Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

It is pouring with rain in the Smolensk region and in the swampy woodlands there is no shelter. My tunic is soaked, my underwear damp, my boots squelch. In this place at this time the rain never stops.

I might have expected the historic events in Berlin in which I was involved during the last days of the war would have erased many other things from memory. In fact, though, what has left the deepest impression are those days of incessant rain in the environs of Rzhev when the efforts of an army at war and the lives of the population in that frontal zone created a tremendous sense of a whole people at war.

In the initial dismaying succession of defeats, the war gave us back a sense of our value, of human solidarity, and often also of human dignity. After the terrible delusions of the late 1930s, we had a clear, righteous aim to strive for: to defend our Motherland and vanquish a terrible foe that had almost all the rest of Europe under its heel.

Now, as the tide of war changed in the direction of victory, something supremely important was being taken away again.

Our army newspaper, Boevoye Znamya, The Battle Standard: ‘Yesterday at dawn our units re-entered the territory of Soviet Byelorussia.’ There is a hill in front of me. The sun is setting and the sky becomes as golden as pie crust. On the horizon, outlined against what will be tomorrow’s frost, horses, people on foot, and laden trucks are on the move.

General Kutuzov before the Battle of the Berezina: ‘God is with us, we have a broken enemy before us, let there be stillness and peace behind us.’

It is said with resignation, ‘Our earthly life is but a little time.’ Have we still future enough to get to the root of everything, to the core of life? What is certain is how long the past has been. Reverse the future and the past and there will be an infinity of days that seem sometimes a hazy succession, sometimes an elusive delight, and sometimes have such density and fullness that the thunder reaching you from that chasm pounds against your transient being.

Warsaw has a suburb called Praga. It had long been taken back from the Germans. Fate had been kind to us, not compelling us to languish here, on this side of the Vistula, while the Warsaw Uprising flared tragically on the other. We had not, thank God, been here at that time but were deployed to Poland from our Motherland just before Christmas. Almost immediately the Wojsko Polskie and our troops moved on Warsaw.

Now Warsaw is liberated and we are in its suburbs, in Praga, in the midst of jubilant red-and-white Polish flags. Somewhere a small orchestra flares up briefly and goes out. There is broken stone and shattered glass underfoot, the walls have breaches in them. Front-line vehicles and the infantry are on the move. A houseowner in warm earmuffs waves a small red flag and stands there in the street, loudly welcoming our unit as it passes through, eager to shake every hand.

Here is where we will stop for the night. A steep climb up a dark, frail, creaking staircase to the second floor where we are to sleep in empty, freezing rooms abandoned by their occupants. We find a lonely old woman, the one remaining, longstanding resident. Hearing our heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, she waits warily in the corridor.

She has a worn, black velvet coat and a felt hat that must once have been fashionable, with the snouts of two small, unidentifiable animals artfully attached to it. Her gaze is detached, unfocused, and she seems to be looking past us. She greets us courteously and in slow motion. Her delicate hand, removed from a velvet muff, indicates the doors of the rooms that are empty, ‘Proszę panowie [Gentlemen, please],’ before it is replaced in the muff. In her high laced boots she minces back down the corridor to her own apartment.

In the morning she is waiting for me in the corridor, wearing an old shapeless dress that looks like a mantle, and long, elegant black earrings. Her grey hair is carefully divided into small tresses. She takes me to her room. A pair of men’s worn-out shoes serve as her indoor footwear and clatter on the worn, black parquet. Pieces of cotton wool are sticking out of the backs of the shoes, pushed in for warmth or, more probably, to keep them from falling off as she is walking. Her heels do, nevertheless, pop out and holes gleam all the way through several layers of stockings. At the door of her room she introduces herself: Madame Maria, a music teacher.

A big room, a divan, an open harmonium. Freezing cold. A baby grand piano, ‘Becker. St Petersburg’, covered in pillows, blankets, pieces of soft cloth to keep it from getting too cold. It seems to be the only thing here with any life. In a notebook I got hold of back in Latvia, inside a hard dark blue cover with light blue marbling, I write that day, ‘From somewhere, a wave of depressing weariness and pain.’ It must be because, having glimpsed someone else’s life, shot to pieces by the war and the German occupation, I was suddenly shaken by her rugged, uncomplaining solitariness. Perhaps it was an austere reward for my own nomadic, homeless destiny at the front. The entry is dated 19 January 1945, two days after Warsaw was liberated.

Madame Maria says she wants to celebrate it somehow, and touches one of her long black earrings. It is the first time in over five years she has worn them. She invites me to be seated and, looking a little absently in my direction, begins removing the pillows and blankets from the piano and putting them on the divan. Yes, yes, something to celebrate it, she says, mixing Russian and Polish words together. If Maria can be permitted, she would like to play something for me. She loves Bach, but after the Germans declared him an Aryan she stopped playing him.

She extracts sheet music from the pile on the piano and sets it on the music rack. She sits down on the rotating music stool, adjusts her hair, raises a hand to her mouth, breathes on her fingers and rubs them, then runs them over the keys.

She plays and her earrings sway. The pedal is operated by a foot wearing a man’s worn-out shoe. I do not listen very attentively but, as tends to happen when you hear music played, something inside you seems to fill with a sense of participation in living, perturbs you with an unfocused joy or hope of life, and carries you away from the limitations of war. My feet feel cold.

Maria finishes with a cascade of chords, looks across to me and says, with perhaps a hint of irritation, that she would, of course, have preferred to play something more serious but it would be difficult to do that from memory nowadays, and her finest music has long ago been taken to the bomb shelter for safekeeping. What she has here – she indicates the pile – is just what she is practising with her pupils, easy pieces.

Her pupils? Here in a suburb which has been on the front line for months and which only the Vistula separated from all the fighting and destruction in Warsaw? She evidently notices my puzzlement and tells me with quiet dignity that her son is over there, by which she clearly means on the other side of the front line, where the Germans are. He is in the underground. She reaches for her late husband’s warm dressing gown, thrown on the divan. Rising slightly, she wraps it around herself. Yes, yes, she still has two pupils. Their parents are not so rich, she tells me with an increasingly evident, and evidently defensive, haughtiness, as to be able to throw away all they have already spent on their daughters’ musical education. Quite possibly the ability to entertain a party with light music will be the only dowry they get. Just recently, though, she has taken on another student, a strange man, Pan Wojciech. His villa, requisitioned by the Germans, has been returned to him and he is intending to sit out the remainder of the war alone, minding his own business, whatever happens outside the walls of his home. That is why he has taken to learning the piano. He is fifty-four and his hands are completely unsuitable. ‘You need to be playing while your hands are growing to fit the keyboard!’ she says rather intensely, and it is evident from the way she says it that she disapproves of Pan Wojciech. She should have declined taking him on but now only has two other pupils – not enough to survive on.