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

A very thin woman, a German refugee, ran in the entrance of the commandant’s office. She was looking for her five-year-old son, whom she had lost the day before at the station. I appealed to a Polish administrator, who was sympathetic and phoned round the local commandant’s departments, while the woman sat on a bench anxiously clasping her hands together.

The telephone enquiries yielded no results. The woman got up, as if she had never supposed they would – she was so slim and so very young, just a girl. You could see she was reluctant to leave, how afraid she was to go out of the building, to be on her own again, running God knows where in her desperation. ‘Oh Lord, how cold it is!’ she exclaimed. How could she be expected to bear this monstrous burden the war had imposed on her?

I am still terribly pained by the memory of that woman. What became of her? Of her son? Was he ever found?

The prisoners of war who had left their camps, and the forced labourers brought here by the Germans to build their defensive rampart, were ordered to stay together in national groupings. They were lodged, some here, some there, in very varied accommodation. Where the French went I do not know, but I was sent off to the jail to smooth relations with our British allies, who had been allocated this cavernous, deserted residence. They would at least have a roof over their heads until morning, when everything could be sorted out. But was it really hospitable to put our allies in a jail, even if was not functioning as such? In wartime such niceties have to go by the board, and we were facing a military emergency. It was left to me to sort out this delicate situation.

The prison gates were still open. At the entrance the sentry shouldered his rifle and let me through. The interior was dark. Upstairs, on a broad landing lit by barred windows, the Italians were lying around in their baggy clothes, desperately cold and dejected. ‘Hello. How are you?’ I asked awkwardly in German. They did not reply. Perhaps they had not understood. Someone sighed and groaned, ‘Oh, Madonna!’ Others joined in, sighing loudly, stirring about. They were demonstratively unhappy and, as only people from the south and children can, communicated this by their downcast mien and the inconsolable mournfulness in their eyes.

Someone sitting with his back to me turned his head, said wearily, ‘Salve, signorina !’ ‘Signorina russa !’ a resonant young voice sang out. An older man raised his narrow, almost truncated-looking face, drew back the scarf from his long, veiny neck, rose to his knees and gently spread his arms as if to say, see for yourself how we are. Carefully selecting the German words, he said hoarsely, ‘War is Scheisse!’ ‘Scheisse! Scheisse!’ the others joined in.

The only German they knew, apart from commands, were curses, and they tried to outdo each other, shouting, becoming animated, gesticulating, appealing to heaven: ‘O cielo, perché? ’ Oh, heavens, why? ‘Krieg finito,’ I said, mixing German with Latin which, I felt, as Romans they ought to understand. War finito! For the Italians, at least, it was.

‘È finita. Basta! Santo Dio …’ ‘So, bene,’ I said. ‘Che bello!’ the man with a narrow face repeated. They were, however, in a desperately bad situation, having been dragged all this way from their sunny Italy to the misery of this war. ‘Adieu! ’ ‘Addio, signorina! ’

The British were in prison cells. I knocked. The door was opened from the inside and I was let in, with courtesy and British reserve. There was an amazingly pleasant scent in the cell: of soap, eau-de-cologne. Aromatic refreshing tissues dispelled the odour of prison. A large table in the middle of the cell had a tartan blanket on it and the British were sitting there playing cards. They desisted and stood up – lanky men in long greatcoats, very proper. Our allies.

Politely addressing me as ‘Miss Lieutenant’, they inspected me with curiosity, supposing I must be a representative of the Red Cross. ‘No, no. From headquarters.’ ‘Would you have some news for us?’ I shook my head. No. ‘What then?’ Indeed – what now?

How was I supposed to smooth over the obvious difficulty? The commandant had told me to paper over it somehow, but just turning up was not enough to cheer them, or reconcile them to their present anomalous and unwelcome situation. In fact, it had the opposite effect, because now they had someone on whom to vent their frustration, which only became the greater the longer I stood there.

‘What are we doing in here?’ What could I say? I certainly could not tell them about the parlous situation the city was in, which had obliged the command to separate everyone by nationality, to keep them under control and make preparations for their speedy repatriation. In any case, what language were we supposed to speak? As with the French, it seemed that German was taboo. I could more or less understand what they were saying, but could pronounce only a very few words of English myself. During the years of war, German had displaced from memory the little I had learned at the institute.

‘One day here, tomorrow not here,’ I somehow scraped together. ‘War.’ These were people who had experienced disaster at Dunkirk, on Crete and who knows where else. They had been held in captivity for four, even five years. Perhaps they could have been more tolerant, more amenable because, after all, it was only for ‘one day’ and we were, after all, in a ‘war’, but there were already British troops fighting the war in the Ardennes, and this evidently stiffened the sense of self-worth and pride of my British allies here in their prison cell. They were insistent, demanding. How and when would they be given transport? Did the Soviet command at least have a plan of action? I knew nothing about that, but suddenly, from my student past, an old British soldier’s song we had sung many times came to my aid. I said, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary…’

All of them laughed approvingly. Several voices began singing,

When the British were marching the next day to their repatriation point, they sang this contagious song as a joke, making fun of themselves.

Then, that evening, we were brought a contingent of captured German soldiers. They were held in a dark warehouse. Bystrov and I went in. There were a lot of them, lying about on the ground or sitting. ‘Are there any officers?’ There were none. ‘Perhaps somebody has something important they want to tell the Soviet command?’ ‘I have something to say.’ Major Bystrov directed his torch beam towards the voice. This caused a stir among the Germans, who looked across. Voice: ‘I am Private Schulenburg, the nephew of Count Schulenburg.’

The Germans’ attempted counter-attack came to nothing and prisoners were arriving for the rest of the night. The usual interrogations were carried out. Count Schulenburg’s nephew had nothing important to contribute to the standard intelligence report and remained in the warehouse. We accumulated enemy documents: reports, orders, letters, and a leaflet from the German command, addressed to the surrounded units:

Soldiers! The current situation in the east is only a temporary state of affairs in the gigantic manoeuvres of the war. It is too soon to expect significant changes in the situation after such an unprecedented onslaught by the enemy, but the initiative will come back into our hands!

Each of us must learn the lesson of this war that, where spearheads of enemy tanks have reached certain points, no tightly consolidated Bolshevik front ever forms, and the districts to the rear of these points are never cleared of German troops. All the time our westward moving ‘mobile cauldrons’, these mighty combat groupings, succeed in meeting up with our front-line units.