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

This leaflet was calling on German soldiers to break out of their encirclement towards Bromberg. It went on to remind them that,

The Führer has ordered that all servicemen who break through from cut-off front-line units to the German line, alone or in groups, should receive special recognition. The Führer wishes all such soldiers to be given an award as well as a medal for distinction in close combat.

During the night we heard the distant rumble of approaching vehicles and the clanking of tank caterpillar tracks. The commander of the front’s reserve was being brought into battle to counter and repulse the German onslaught. Tanks continued to arrive, and rumbled through the city streets heading for the front line.

In the morning, while I was at headquarters, a representative of the newly appointed Repatriation Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars flew in from Moscow. The representative, who had the rank of lieutenant colonel, was a middle-aged, ill-looking man, tall, very thin, with a hollow chest, abrupt gestures, and an unexpectedly powerful voice. To tell the truth, he looked as if he had just been discharged from hospital. Quite possibly he had and, after being treated for a wound, had been sent to the rear, back to Moscow.

In some inexplicable way he already had a detailed knowledge of the situation in the city. He was here to discuss with our command the plan for repatriating liberated allies and others, but roared in outrage with that powerful voice, as if banging his fist on the table: ‘Are you aware that there are Poles who yesterday prevented Jewish women from taking refuge in buildings here?’

I was stirred to hear the wrathful voice of my nation speaking out in that manner at that fateful moment, but we also knew that other Poles had risked their lives to shelter Jews, whom they had regarded simply as their persecuted fellow citizens.

The yellow stars to identify Jews had been dreamed up by Goebbels. Very pleased with himself, he noted in his diary that the Führer had thought them a good idea. There had been a time when, for many years, Josef Goebbels had had a half-Jewish fiancée, to whom he had presented a volume of his favourite poet, Heinrich Heine. There had been a time when he was in raptures about a Jewish professor, under whose supervision he went on to defend a dissertation. Then, however, he threw in his lot with Hitler and all mention of his fiancée and the professor ceased. Heine’s books went up in flames at the very first auto-da-fé Goebbels organized as minister of propaganda. The Kristallnacht pogroms, the burning down of the major synagogues, were more of his detestable gestures as he rushed to identify himself unambiguously with the ideology of the Führer.

Now we were encountering those yellow stars on prisoners coming in from the hinterland of Bromberg. By good luck I managed to evade the yellow star intended to blight my own destiny.

The blonde girl who translated from German for the Frenchmen gave the soldier his cap back and, again covering her head with hessian, became indistinguishable from a distance from the other Jewish prisoners. Seen close to, however, they were all so different you would have thought they belonged to many different nationalities. The Austrian Jewish women, like this Viennese girl, looked quite different from the Hungarians, and those in turn were quite unlike the Polish or Baltic women. They all spoke different languages, each the language of their homeland. Selecting women who could sew from the ghettoes of different countries, the Germans brought them to a concentration camp here, outside Bromberg. They were given a temporary extra lease of life while they could be of use to the German Army. There was no one from Russia among them.

I was able to talk briefly in the commandant’s office to a woman from Vilnius. She was about thirty, short, with a dark, exhausted face and great inner composure. She was a dressmaker but told me that, no matter how events developed now, she would not return to her native city. She could never forget that, when the Germans invaded, students who were Nazi sympathizers burst into the apartments of Jews, created havoc, jeered and, when the Jews were herded off to concentration camp, derisively accompanied them with a jolly little amateur orchestra of their own.

I came out of the commandant’s office with her. The women were still standing there in the road, unable to decide where they should go now. I repeated what the commandant had said about the large apartment buildings that were empty now the Germans had fled Bromberg – and felt how indifferent they were to their fate. They had lived too long with the belief that extermination was inevitable to spring back to life immediately. They had no choice, however, but to decide something, and they slowly made their way in that direction. The cold February sun lounged disinterestedly above them, picking out the yellow stars among their grey rags. I stood there feeling desolate, perhaps trying to comprehend something that was beyond comprehension, that could not be fitted into even the diabolical categories of this war, which I was incapable of looking beyond.

The liberated foreign soldiers and forced labourers marched with their heads held high towards the repatriation point. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary.’ They, at least, were on their way home. The war once more invaded Bydgoszcz. The sky was rent by the roar of ground-attack aircraft. The singing stopped, the march halted and everyone looked skywards.

Meanwhile, back at the warehouse a group of prisoners of war in German uniform were lining up, eager also to head to the repatriation point, also breathing the air of freedom. ‘We are Austrians!’ they declared. ‘Unfortunately, gentlemen,’ I had to inform them, ‘you are also soldiers of the enemy army.’ The Austrians filed disconsolately back into the warehouse.

Marianna tracked me down. Alfred had been taken to the repatriation point and was forbidden to leave it. Her voice had lost its crispness, its intonations, and now her speech was colourless and halting. She asked me to pass him a note. She could not do it herself because the sentries were not letting anyone in.

It was very noisy at the repatriation point. The soldiers reacted enthusiastically to my appearance, and as I crossed the broad courtyard I was bombarded with witticisms that evoked an explosion of mirth, perhaps inoffensive, perhaps not. The Italians were looking a bit more cheerful than the previous day. They wanted to tell me something but I could not understand what. It seemed, though, to be friendly.

To one side, beside a post stuck in the melting snow and bearing the flag of Belgium to summon his compatriots, stood Alfred. Alas, the Belgians who had been herded out of Bromberg were by now being marched by German guards far from this place. He was the only one in that column to have escaped. He stood there hatless, his dark coat unbuttoned, inscrutable.

I don’t remember now what language they communicated in, but I brought Alfred’s note back to Marianna. When she had been scurrying around by the prison waiting for him she had seemed much more confident that they would be reunited than she was now. She was baffled by the new circumstances that had so pitilessly parted them. Her face grew long, her cheeks were sunken, her lips tightly pursed together. She seemed stunned, but from beneath those downcast eyelids her bulging grey-green eyes were feverish with hope. I found some pretext to visit the repatriation point one more time.

In the courtyard soldiers of different nations were clowning around, energetically playing soldier games. I found Alfred still in the same place at the back of the courtyard, as if he could not move away from the pole with the Belgian flag. He was a lonely man. He took the note silently, quickly read it, undid and moved aside the flap of his open coat, and hid the note in the inside pocket of his jacket. Hurriedly, as if afraid of running out of time, he painstakingly outlined the letters of his answer, very large, as if he were writing to a child. His hand was trembling with tension. When he had filled the sheet of paper, he tore it out of his notebook, folded the little page in four and handed it to me. He watched silently, making sure I put it safely in the breast pocket of my tunic. He did not speak, but his face said it all, expressing the pain, the rage, the powerlessness. Or did it? That is how I remember it now but he was stony-faced. That made me even more afraid to look straight at him, to meet that unwavering gaze through his glasses.