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

It is time for her to get ready to give him his lesson, and our truck is already snorting down in the street. I run downstairs, pulling on my outdoor clothes as I go. The engine is being warmed up and the truck is juddering.

When Madame Maria emerges through the front door, I am sitting in the back of the truck. She comes over and, in the unforgiving light of a clear winter’s day, it is only too obvious how bloodless her aristocratic face, crisscrossed with wrinkles, is. A purple vein twitches under one eye. How old and scrawny the snouts of those little animals on her hat are. She is looking distractedly, perhaps at me or somewhere above my head, pressing her muff high up on her chest. There is something she is hesitating to say.

‘Warsaw,’ she quavers but breaks off. Pulling herself together, she says simply, ‘Give Bach back to us. How can anyone play the piano without Bach?’ She could equally well have said, bring my son back to me but she does not. She hurries off to give her lesson, teetering in her high lace-up boots over the frozen cobbles.

I wrote at the time in my diary, ‘She has lived her life and has no future, but she is giving music lessons in a town which for a long time was the front line, her hair carefully divided into little tresses. This is not senile affectation, it is her way of life.’ And with that way of life she is retaining her sense of self-respect, discipline, nobility and femininity in spite of her age and the sad losses she has suffered.

She goes off to give her lesson, and the brittle clacking of her heels gradually dies away. As I look after her, I am painfully aware how vulnerable Maria is amidst the collapsing masonry of war, how homeless, as if it is she rather than I who has no roof over her head. And in fact, that really is the situation: the war is my home. The war takes some account of me, I have business with it, while Maria, a private person, has none. It is up to her to survive as best she can.

The agony of Warsaw stares out at us, the blackened gaps between the buildings, the jagged fragments of walls, the spectral skeletons of houses stripped bare by the avalanche of shells and fire, the silent testimony of its ruins.

These ruins are a tragic monument to the spirit: its torment, its doomed passion, its inspiration and its horror. They are an emblem of something that cannot be gauged against earlier knowledge or experience. What these ruins encapsulate cannot be articulated or sculpted. Only the ruins all the way from Vyazma to Warsaw speak the language of what has transpired here.

The open road. The snow on the ground is drifting, the tall, thin Catholic crosses by the roadside with the figure of the crucified Christ flash by. Beyond the boundary of the road is open country and woodland shrouded in mist. What is it about this land that so clutches at your heart, so unsettles and bewitches you? You cannot pin it down. Only many years later did I see surviving newsreel footage of the Polish cavalry, with sabres drawn, charging German tanks. In that chivalrous, warrior-like outburst of valour there is such love and beauty and vulnerability that you are transfixed. I thought when I saw that sight that this gesture was the very embodiment of a Poland that had languished for so long under the yoke of tyranny; it was all in that gesture – the boundless devotion of spirit, imprisoned in mortal flesh, raising its immortal arm against soulless, invincible brute force.

We drive through some ruined town. The townspeople are ceremonially bearing two Polish soldiers shoulder-high through the streets. We have not been issued felt boots. The quartermasters withheld them on the grounds that winter in Europe does not compare with winter in Russia. In the back of our truck, however, our legs are frozen in our thin boots. We have no option but to stop at a village to warm ourselves. Our hosts cannot do enough for us. Before I can pull off my boots myself they rush to help. The mother shouts and a young lad grabs a basin, skips outside to collect snow, comes back, sits down on the floor beside me and starts rubbing my numb legs with snow.

Two little urchins wake up, escape from under the quilt and start jumping up and down on the bed. The only person in the house not involved in all the turmoil and excitement around us is an orphaned girl from Warsaw whom they have taken in. Kneeling by the stove, she is constantly, unsmilingly topping up the fire. It is her job to keep the stove fuelled. She half turns round and I see sunken, deeply melancholy eyes not at all like those of a child. She does not belong here. ‘Girl by the fire in the stove, her narrow little back wrapped crosswise in a grey shawl, saving something up, hiding it against…’ Against whom? I did not finish the sentence on the scrap of paper that has survived. Against the people who had given her shelter, against all of us for her orphaned life that can never be put right again.

A modest, subdued far horizon, a low sky, a snowstorm is trying to tear a poster down, flapping it above the road with one end still clinging to the post. ‘Brother Slavs!’ ‘Brothers…’

The war lumbered onwards, and brought us to the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, which the Germans called Bromberg, alien, not demolished, not devastated, as if the war, having passed it by, had now been pushed aside. The enemy had been forced out at dawn, or rather, obliged to depart, leaving no sign of having put up a fight. The tanks and infantry did not pause to fortify the position but rushed straight on. It was they who rightly enjoyed the enthusiastic welcome of the local Polish population.

The blizzard was dying down, but it was still snowing and foggy. Our truck was following the car with the chief of staff, drawn increasingly into the straight, narrow streets of the outskirts. From the back I could see the stone walls of prim grey houses, the pavements empty. Only on one corner, a collection of strange, stunted creatures, enveloped in what looked like dark flannel soldiers’ blankets, were shifting from one foot to the other to keep warm. We drove on towards the city centre and again saw, swarming on the corners, more of these indefinite, small, lumpish people. As the mist cleared you could just glimpse, if someone peeped out from a blanket, a woman’s face, dark, angular, with a vacant, unseeing gaze. There was something deeply disturbing about their unfathomable swarming, their incoherence, their disconnectedness from their surroundings. We learned later that they were Hungarian Jewesses who had walked out of a concentration camp abandoned by fleeing guards.

Our truck was already entering the town centre, where a confusion of vehicles had created a traffic jam. The place was full of people out in the street enjoying the tumult of victory. There were Polish girls, soldiers with dapper Polish caps, tomfoolery going on, boys jubilantly shouting threats to the Germans, and townspeople carrying armfuls of goods looted from the German depots and shops. We heard the order ‘Back to your vehicles!’, and the vehicles, extricating themselves, slowly moved off to their destinations around the city.

I finally jump down from the back of the truck and, on feet stiff with cold, advance through an echoing main entrance, crushing fallen plaster under my boots, and go upstairs to an apartment abandoned by its occupants. In the semi-darkness of the hallway someone comes towards me. I step back, alarmed, not immediately accepting that this is me, my own dim reflection in a dark mirror. Not half turned towards me, not in a shard of mirror glass, but straight ahead, full length. Had I ever experienced that before? Perhaps years ago, but I had forgotten it.

Antlers on the wall. A round wooden stand on the floor with the knobs of walking sticks and umbrellas sticking out. On a pier glass commode are a clothes brush and the stump of a candle that has run. I inspect and take all this in, and enough light is coming from the vestibule through the open front door to make out the dark depths of a corridor. The toe of my boot makes contact with displaced blocks of parquet in the doorway of a room.