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

While we waited for the commandant to return, I invited my French visitor to take a seat and offered him some high-energy cola chocolate we had lying on the windowsill. It was made to a special recipe designed to give a boost to the spirits of Luftwaffe pilots.

It seemed extraordinary to be meeting here in Bydgoszcz a man who had fought in Africa as the adjutant of the famous French general. Everything about the newcomer was very correct. He had not been robbed in the camp and still had his broad army belt, his sword belt, his insignia of rank, and a shock of wavy hair projecting from under his beret. There was no sign of recent captivity to be detected in his free and easy bearing and ready smile, but the conditions of captivity for French officers bore little similarity to those experienced by Russians and Poles. The French were allowed to correspond with their families and receive parcels from home and from the Red Cross. They enlivened their time in captivity with amateur dramatics, and General Giraud’s adjutant produced photographs to prove it (all with that crenellated border.) He handed me one depicting a scene from a play in which he featured. He was sitting in his officer’s uniform in the corner of a soft sofa. Sitting on his lap was a frisky, well-built blonde with a high bust, wearing a spotted dress, above knee-length and revealing unattractive legs without shapely calves and feet shod with plimsolls. She was embracing him with bare arms.

The role of the mademoiselle was also being taken by a captive French officer, wearing a dress belonging to one of the camp’s waitresses and a wig. This scene had evidently evoked much laughter and applause. Noticing that I was rather taken with the photograph, the Frenchman took out a pen with a fine nib and inscribed on the back of it, ‘Un souvenir à l’armée russe qui est venue nous délivrer du joug hitlérien.’ A souvenir for the Russian army that has come to liberate us from the yoke of Hitler. ‘Un soldat français d’Afrique en captivité à l’armée victorieuse. Amicalement.’ From a French soldier of the African army in captivity to the victorious army. In amity. I cannot read the signature. The date is ‘1 February 1945’.

The absent military commandant came back, a morose young major wearing a white Kuban Cossack hat, a winter jacket, and with eyebrows trimmed with a razor. He was the commander of an infantry regiment, and when I told him who this foreign officer was, looked him straight in the eye, enthusiastically lumbered over and with his great paws clutched him firmly by the shoulders. He did not, however, go so far as to kiss him. When I think back to that day, I see the moment as a pendant to the famous photograph of the Allies meeting at the Elbe. This ‘soldier of the French army in captivity’ was the first Allied soldier we had encountered on our long journey.

Looking much more cheerful than usual, casting aside for a moment all the attendant concerns of a city commandant and the need for diplomacy that did not come naturally to a regimental commander, he exclaimed in an outburst of cordiality, ‘Move them all here!’, emphasizing the order with a sweeping gesture that said, ‘Let the whole lot come piling into the city!’

Meanwhile, from all directions prisoners of war were already flooding in from the outskirts, abandoning their camps. Without receiving permission or thinking to ask for it, they came into what was again Bydgoszcz, marching in columns under their national flags, which they had stitched together out of scraps of material. And what a sight that was! Again, as on the day of liberation, the entire Polish population poured out of their houses, every one of them with a scrap of cloth, a miniature red-and-white Polish flag, pinned to their chest. Again the city exploded in a burst of exultation, tears and hugging. Soviet soldiers were in the middle of a whirlpool of people. Polish soldiers, identifying who was French, walked arm in arm with them two at a time. A huge liberated American pilot without a hat, in a khaki jumpsuit, was yelling, laughing happily, waving his arms about and grabbing everyone he met by the sleeve. Everything was in tumult and a spontaneous, unbelievable procession marched down the main street of the city: our soldiers and Polish soldiers with their arms round tall Englishmen in khaki, Frenchmen in forage caps and berets, Irishmen in green hats, and Polish girls.

At one point, an emotional Bystrov caught sight of me. Very excited and, unusually, with his fur hat pushed dashingly back on his head, he shouted, ‘Lelchen, look, it’s the second front!’ He shouted something else but his voice was drowned out by the happy hubbub in the street. We were carried off in different directions, but I took his paradoxical exclamation to mean that, even if this was not the second front we had so been anticipating during the fighting at Rzhev, when we had cursed our laggard allies, even if it was not the second front that had landed on continental Europe in Normandy and which we were advancing to support, these soldiers who had fought and been captured in Africa, these pilots who had bombed Nazi Germany, were they not a second front? And now they had joined forces with us here in Bydgoszcz, the ‘Russian Army that has come to liberate us’, as General Giraud’s adjutant had written. My God, I too was part of that army of liberation.

Everyone was singing, each in their own language, in splendid disunity. Somehow, magically, the songs all merged, a discordant, colourful, celebratory hymn to freedom. It was so uplifting, so joyful; it seemed that surely this was how we would all live together in peace when the war was over, in one great brotherhood of man. Italian soldiers, now also freed from their prison camp, clustered together on the pavements, staying close to the buildings. Until recently allies of the Germans and fighting against us, since Italy withdrew from the war they had been herded behind barbed wire by the Germans and were now thoroughly confused: who were they in our eyes, enemies or captives of the Germans? But the holiday atmosphere was contagious, and in the end they too joined in, bringing up the procession, raggedly wandering along together, not mixing with the others.

When the procession had moved on a little, we began to hear the squeals and shrieks of children in the streets. A whole generation of little Polish kids had been brought up having to keep their voices down. Poles were forbidden to talk loudly, and could be punished for doing so. Now the children had just discovered shouting, and were ecstatically yelling at the tops of their voices, revelling in the newly revealed power of their lungs. The children’s shrieks of emancipation reverberated through the city.

While this diverse, multilingual carnival was pulsating so vibrantly on the main street two quite different things were happening. Firstly, the Germans were preparing a major offensive to retake Bromberg–Bydgoszcz, something that for the present was known only to those privy to such matters, of whom I was not one. But the second thing was happening in full view of me in a quiet side street adjacent to the main road.

Here there was a straggling line of people with their belongings loaded on carts, sledges and on their backs. They were German smallholders, driven off their farms by the Poles, from villages where they had been settled for centuries, now wandering with only a few possessions to heaven knows where, but westwards. A posse of Polish teenagers were skating around them, whooping. Their ringleader broke away, skated ahead, and completely blocked the refugees’ way. An elderly German woman, with a coarse, heavy blanket on top of her coat, which our own village women, too, were wearing at that time and calling a shawl, tried to explain something to him, but he was not listening and frenziedly beat her bundle of possessions with a stick and shouted furiously, ‘Why you not speak Polish? Why you can’t speak Polish?’ I took him by the shoulder and said, ‘What are you doing? Leave them alone!’ He looked up, his face full of anger and with tears in his eyes. He stared at me, or rather, at my army jacket and the red star on my hat, and skated to one side. But I saw him watching bewildered from a distance. He found it unbearable that today Germans were being allowed to walk away freely after all they had done. Beneath this festival of brotherhood there was an undertow of fury and violence that had been building up under the yoke of brutality and was ready to break out and rage.