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

For a time I was staying overnight in the apartment of the Buzinski family, and made friends with the mother, Wiktoria. The head of the family, Stefan Buziński, went out early in the morning to his job at the railway depot wearing trousers too tight for him and a patched donkey jacket. His wife, pani Wiktoria, was a dressmaker by profession and had just acquired some new customers – our traffic-control girls, who were living on the ground floor of the same house. Standing that spring in full view of the whole of Europe, they naturally found it essential to have their tunics neatly altered to fit their figures. To the delight of hospitable and sociable Wiktoria, the girls pestered her from morning till night.

The housework in the family was done mainly by Alka, Wiktoria’s daughter. Slow-moving but pretty, she casually shifted the crude, ancient chairs around and would suddenly freeze, deep in thought, with a duster in her hands. If you happened to look at such a moment into her wonderful blue eyes, the contrast was very striking between her phlegmatic outward appearance and the hidden temperament her eyes betrayed. Passionate forces seemed to be slumbering in her soul, awaiting their hour. Where would Alka direct them?

Wiktoria’s son, a chubby adolescent with curly hair, was his mother’s darling. Every day he would retire behind a partition to play the violin. He was considered musically gifted and, before the war, a teacher at the conservatory gave him lessons, in return for which Mrs Buzińska did the teacher’s laundry and cleaned her apartment. During the years of occupation, the boy could play the violin only in secret, away from the eyes and ears of the German police. One time Mrs Buzińska confided to me she was hoping that her son would be admitted now to a music school.

Standing back a little from her tailor’s dummy, short-sightedly peering with her tired, light blue eyes, which had probably once been the same colour as Alka’s, she carefully examined the darts marked on the waist and shoulders of the tunic.

All those years, ‘the German period’, her children had had no schooling. I asked in surprise if there had been no schools in Poznań. I even noted down our conversation afterwards in my diary.

There were German-language schools for Polish children, but I certainly did not want my children learning German.

But they would have been taught other subjects than just German.

Oh, no, miss! In those schools Polish children were taught only German, and how to count. The Germans said Poles should only be labourers and Knechte – servants; they had no use for educated Poles.

The ‘German period’ was truly a time of dark and wasted years. I suppose I already knew all this, because I had translated German orders and Hitler’s views on the uses of Poles and Russians, but I was astounded every time I came across them in action.

The street in the suburbs was so peaceful, so unscathed. There was no sign of bitter fighting, of people running away, of devastation. The last train to Berlin, on which the fleeing Germans departed, left when there was already heavy fighting in the city. All four apartments in the villa where our operational group was working on the ground floor, were empty. Their previous, Polish, owners had not reappeared. Were they alive? After waiting for a time, I was allocated a room on the first floor, and said farewell to Wiktoria. For the first time during the war and, to tell the truth, in my entire life, I had, if only for a time, a room of my own. It was small, came with a sofa, an SS uniform on the back of a chair, an open writing pad on the table, and a cigarette butt in the ashtray. Also a framed exhortation on the wall from Hitler:

‘Sichere Nerven und eiserne Zähigkeit sind die besten Garanten für die Erfolge auf dieser Welt.’

‘Strong nerves and iron tenacity are the best guarantees for succeeding in this world.’ On a shelf with illustrated magazines there was a plastic puppy with its paw raised in something approximating to a ‘Heil! ’ Posters with similar puppies hailing Hitler were to be seen on the walls of houses and in shop windows.

Not far from us was an airfield that provided our communications link with Moscow. The planes of Front Commander Marshal Zhukov were always parked there at the ready. From time to time senior figures on their way to the airfield to fly to Moscow would drop in on us, as, indeed, did emissaries of Moscow arriving at the front. On one occasion we had a phone call from front headquarters to warn us that a Yugoslav general on his way to see Stalin would stop with us for a time before leaving for Moscow. [1] Naturally nobody told us his name at the time. In writings about the war it is sometimes given as Stefanović.

We were all feeling a sense of great responsibility. I was entrusted with receiving the general, that is, giving him lunch and looking after him because it was believed that, as a Muscovite, I would know about that sort of thing.

Cooking a respectable meal with the assistance of our neighbour, Ewa, who looked after the kitchen for us, was not a problem. Serving it properly was more challenging. We Muscovite children of the first five-year plans, of the rolling five-day working week when not everybody had the same day off, barely knew what a family meal was. When the seven-day week was restored, with Sundays off for everyone, our fathers got home from work, as was expected, after midnight, devotedly giving their all to their jobs. It was a rare Sunday when they were to be found at home. As for the war… barely a month had passed since everyone had their personal spoon tucked into the top of their boot.

In short, I had scant knowledge of how to serve a meal properly. I was also bewildered by the abundance in the sideboard of our ‘working apartment’ of knives and forks of varying calibre and shape, and all manner of smaller items of unknown purpose. Zhenya Gavrilov, a bright-eyed headquarters messenger, walked behind me, dragging a rigidly starched bedsheet along the floor and rigorously polishing with it the wine and vodka glasses and anything else I found in the dining room and kitchen that we could use. For better or worse the table was laid, my superiors inspected it and found my improvisations convincing.

The Yugoslav general was a big man of indeterminate age, in a baggy, tawdry uniform, with a straight parting in his barely greying dark hair. He seemed not to notice the elaborate setting of the table in his honour. His manner was very formal, either because that was natural to him or because he had got into the habit of being reserved. He unintentionally mortified me when, taking his napkin out of its silver ring, he stopped short and looked closely at the German monogram on it. I do not know what he was thinking, but I scolded myself. To hell with all their napkins and napkin rings, their monograms and all their other flim-flam.

The general seemed to be eating and drinking more out of politeness than because he was hungry, although he had only just got out of a German concentration camp where he would have known all about hunger. In addition, he was distracted from eating by the conversation. There was none of the usual military spiritedness in the gaze of his light grey eyes, which was slow and gentle, at times alert, at times remote. Our common language was German. As I translated what he was telling us, he looked silently and in a friendly way at everybody sitting at the table, nodding slightly. In part he knew individual words in Russian, and there were also many that were cognate with his language.

As a Yugoslav general, our guest had long been held in a special concentration camp for prominent military and political figures captured by the Germans. René Blum, the son of the sometime French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, was there, as was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son. The Yugoslav general spoke very warmly about him and how he had comported himself in the camp. The Germans gave Yakov no peace, constantly threatening him, trying to get something from him, to get him to do something, but he behaved impeccably and with dignity. The general was transferred to a different camp, and there heard the news that the Germans had dealt with Yakov Dzhugashvili and he was no longer alive. [1] Yakov was shot at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Stalin refused a German proposal to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus, taken captive at Stalingrad, remarking that ‘You do not exchange a marshal for a soldier.’ Yakov was particularly depressed by Stalin’s statement, broadcast over the camp radio, that ‘there are no Russian prisoners of war, only traitors to the Motherland’. He effectively committed suicide in 1943 by refusing to return to his hut and running into the camp’s death strip, where he was shot by a guard. Website Khronos, quoted in ‘Dzhugashvili (Stalin) Yakov Iosifovich 1908–1943’, Semeinye istorii. http://www.famhist.ru/famhist/elag/00033f25.htm . Accessed 20 October 2017. Tr. This was reported to Stalin and he ordered the Yugoslav general to be brought to him.