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

In the nearest hut, in a partitioned-off compartment, the general was lying face upwards on an iron bed. He was covered to his neck by an army blanket and had a young adjutant attending him. They had been captured on a stretch of the railway line, in the track inspector’s lodge. As the German troops were scrambling to get away, the general had suffered a serious wound and had to be left behind. His field tunic, as if crucified on a piece of wood, hung from a nail on the wall. His toiletries – shaving kit, hairbrush, soap – were laid out on a stool.

Our colonel, stocky, burly, wearing a high grey astrakhan hat, took up a considerable proportion of the available space. The adjutant gave him a chair and quickly cleared the stool for me, sweeping everything into a field case. He looked at me in puzzlement, wondering who I was. A representative of the Red Cross, perhaps?

From the other side of the partition came the subdued buzz of conversation of the other German officers. In here was relatively quieter, and the general’s pale face was similarly at peace. Looking at him, you might have imagined the two sides in the war had been engaged in chivalrous combat and that there were no grounds for anxiety that that would not continue.

‘How do you assess Germany’s military position?’ the colonel asked. ‘The situation is extremely serious.’ He did not move: his head remained motionless, and only the bags under his eyes seemed to tense. ‘Your forecast for the immediate future?’ ‘I cannot say it is optimistic, but while the war continues anything remains possible.’

I translated and made notes, but something was troubling me. The colonel hesitated for a moment, and I suddenly asked, ‘I believe you were at Vyazma.’ Our colonel gave me a disapproving look. ‘I asked if he was at Vyazma,’ I explained. ‘I have one other question. May I ask it?’ ‘Go ahead.’ ‘Was the track inspector not anxious about you staying in his lodge?’ ‘He was German. And there are circumstances in which fear has no place,’ he said almost didactically and slightly more animatedly. He brought his white-sleeved arm out of the blanket and smoothed his hair. ‘Although I do not think I brought any additional sanctions down on him.’

I remembered the orders pasted up in the villages around Vyazma: ‘Anyone who conceals or provides lodging or food to a Soviet soldier or commander… will be hanged.’ There he was, lying in his underwear with a blanket up to his chin, and now was not the time to start enquiring whether he had been at Vyazma and whether that order was over his signature Should I continue? I let it drop.

The colonel asked if the general knew about the predicament of the garrison in Poznań citadel. He did. The colonel told him – and this was the whole point of his visit – that the general should send them a message, calling on them to lay down their arms.

The wounded man stirred. His adjutant bent forward to assist him, but was frozen with a look. He laboriously shifted his shoulder and head, turning his pale, puffy face to the colonel. He found it a considerable strain, and sweat trickled from his scalp. ‘Are you proposing to force me to do this as a prisoner?’ ‘It is your duty in the present situation. People are starving to death there now. Your compatriots. Why create needless losses on both sides when it is clear what the only outcome can be?’

‘Call on them to surrender?’ he said. ‘Impossible. That is impossible,’ he repeated after a moment’s reflection. ‘In my place would you really behave differently?’ Now it was the colonel’s turn to reflect. Getting up from his seat, he asked whether the general had any requests to the Soviet command. He had not.

‘Let’s go!’ the colonel said.

During the night a herd of cows was being driven east along a dark road. Cars coming the other way, driving slowly without lights, turned on their headlights, startling the cows which, dazzled, bumped into each other and found themselves with no room to move. Among their black and white coats were flashes of ginger from Russian or Byelorussian cows that had been rustled by the Germans and brought back to their Reich. Cars hooted, the beams from their headlights sought a path through the panicking herd, a whip whistled, lights danced in the cows’ huge eyes. For some reason it was frightening.

Soon people began to forget the enemy in the citadel; the liberated city had better things to think about. General Chuikov’s army had allocated units to storm it and moved on. Red Army troops were already advancing beyond the borders of Brandenburg and Pomerania. At this time I was still assigned to a Smersh group subordinate to front headquarters that had remained in Poznań.

Forty kilometres from Poznań, to our rear, in a shtetl away from the highways of the war, there was, we learned, a camp for captured Italian generals. We went to take a look. The German guards had fled before the Red Army arrived, and 160 Italian generals, now unguarded by anyone, just carried on living in the camp. Not long ago they had been fighting us, but after the coup in Italy, the German command summoned them from the front for a supposed meeting and promptly declared them prisoners of war. In the changed situation, they found themselves as confused as the Italian soldiers we had liberated in Bydgoszcz. How would we regard them: as prisoners of the Germans or as our recent enemies?

We drove past the barbed wire. Emptiness. Several huts. Two men sawing a log. We approached and, when they saw us, they stopped sawing. Two weary, elderly men, two pairs of eyes looked gloomily and expectantly towards us. We said hello in German. One man, dark-skinned with heavy folds on his face, with a bright woollen scarf round his neck, nodded silently. He was in the uniform of an Italian general. The other talked to us. This was Specialist Leader Walther Treublut, a German interpreter and the only member of the German camp administration to have remained at his post. He was bareheaded, grey-haired, and had a pointed nose. His upper lip was drawn inwards.

Our colonel went round the huts, accompanied by Walther Treublut, and informed the Italians, with Sonderführer Treublut translating, that they were free and, as soon as the situation at the front allowed, would be assisted to return home.

Some time later, when the weather was warmer, when the food supplies in the camp ran out and the generals had set off back to Italy, I was to talk to Walther Treublut again, after he was arrested one night in the city park where he was sleeping on a bench.

Having bade farewell to the Italian generals and not knowing what to do, he headed for Poznań, went to the house where he had lived for several years, but found that it was once more occupied by the Polish family who had lived there before being expelled during the occupation. Not wanting to get on the wrong side of anybody, he lay down on a bench in the park, because he was very tired and hungry.

I asked him why he had not fled with the camp administration and guards. He shrugged and did not reply. Then he told me about himself. He was born and lived in Reval, now Tallinn. He owned a chemical laboratory that manufactured perfume products, which he sold through his father’s chemist’s shop.

He suffered from pulmonary disease and, travelling in Italy, met a girl in the village of Domaso on Lake Como. They had known each other for only five days, and the Italian girl knew not a word of German while Treublut knew barely five words in Italian. When he got home to Reval, he swotted up on Italian, sent a stream of postcards to Domaso, and finally offered his hand and his heart to the beautiful Nereida Betetti. Their wedding took place beside Lake Como, and Treublut took his Italian bride to Reval and Estonian citizenship.