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

Outside the gates tanks were passing, infantry were being deployed to Bydgoszcz in trucks. At any moment a battle might break out on the approaches to the city. The outskirts were being fortified, artillery brought in. The war was approaching again. A strict regime was enforced. That is how it was and, probably, the only way it could be in the avalanche of war, that victories crushed personal destinies. It seems it is easier to defend a city than to protect your feelings and the one person you love.

An early winter’s morning and the light is still dim. The church roofs are black and we are driving through this city for the last time. Trucks manoeuvre through narrow streets lined by buildings.

Leaving Bydgoszcz. Grey houses built long ago; narrow, hospitable streets. Two little three-year-old Polish citizens, in long trousers but without hats on their heads, are shrieking by a gate. A blind old man with a bicolour scrap of cloth on his tall astrakhan hat is feeling his way along the pavement.

We overtake the prison officials in their blue uniform, walking to work: the prison is back in business. Ahead we see some male civilians sweeping the last of the snow off the pavements. We catch up and I see a swastika chalked on the lapels of their coats. And that explains the Nazi emblem I drew next to my copy of the magistracy’s decree not to feed Germans. I was not expecting what I saw. In fact I was dumbstruck. The magistracy had also decided that the remaining Germans in Bydgoszcz must go out to clear the streets. Not having to hand anything more suitable, a swastika had been chalked on their clothes. I cannot describe the wave of revulsion that swept over me. Everything seemed catastrophically turned upside down. Eine verkehrte Welt. A world capsized. Something irreparable had surged up from the dregs of the war on the very road to victory. How deadly this enemy was proving: you could kill him, but that did not free you from him.

Neither before nor after that day did I see anyone marked with a swastika. In Bydgoszcz it probably lasted only a single day, but on that morning there they were, those dark, grim figures, those identification marks chalked on human beings, those people cast out from the protection of the law, or even of common human decency.

We drove out of the city, leaving behind us the solid phalanx of our troops, and again saw at the roadside those tall, slender crosses bearing Christ crucified. Trees flanked the road, the lower part of their trunks whitewashed.

For some reason in the land around Rzhev while the fighting was going on every cell of life was eternal, in every physical detail, down to the most fragmentary, minute, tremulous particle. Everything was part of you. There, the road leading you to face danger and uncertainty kept you alert. Here, on the path of invasion, something was different. You could feel something was being pulled tight into an inextricable knot. At Rzhev there had been pain, but for that only the enemy was to blame. Here, an indefinable anxiety was wearing me down. I could not yet tell what was burdening me with a troubling sense of responsibility far too great for me to bear, and far above my authority to deal with in terms of rank. It was pursuing me, but why me? How could I put things right? Who was I to assume the responsibility?

We drove away from Bromberg–Bydgoszcz, having stayed there only a few days. So why do I find my thoughts returning so relentlessly, again and again to that city? Why are my memories of it still so sharp? Why do they still smart so? Why is it those particular faces and those particular episodes that so upset me?

I know nothing of what happened after that. Were Alfred and Marianna ever reunited, or were they inexorably separated by the state borders imposed by the victory and so pitiless towards an alliance of love? If they waited and met again many years later, had that sublime emotion they had shared survived, or had it withered and lost its amazing potency?

Did the Jewish women find refuge in that city liberated from a shared deadly enemy? Or were they doomed to stand around in the cold on street corners, like the Hungarian Jewesses on the day we drove into Bydgoszcz? ‘You are free!’ But what sort of freedom can there be in wartime? The idea was absurd. Captivity had provided a roof over their heads, and freedom none.

Where did those German peasants find respite, who had been torn from their native land? Where could they rest when Germany was beyond their reach, on the far side of an impassable front line?

And what of the nephew of Count Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Moscow who had warned of the German attack and was executed for complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler? Perhaps he really could have been shown a little more sympathy, or at least interest? Nobody had any time for him, so there he stayed, in the darkness of that warehouse.

What became of the town’s German citizens, who were not expelled from Bydgoszcz but whom it was resolved not to feed? What did that mean anyway? I should have jumped down then from the back of that truck and rubbed off those swastikas chalked on human beings, but that was possible only in my dreams in later years. The war did not understand or tolerate such feeble acts of protest, manifestly inappropriate to your rank. And in any case, I did not have the bottle to do it.

Among the throng of faces and the ferment of events, how poignant is that skinny, very young German refugee woman in the doorway of the commandant’s office, who had lost her five-year-old at the station twentyfour hours previously. Even today I shudder to remember her, to think of the horror of that mother, and the horror for her child of being lost in the madness of war.

That is the way things were. There is no changing the course of those events now, but neither can I resign myself to accepting them. It is a torment.

At a fork in the road the traffic ground to a halt and re-formed itself into two streams. Our headquarters unit was going with the troops to the west. I found myself detached from people I knew and assigned to a Smersh group subordinate to the commander of the front and attached to the units storming Poznań. With one foot on the step of a truck cabin, Major Bystrov, bade me farewell. ‘We’ll meet again, Lelchen, if we survive!’ He rapturously exclaimed, in an outburst of emotion, ‘Our tanks roar forward and our infantry advance, in trucks not even on foot, in Studebakers and Donnerwetters… Hurrah!’

We were to meet again, in just over two months’ time.

The highway to Poznań. A plain without snow; a dead, barefoot German soldier frozen to the ground; slain horses; the white leaf-fall of leaflets we had dropped before the attack; soldiers’ helmets as dark as crows on the battlefield. Columns of prisoners. The intensifying rumble of artillery. The second, third echelons of our troops advancing. Banners being carried in their covers, trucks, horse-drawn carts, carriages and people on foot, on foot, on foot… Everything is on the move, wandering the roads of Poland. In the back of a truck an old man sitting on a chair is shaken about. Two nuns wearing huge white starched wimples are stubbornly marching in step. A woman in widow’s weeds is pulling a boy along by the hand. Only here and there is there any snow. It is cold. The roads are flanked by trees with whitewashed trunks.

I was shown a letter by the family of an electrician in Gniezno. It had been smuggled from Breslau–Wroclaw: ‘Czy idą Rosjanie? Bo my tu umieramy.’ Are the Russians coming? Because we are dying here. The Red Army is on the march and, together with the Wojsko Polskie, is scouring Poland clean of the Nazi occupation.

On 9 February, our army newspaper comes out with the headline, ‘Be afraid, Germany! Russia is coming to Berlin.’