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

The situation in which I found myself was odd, unreal, especially when I look back at it now, out of the context of the war. War is itself pathological, and everything that happened during the war, everything we went through simply cannot be translated into the concepts of peacetime and does not fit into the familiar psychological categories.

Already by this time, the sense of history surrounding the fall of the Third Reich was fading. We had experienced too much. The death of its leaders and everything connected with that seemed nothing out of the ordinary.

I was not the only one feeling that way. When I was called to front headquarters to translate Goebbels’ diaries, I met up with Raya, our telegraphist, and saw her trying on a white evening dress that had belonged to Eva Braun and which had been brought to her from the underground complex of the Reich Chancellery by Senior Lieutenant Kurashov (who was in love with her). It was a long dress, reaching almost to the floor, with a plunging neckline, and Raya did not care for it. As a historic memento it was of no interest to her. Shoes from a box labelled ‘Für Fr. Eva Braun’ were just right and she appreciated them far more.

Towards midnight on 8 May, I was about to go to bed in the downstairs room I had been allotted in a two-storey house when I suddenly heard someone calling my name from the first floor. I hastily ran up the very steep wooden staircase. The door to the room was wide open, and Major Bystrov and Major Pichko were standing beside the radio craning their necks.

It was strange really, because we were expecting this, but when the newsreader finally came on air to announce solemnly, ‘The signing of the instrument of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces…’ we just stood there, overwhelmed.

1. We, the undersigned, acting by authority of the German High Command, hereby surrender unconditionally to the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and simultaneously to the Supreme High Command of the Red Army all forces on land, at sea, and in the air who are at this date under German control.

2. The German High Command will at once issue orders to all German commanders of the land, naval and air forces and all forces under the German Command to cease hostilities at 23.01 Central European Time on 8 May 1945, to remain in their places where they are located at this time, and be completely disarmed…

The voice of Yury Levitan resounded, ‘To commemorate the victorious culmination of the Great Patriotic War…’ We yelled something and waved our arms about in the air.

We poured out the wine in silence. I put the box on the floor and the three of us clinked glasses, deeply moved, excited but hushed as the cannonades boomed out in celebration over the airwaves from Moscow.

I went back down the steep wooden stairs to the ground floor. Suddenly it was as if something jolted me and I clutched at the banister. Never am I going to forget the feeling that electrified me at that moment.

God Almighty, is this happening to me? Is this me standing here at the moment Germany surrenders, with a box in my hands containing the indisputable remnants of Adolf Hitler?!

Many years were to pass before I stood in that place again. I wandered excitedly along the street, looking out for the house with a steep staircase where I had stood with that box in my hands and heard the news that the war was over, and where in those hours my life so freakishly intersected with the course of German history.

What is victory? You can sculpt it as Victoria, drawn by a quadriga above a triumphal arch. It can be embodied in architecture as the Propylaeum, the Brandenburg Gate… But what does it mean just for a person? For someone back in their own suffering homeland? For someone who has followed it here to Berlin? How can that state be articulated, that jubilant ‘Aaah!’ as if you are on a swing at its highest point, and everything about you is awhirl – at last, this is the end, and you are alive, and your heart sings with indescribable joy; it seems you really will get to wander once again through the streets of your home cities, to stare up at the sky, to look about you, to do so many things – now that the war is over, now that war is no more. And you are close to tears at the afflictions of the past and from bewilderment over the future you now face.

The uplifting spirit of victory, but exalted within it, and perhaps above all else, the mourning. How are you to hold on to that? How are you to reconcile the victory with all the effort it has cost, the merciless demand for self-sacrifice along the way?

Early on 9 May everything was buzzing in the village of Berlin-Buch. In anticipation of something extraordinary, some indescribable festivity and celebration to honour this long-awaited Victory Day, soldiers were already dancing, somewhere there was singing. Soldiers were walking down the village street their arms flung around each other. Girls in the army were frenziedly laundering their tunics.

The forensic medical report had noted, ‘The fundamental anatomical discovery that can be used to identify this individual are the teeth, with a large number of artificial bridges, teeth, crowns and fillings.’

However, the task now facing us, of locating Hitler’s dentists in the chaos of devastated Berlin, would have daunted anyone not fired up by the prospect of impudently confronting the conspiracy of silence, and buoyed up on the crest of the wave of victory. It was on 9 May, this first morning when the war was over, that we sallied forth on our quest.

A tractor was pulling an artillery piece, and on its barrel, as on the side of a truck we met, there still glowed the words, ‘Berlin, here we come!’ The Red Army soldiers, the guns, the cars: everything was in its place, nothing had changed, and yet, at the same time, suddenly, everything had changed.

The cannon would no longer fire, the soldiers no longer go into the attack. A long-awaited peace had descended upon the Earth and already it was not only those far-off battles on the banks of the Volga, but also those battles very near this present place, in days of an incomparable upsurge of morale, when our soldiers could not wait to get at Berlin, that today had suddenly become history.

The day before Victory Day had been warm, summer-like, even, but now the sky was overcast and the day was grey and sunless. In the Berlin suburbs, though, the gardens were flowering, the smell of lilac was in the air, and by the roadside, in grass lit up by yellow dandelions, sat two Germans – a boy and a girl, and on their young, lively faces you could read that the war was over, the nightmare and the dying was at an end, and that to be living in this world was an unbelievable blessing.

From the intact outskirts we drove back into the ruins of Berlin. In places smoke was still rising, the city’s air still filled with the fumes of battle. Through the breach in a wall you would glimpse a sooty piece of red cloth, a home-made banner, one of those that the soldiers had readied on the approaches to Berlin and kept close to their hearts to be planted in the German capital.

The barricades, crushed by tank tracks, had yet to be dismantled. In places ruins not yet cool still smoked. There was rubble everywhere. The city was full of refugees from the eastern lands, but everyone who could had fled Berlin before the assault, getting away from the bombing and the impending siege. Who could we approach?

Somehow, though, the gods were with us: there is no other explanation. How else was it possible that in this tortured, vanquished city of three million souls, we found the assistant of Professor Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist?

This is a subplot in its own right, but perhaps not a subplot because those develop at least to some extent in accordance with the laws of logic. This developed against all logic, an enigmatic succession of strokes of luck smoothing the path of people bent on affirming the truth.