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

11 January 1942. Rzhev and Kaluga are now the sites of ferocious fighting… We are digging in. For our 185th Infantry Regiment there will be no retreat. We shall hold out or perish.

20 January 1942. Minus 40°. Tank traps, a barbed wire entanglement. What’s it all for? It is a pity to leave this place to these dirty, ragged people. Most of the regiments in our division are retreating. Once more, several men suffering from frostbite. In many villages the wells have already been blown up.

The evening sky is blood-red in many places. Torched villages go up in flames. Tongues of flame greedily lick the squalid huts. War is merciless, and that means it’s them or us…

On that note the diary ends.

In the towns and villages around Moscow from which the Germans had fled, I kept seeing a poster reading, ‘Der Russe muβ sterben, damit wir leben.’ The Russian must die so we may live.

During the days in January of which a German lieutenant writes in his diary, we first graduates of the army translation course left Stavropol-on-Volga with two lieutenant’s pips on our collar tabs. A quiet, small provincial town, little more than a village, it shared its name with the much larger Stavropol in the North Caucasus. The translation course had been set up there in the proximity of General Staff Headquarters, which had moved from Moscow to Kuibyshev. From Stavropol to Kuibyshev was over 100 km down the Volga. There was no railway, no road, and when the Volga froze over we were cut off from the rest of the world until a sledge track along the river could be established.

In this nondescript town with its mysterious hills beyond the Volga, with flickering lights burning in its low, iced-up windows, in the faint swish of sledge runners fading away in fluffy snow, in this ultimate stillness there was none of the thunder of war. Even here, however, the war signalled its presence: refugees, ‘vacuees’, heart-rending scenes at the flea market where poverty met profiteering. In the canteen the new waitresses were all evacuated pregnant women, the town council having decreed that they should receive ‘humanitarian aid’ by being allowed to work at the only catering institution in town operated by the state.

We were cut off from Moscow. How were things going there? We were in a state of constant anxiety. One winter’s day an army division passed through the town, or rather, what remained of it. Down the main street, past the windows of the district land department where we were studying, they came from far away, from the war, Red Army men, limping, dragging their feet in boots and footcloths, frozen, exhausted.

In our lesson that day we were reciting paragraphs from the Wehrmacht’s charter, which had to be learnt by heart: ‘The aggressive spirit of the German infantry…’ Taking in the sight of those trudging past, we fell silent, crowded round the windows and, stricken, could not tear ourselves away. A broken division was being led from the front to somewhere deep in the Russian hinterland to be reconstituted. In the ranks there were flashes of white: an arm in a sling, frostbitten on the way, bandaged ears under a summer forage cap. Some were being hauled along on sledges.

Still they came, more and more of them, exhausted, frozen. The column seemed endless. Darkness fell. They would evidently be coming through all night. A chilling presentiment of defeat crept over us. And that was the moment we took the oath.

The head of the army faculty running our course, handsome Lieutenant General Nikolai Biyazi, had until recently been the Soviet military attaché in Italy. He arrived in a low, wide sleigh from a requisitioned sanatorium. Stepping gingerly in black felt boots he had yet to wear in, he entered the room at the district land office, where our first platoon was lined up ready to take the oath. He warmed his hands at the round stove in the middle of the room and said simply, ‘The future of our Motherland is at stake.’

We came forward one at a time and read out the text: ‘If I break this, my solemn oath, may I be subject to the severity of Soviet law and to the general hatred and contempt of the workers.’ We appended our signatures.

Our classes continue. Today’s lesson is on ‘The Organization of the German Army’, and is being conducted by a captain with a razor-sharp parting in his abundant auburn hair, a rather good-looking man of thirty or so.

We are not paying proper attention. We are in two places at once. Our soul has already winged away and only our body is present here and now, in this room at the land office which looks out to the main road, a snowy white street leading down to the Volga and, beyond that, to the front.

How many howitzers are there in a German artillery regiment, and how much ammunition do they have? What are the calibres of the Germans’ guns? What types of aircraft do they have? (The Henschel 126, the Junkers 88, the Messerschmitt 109.) It is all just too difficult to remember. When we get to the front no doubt we’ll sort all that out, but here and now we do not take it too seriously.

The lessons given by Auerbach, a civilian teacher, are livelier. We do roleplay. ‘You are the prisoner: I am the interpreter. I am the prisoner: you are the interpreter. Let’s talk serious interrogation.’

Civilian Comrade Auerbach is not like the other teachers, who are all captains with emphatically parted hair. He is rather small and wears a dark blue Boston suit you might not expect to see outside Moscow. It seems out of place among all the army tunics and grey greatcoats. He was born in Switzerland but has lived most of his life in Russia, and appears intensely committed to his work. Perhaps work is his homeland and he is cultivating its soil. Our course has just been set up and the teaching methodology is not yet set in stone, so he is his own master, free to do things his own way. He imparts useful knowledge to us.

In order to get used to the military cadence of the enemy’s language, we translate newly captured documents, dated December and sent up the Volga from General Headquarters.

1. Emergency Methods for Protection Against Cold

Insert felt under the helmet, a handkerchief, crumpled newspaper or a forage cap, with a balaclava. Makeshift balaclavas and oversleeves can be made from foot wrappings. Oversleeves can also be made from old socks

It is better to wear two shirts (even if thin) rather than one thick shirt. (The layer of air between two thin shirts provides excellent protection from cold.)

Particular care should be taken to protect the lower abdomen from cold. Use a lining of newspaper between undershirt and overshirt, or wrappings made from old clothes.

For legs and knees: newspaper between long johns and trousers; the slit in underpants should be sewn up; wear an extra pair of tracksuit bottoms under trousers…

That made us laugh. The enemy had been brought low. It cheered us to think that those swine were feeling cold and wrapping newspapers round their thighs. But on the other hand, there was something incongruous about the enemy feeling the cold, just like us, something perplexing.

While we were talking howitzers, the Hs 126, the Ju 88, paragraphs of their regulations, everything seemed more or less in its right place: tidy, alien, intangible and menacing; but that memorandum suddenly gave us a vivid insight into what these people were going through. They were suffering from the cold. They were, damn their eyes, animate beings.

The iced-over Volga cut us off from the outside world, but late one evening the news broke in those muffled, snowbound streets: the Germans were being driven back from Moscow! We could not sit still at school and rushed back to the hostel to the boys, hugging them and singing. Next I received a letter from my brother, a cavalry scout in a Moscow volunteer regiment: ‘Where we are, the Germans are on the run!’ What could be better?