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

I cannot recall which of us spoke first or why, but we got talking and she must have led me to the commandant’s office and gone back to the prison. Yes, that must have been how it was, or she would not have known to find me there the next day, which she did. She was already changed out of all recognition. A kind friend had not only given her somewhere to sleep but also clothes from her own wardrobe. She was wearing a mauve hat with the brim lowered over her face and a narrow-waisted, flared coat with a fluffy boa. To me, someone who had lived for over three years surrounded exclusively by greatcoats, winter jackets and padded body warmers, and who had worn nothing different myself all these years, she seemed decidedly elegant. She had a pleasant face, but it was faded and could hardly be called pretty.

Tucked between the pages of my notebook are two photographs she gave me when we parted: Marianna on her own, and Marianna with Alfred R___d. He was a regular client at an establishment in Pflünderstrasse, a secondclass brothel for foreign workers brought by force to Bromberg to build a defensive rampart. There Marianna had caught his eye. It is difficult to tell what so attracted him to the faded creature in the photograph taken before she met him, with her sunken cheeks, her bulging eyes peering intently and anxiously upwards, with a bow on her sailcloth hat and with prim, unsmiling lips. In spite of everything, he fell in love and demanded that she immediately leave her place of work and become his wife. The German law on total mobilization stipulated, however, that no one might leave their post until the war was over, so the malnourished Belgian, spending such savings as he had brought from home, ransomed her anew every day.

The front line was approaching Bromberg, however, and the unfinished rampart was no guarantee the Germans would be able to defend the city. They began clearing it of the foreign workers, who were seen as a potential threat. As the contingent of Belgians was being marched out of Bromberg, Marianna ran after them. The German guards chased her away, throwing stones at her, calling her filthy names and menacing her with their assault rifles. In the end they seized her, handcuffed her, dragged her back into the city and threw her into prison as a Pole whose intimate relations with a foreign worker had far exceeded her job specification.

Now she was waiting for Alfred to come back to Bromberg for her, without giving a thought to the practicalities of how, under guard, he was going to do that. She trusted him implicitly, although what certainty could anyone have of anything in this world at war? She was, nevertheless, naively, calmly convinced that she needed only to wait patiently there at the prison for him to return. He had seen her being handcuffed, so he would come to the prison. Where else could she be, when even that other establishment, to which she would not dream of returning, had been closed? All along Pflünderstrasse the brothels, the better class ones for Germans and the lesser ones for poorer people, had been closed, and any young ladies who had not managed to run away in time were behind bars. Where would they be going now? Perhaps even to Siberia.

The sky above the city cleared to a bare, cold blue that might betoken bombing by Junkers. The uncleared snow crunched under the heavy marching of our patrol along the roadway.

Until now we had only entered major cities, like Smolensk, Minsk or Riga. There had been no question of stopping there, but now, in the ceaseless flow of the war, there came a new development. Bromberg was different: the first big city in our path to have survived a long occupation relatively unscathed, and which we were to occupy. This was a completely different, incomprehensible, unfamiliar kind of warfare, and created all manner of unforeseen problems for us to solve.

Alfred R___d did come back. He escaped by lagging behind the column of Belgians, at the risk of being shot in the back by a guard. I do not know what he looked like at the moment of his reunion outside the prison with Marianna, having made his way back to the city through the obstacles of warring front lines. The unspeaking man to whom I was introduced was clean-shaven, with a dark bar of a moustache: upright, broad-shouldered, stocky, bespectacled; with a high forehead, hatless, dark-haired, looking through his glasses with a rather glum but steady gaze. I remember it with painful clarity, but mostly for the dramatic days that followed. Now, when I look at the snapshot taken back then, I see how young this thirty-year old teacher from Liège still was. At the time he seemed to me a very mature man.

That first time we were photographed, the three of us just stood there, dazed. Marianna did not say a word. Her lips seemed puffed up with excitement and intoxication, and just as in the photograph of the two of them together (with its edges pinked in that German fashion), she stands there so puny, her shoulder pressed against Alfred, her gaze intense, trusting, looking out to somewhere far beyond us. The hollows in her cheeks have disappeared, the oval of her face is softly outlined, and she looks nothing like that fright in the sailcloth hat with a bow. He, though, looks out from the photo with the same firm, reserved, adamant, steady gaze as he had back then. The two of them. It seems as if only the two of them are in their right minds while everything around has gone mad, and war has no dominion over them.

Dear God, what high hopes! Years later I heard a saying in Alfred’s homeland that a Belgian is born with a brick in his belly, either in self-deprecation or proud assertion of the national obsession with building a house of one’s own. A Belgian in Nazi captivity had chanced upon the most humiliated, pathetic, crushed creature, had raised her up, taken her under his protection, and defiantly chucked his brick at the forces of chaos.

There was, though, something unresolved, something still bubbling away under the surface in the city. The countenance of victory can change in an instant when people remember the disproportionate sacrifices that had to be made to achieve it. What mattered most had come to pass: Poland had risen again and this city, seized by the Germans and called by them Bromberg, was once again Bydgoszcz.

But now what? Nothing had yet been definitively proclaimed. There had been no announcements. No notices had been pasted up on walls and columns. A Polish municipal magistracy had been hastily organized and was in session, but what was to be done about people who were starving? It was essential to establish immediately which Germans were still in the city and where, and how they were to be treated. What punishment should be visited on them, what reparation demanded for their seizure of Poland, the crucifixion of Warsaw, for the slavery, the inexcusable humiliations and plundering? There was a grimness in the city as it grappled with immediate and long-term issues.

The former Polish warders and prison officials were still hanging around at the prison without a job to do. All I can find about this in my diary is an entry consisting of a single sentence, which I had forgotten but now, as I am browsing, jumps out at me. ‘The magistracy has decided not to feed Germans.’ Many years later that still makes me shudder. Next to it I drew a swastika. I did not immediately remember why I had done that.

I heard footsteps. Someone with a brisk, confident manner, crossing the vast entrance hall of the commandant’s office, stopped in the doorway and saluted. It does not often happen that you meet someone to whom you immediately, at first sight, take a liking, but that is how I reacted to this person wearing an unfamiliar military uniform and a beret. He introduced himself as an officer of the French Army. He had fought in Africa and been taken prisoner by the Germans. He had been the adjutant of General Henri Giraud and had come as a delegate from an internment camp for French prisoners of war which was 10 km outside the city. The German guards had fled. The French had elected a camp council, made an inventory of all the remaining food, and sent him to report their presence to the Soviet command and ask how they should proceed.