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

Next Vanya came out to the road, a taxi driver from Riga, brought against his will by the Germans to work in Poznań. He was shivering in a short, once dapper but now bedraggled, suede jacket, and inspected the Ford approvingly. Unfastening his shoulder strap, Sergey took a flask of vodka and presented it to him.

Sergey looked first at one then at the other side of the street A lone figure was conspicuous on the pavement, a girl in a short checked skirt, with large legs and a scarf on her head. She was watching tensely as we prepared to leave. The cars were already moving off. Sergey said quietly, ‘Go home. Why do I have to say it. For heaven’s sake, idz do domu .’

She turned and walked slowly away, turning to look back again and again. Sergey stood there, unable to move, then straightened the folds of his tunic under his belt and yanked the car door open.

With the flask tucked under one arm, Vanya the taxi driver smoothed his sparse fair hair with the other and waved us goodbye. The Ford’s wheels screeched furiously, but the engine immediately settled down and we drove smoothly on our way. I was sitting behind Sergey. To either side of the street a white surf of apple trees in bloom was foaming. The city was waking. The girl directing traffic at the city gate gave a signal and the barrier floated up. A schoolboy with a satchel on his back came out of a house and politely took off his little kepi to wish us, ‘Dzień dobry’.

The car emerged onto the highway to Berlin. Sergey lowered the window and took off his cap.

‘Deutschland liegt im Herzen Europas.’ Germany lies at the heart of Europe. So we had been informed with admirable accuracy yet, at the same time, poetically, by our school textbook.

Beyond Birnbaum there was a checkpoint with a large, hastily knockedtogether archway and a sign reading, ‘This was the German border.’ Everyone passing along the highway to Berlin at that time read also a second inscription, scrawled in tar in huge, uneven letters by a soldier on the nearest ruined house: ‘Take a good look: this is fucking Germany!’

That soldier had been marching towards this place for four years. Fires, ruins: the war had come back to haunt the land from which it had sallied forth. The wind ruffled sheets and towels on fences and trees, the white flags of surrender. Somewhere far beyond the uncultivated fields peaceful windmills rose like a mirage.

An old, small, half-ruined town. The war had moved on and here, muffled, barely audible, life was pulsating. At the crossroads, opposite the grey house of the Dachdeckermeister (roofer), a lad in a sheepskin jacket bawled from a large poster, ‘Fire into the lair of the beast!’

Boys wearing white armbands were climbing over a wrecked Opel on the pavement, which had lost its wheels. They were evidently playing at war. There were many townspeople, burdened with bundles, pushing laden prams, and one and all, adults and children, were wearing white armbands on their left sleeves. It was completely unexpected for me that the whole country had put on white armbands to indicate surrender, and I do not recall reading about it anywhere else.

Beside the road on the outskirts of the town an elderly man was digging his garden. We stopped and went into his house. His wife, evidently accustomed by now to such guests, offered to warm coffee for us.

In this small house, perched by the roadside of war, the kitchen was cosy and dazzlingly clean. On the shelves there was a dauntless parade of beer mugs. The porcelain skirts of an artful-looking lady crouching on the sideboard billowed upwards. This merry little trinket was a wedding present given to our hostess thirty-two years before. Two terrible wars had raged, but the porcelain coquette had survived in one piece, along with the inscription on her apron: ‘Kaffee und Bier, das lob’ ich mir.’ Coffee and beer, I hold them dear.

We left the house. Our hostess’s husband was planting flowers in the ground he had dug, as he did every year, to sell. Armoured personnel carriers trundled by, their caterpillar tracks clanking.

In the sky a German spy plane hovered above us, a Focke-Wulf ‘frame’, and where the road forked, the Military Roads Commission had an information kiosk for anyone driving in Germany, severely warning that ‘Driving on the left will result in confiscation of the driver’s licence.’ The warning looked comically out of place, but also rather touching in the way that it hinted at a different way of life with sensible regulations, a different world without war.

People of many nationalities, newly liberated, streamed along the roads towards us: French, Russian, British, Polish, Italians, Belgians, Yugoslavs… Prisoners of war, captives from concentration camps and torture chambers, slaves dragged here from the USSR, from all over Europe, to forced labour, starvation and death.

A few were riding in German vans or on purloined bicycles. More commonly, they were on foot, in groups, under a homemade flag of their own country. Some were in military uniform, some in civilian clothing, some in the striped jacket of a prisoner. Their exclamations of greeting, radiant with warmth, lit by a smile, the frank, open expression of emotion were heart-warming, profoundly touching encounters I will never forget.

Past a cavalry regiment stationed in a village adjacent to the highway, past a tank brigade of the commander of the front’s reserve, past a roadside poster urging ‘Forward, Victory is Near!’, overtaking trucks heavy-laden with ammunition, we drove into Küstrin, a town on the Oder, deserted, ruined. ‘The key to the gates of Berlin’, the Germans called it.

The main square was now a graveyard of the buildings that had once looked on to it. They seemed to be advancing on it from all directions, reduced now to grim piles of rubble. Beams left suspended in mid-air groaned; stone dust poured down from the gaps in walls. In the middle of the square a monument with a bronze bird on top of it had miraculously survived. My God, how lonely this place felt, with that idiotic, vainglorious bird all on its own in a dreadful wasteland of stone.

Back on the highway. Again, fields and woodland, windmills looming on the horizon. Pigs, unfed, crazed, rushing around the fields.

The retreating enemy had blown up the bridges, the main roads had been wrecked and were littered with broken vehicles, but the trucks with their cargoes were getting through somehow, clocking up hundreds of kilometres on the difficult route into the heart of Germany. What hardships did these front-line drivers not endure, what trackless wastes did they not traverse with their loads, sinking down in river crossings, bogged down in swamps, dodging bombs and shells and mines in order to get here, in a truck riddled by bullets and shrapnel, to participate in the final battle!

Dusk fell, protecting us from attack by enemy aircraft, and the amount of traffic on the highway increased markedly. Tanks, trucks, self-propelled guns, armoured personnel carriers, amphibious tanks, horse carts. Infantry in Studebaker trucks and marching on foot. On rifle barrels, on tank turrets, on carts, everywhere you saw the slogan, ‘Berlin, here we come!’

When it was completely dark the traffic only grew heavier. The night was short and you had to get into position while you could. People drove slowly, not turning on their headlights, getting snarled up in traffic jams. Anti-aircraft guns were firing. From village byroads artillery, tanks, and infantry were all drawn to the highway. Vehicles drove several abreast, peeled off and drove through land to the sides of the road. Everywhere there was rasping and clanking, furious honking, horses being whipped, everybody trying to overtake those ahead of them.