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

Later, in May, I wore this dress when I was photographed in Berlin at the monument to Bismarck, at a hoarding with portraits of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, and in various other temporary or permanent historic settings.

At New Year 1945, when our army was redeployed from the Baltic states to Poland and had its headquarters in Kaluszyn, something between a town and a shtetl, Major Bystrov had told me when no one was listening that he would try from now on to carve out a ‘creative day’ for me, because the war was coming to an end and I would find myself trying to get back into the Literary Institute with absolutely no new qualifications. Pulling my desk over to one corner and spreading out some unimportant German papers to make it look as if I were translating, I made a conspiratorial start under Bystrov’s watchful eye. In a slim, blue Polish school notebook I wrote down the title of a story, ‘The “Son-in-Law”’. I had had it in mind for a long time: there was something secretive about it that moved and excited me. I had been imagining everything that would go on in the story. All I needed was an opportunity to sit down and write it.

And now I had it. ‘The “Son-in-Law”’. I wrote it once more, this time as part of the text. ‘…that was the name they gave to young Russian deserters in encirclement who shacked up with grass widows in nearby villages whose husbands were absent in the war.’ Now what?

I decided the first sentence was not quite right. It sounded like a dictionary definition. I crossed it out. Something more ‘literary’ was needed. In the end I wrote down, ‘A cow was pulling an oxcart,’ then improved it to ‘a spotted cow was pulling an oxcart.’ And that was the fruit of a day’s work.

Bystrov’s sound pragmatism saw no signs of promise in this, and he said frankly that with such a woeful level of productivity he could not justify further diversion of the war effort. He stripped me of my creative day, and was right to do so. The notebook survives as testimony to my incompetence. I was able to write ‘The “Son-in-Law”’ as I had imagined it, about the tensions of life behind German lines, only after I got home when the war was over.

How easily and willingly I would jot down this and that as it happened (when, that is, I was allowed to), and how difficult it proved to sit down and just write.

Captured Germans were sent, over time, in echelons to the east. Fearing the hatred of the Poles, they always asked to be escorted by Russian soldiers.

Studying German staff headquarters documents from the captured citadel was becoming less operationally valuable, and had not yet become of historical interest. It was also thoroughly depressing. Our army was standing 80 km from Berlin, and here we still were putting on weight in Poznań where nothing serious was happening. Little did I know how merciful fate was being, holing me up in Poznań for the whole time the Red Army was advancing through Germany, right up until the assault on Berlin. But that is an aside.

Already in Poznań the war was covertly preparing to withdraw and allow the return of what is, perhaps, the truly dominant feature of human existence: love – personal, intimate feelings. There was danger in those, there was risk, but also all the radiant wonder of being alive. Since we were in Riga I had been collecting slim volumes of Ivan Bunin’s poetry, and magazines with Marina Tsvetayeva’s poems, whenever I came across them. I carried some with me wherever I went. They were pulsating with a life that had unfamiliar facets, a different sadness, different passions.

What a blow was coming my way! A famous writer flew in from Moscow and called on us when I was not there. He asked the colonel hospitably welcoming him whether, by chance, we had any emigré literature, because he would really like some to read. That was our visiting celebrity’s only request to us.

I can imagine our Colonel Latyshev regretfully shrugging his shoulders as he explained he had nothing to offer. Being a generous man, he no doubt imagined others were equally generous. He called Zhenya Gavrilov in from the kitchen. Zhenya was always pottering around there, drying dishes with his bedsheet, because we never had any shortage of people looking for a meal, or of dishes to wash when they left. Zhenya, keen to make a good impression on Ewa, helped her out when he had time to spare, which was more or less all the time except, of course, when he was spending late evenings with Ewa’s neighbour, young Zosia.

The colonel told Zhenya to go up to the translator’s room and see if there was any literature there in Russian. The impatient writer followed him up the stairs, and there the literature lay, on the wide, deep sill of the window at which the SS officer used to sit.

My diary entry reads: ‘On 28 March, visit from so and so, who helped himself to my Bunin and Tsvetayeva.’

My resentment and indignation were such that I could write nothing more. A few days later I again wrote in my diary, ‘On 28 March, visit from so and so…’: exactly the same entry.

I would probably not have felt so intensely about this if I had known that for me the war would not be ending in Poznań, and that destiny was about to move me to the very epicentre of events as it did.

Our troops, having overcome what the Germans had supposed to be their impregnable defences on the River Oder, were by this time already fighting on the plateau near Berlin. How eager we were to be there and not in Poznań! At last an order was received that we should all return to our units.

When I heard the news, I ran outside, round our house and turned in at the gate. It was late, but in the courtyard I could see the black silhouettes of our cars and, under one of them, the bright light of a torch shining on and off.

I called to Sergey. The hand holding the torch appeared from beneath the car, and then Sergey, our driver, emerged wearing the dark blue Gestapo uniform he used as his overalls. I advised him that we were leaving for Berlin, and that he was to have the cars ready for six in the morning. Sergey put out the torch and we stood silently in the dark.

Who in those days was not only too eager to get to Berlin? Of course, Sergey was too, but we had been stationed in Poznań for over two months, a lifetime during a war, and Sergey, after a whirlwind romance with a Poznań girl, had contrived to marry her secretly in church. Ever since there had been a slightly crazy, mischievous expression on his likeable, thoughtful face.

He wiped his hands on the Gestapo uniform, clicked his cigarette lighter – his broad, Slavic face paled, he frowned and said, lighting a cigarette: ‘Ah, wszystko jedno – wojna !’ What can you do about it? That’s war! It was something you often heard in Poznań at that time.

At dawn we prepared to leave and, just before we did, I observed the customary moment of reflection before setting out on a journey. I went to the front garden of our house and was suddenly transfixed by the sight of the apple tree, alive with white blossom, by a square of bare, damp earth through which, here and there, delicate young blades of grass were sprouting, and by the sight of last year’s leaves decomposing underfoot. A gusting breeze brought such a sense of spring in the air.

Along the street on his bicycle, clad in black, came a chimney sweep, complete with his top hat, stepladder and brush slung over his back. The feeling of safety, which had been becoming oppressive with its overtone of stagnation and a kind of emotional turmoil, gave way to a sense of melancholy now at having to leave.

Sergey cast a farewell glance at the old Molotov saloon painted a ghastly, muddy, camouflage colour, with an unbroken red edging the length of its bodywork and on the wheel rims, which he had constantly retouched. He had driven this battered, bullet-scarred car for the first four years of the war. Now he drove out to the roadway in his new baby – a captured, highpowered Ford 8 he had rescued from a ditch near Poznań and lovingly repaired. His fresh black paint had run and grey showed through in places, but the bodywork and the wheel rims sported the same ostentatious red edging. He was incorrigible.