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

A general in a tattered uniform, liberated from a concentration camp; his closeness to the captured Yakov Dzhugashvili; the fact that Stalin wanted to see him and would perhaps that very evening hear from him what he was telling us now, could not but excite his listeners’ curiosity. We bade him a warm goodbye when he and the individuals accompanying him got into a car to be driven to the airfield.

I never heard another word about him and know nothing of his fate. Stalin tended to be hard on witnesses. I was left with a liking for the general, and remember his eyes, the eyes of a man who had been through a lot, spent a lot of time thinking, and who had perhaps already resigned himself to something.

From the day the Yugoslav general appeared there began an increasing number of incidents, circumstances and events that reached all the way to Stalin. Marshal Zhukov’s pilots dropped in on us for tea and to kill time. They were so good looking, each more handsome than the one before, and they brought news of Moscow, the city so dear to us. Hearing that I lived in Moscow on Leningrad Highway, they volunteered to look up my family. ‘We’ll be going past your door,’ they said. Planes were landing at that time on the Leningrad Highway, where the air terminal is now. But I no longer had any family for them to look up: my father had left my mother, and guests would not be welcome. ‘Okay, then, let’s grab Ewa and take her for a spin round Moscow. We’ll bring her back tomorrow.’ They would have, too. They were very dashing.

All the time at the front people had joked and got up to pranks with great gusto. They had been scathing, cheery, flamboyant. Here, though, everything was different. We were hanging about as if we were less involved with the war. It really was difficult to know whether we were fighting or not. Now and again our lads would loose off some shots, but in an offhand sort of way. The citadel did not snarl back. Were the Germans all dead? Were they hiding? Or were they saving their shells to fight back when our troops mounted their assault? All was quiet. It was a long time since any German planes had come to drop supplies.

The workplaces of our cryptographer and myself, with their associated equipment, were in the third room of the apartment, a pink bedroom.

We had pink wallpaper and a fluffy pink double bedspread, rolled up but abandoned at the last moment. The cryptographer now slept in the double bed. In place of a chandelier, an open, upside-down pink umbrella was playfully attached by its handle to the ceiling. In this spacious room with two windows, the cryptographer and I were allocated our separate spaces on opposite walls: the man was after all working with codes that had to be kept secret from everyone. I, far more modestly, was working with a dictionary, sifting through that postbag of German letters or newly acquired documents, and a typewriter. The cryptographer did not say much: he was always wearing a headset and always had a cigarette in his lips, the ash from which he periodically tapped off on to the carpet. He and his secrets were not, however, so hermetically sealed off from me that I did not know a coded message had been sent ‘upstairs’ to the effect that the gold in the German bank had been found not to have been evacuated.

Each of the apartment’s three rooms was kitsch in its own way. Either that, or its German cosiness only seemed obnoxious and vulgar to us in our state of homelessness. You tried not to look in the corner where scattered children’s toys had been swept off the pink carpet. You tried not to, but you did peep, and might even find yourself looking rather closely and working out from the toys what the age of their owner must have been: just over one year old, probably. The, probably folding, cot that had stood there – there was nowhere else for it – had been taken with them. There were no other clues. But those colourful toys: the blow-up animals and wooden blocks, the plastic rings and rattles… but that’s enough of that, because first, before this baby was born, its parents had kicked a Polish family out of their own apartment. In the apartment opposite, across the landing, where other staff members now worked and slept, there had also been Polish people living before the Germans arrived.

But later, dating the entry ‘late March 1945’, when I had taken in many more impressions, I wrote in the diary again, ‘Poznań, misery here in archaeological layers: first, five years ago, Polish; now German.’

A bulky, reinforced coffer was brought from the bank and dragged up to my ‘attic’ bedroom on the first floor. This no longer boasted the SS uniform or Hitler’s helpful framed advice on the need for strong nerves but only a table and a sofa bed, and the funny little plastic puppy which, after all, could hardly be blamed for the Hitler salute imputed to it.

The top of the sofa was raised, the lower compartment where the bedding was stored was cleared, and sundry gold items emptied into it. Inventories were stacked on top of them. The mattress was lowered, entombing the contents beneath it. The reinforced coffer was removed from the premises in order not to attract attention. This was all done with great excitement, in the certain belief that precious possessions of the Soviet state had been recovered, which the Germans had stolen and exported to their Reich.

To mount a 24-hour guard with changes of sentries would have tied up too many resources, and we were short of armed soldiers. It was thought that the gold would in any case be safest in my sofa bed. I was trusted. So in Poznań I slept on a hoard of gold. Nothing special about that, eh? It was only later, after the war, when I graduated and could not get a job because of ‘Point Five’, as people said at the time (Point Five in a personnel questionnaire enquired after your ‘nationality’, which I gave as ‘Jewish’), and as I spent years in straitened personal circumstances, that I sometimes smiled wryly at myself and the twists and turns of destiny as I recalled that sofa.

One or two days later, maybe three, encrypted instructions came back from Moscow. The gold, along with the inventories, was scooped out from under me and despatched in sealed bags to the address of the government department indicated in the secret message.

‘Right, let’s go!’ said Colonel Latyshev. A wounded lieutenant general had been captured in the Frankfurt-on-Oder area. Our saloon car roared off at full speed, as it usually did when the colonel was being taken anywhere. Out in the country, indistinguishable villages flashed by, some of their dwellings destroyed, others intact. Polish men and women were pushing wheelbarrows and prams with whatever of their possessions had survived.

I glimpsed the threatening German notices with whose colour and design I was so familiar. Pasted up on ruined walls and posts, whole or in tatters, they flew by: ‘Show light – you die!’ Or ‘Light means death!’ Or ‘Pssst! Shhh! The enemy is listening! Keep quiet or die!’ Death, death, death… But everything became a blur and was left behind as the car sped on at reckless speed, as if in search of the risk and danger without which life would now have seemed bland to us.

A Polish soldier rushed to open the camp gates. The depressing, numbingly regular rows of huts stretched far inside. They had been built by Russian prisoners of war herded here to do German forced labour. They themselves had surrounded the camp with six rows of barbed wire, and then lived behind it.

The colonel disappeared through the door of the Polish commandant’s office. The prisoners of war in the camp were now Germans. A miserable, straggly tree still retained frozen leaves here and there. On the inside of the gate a German warning in Russian had not yet been torn down: ‘If passing the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp unescorted by German guards, you will be shot.’