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

Hitler wanted to remain an enigma, to become myth, a new phoenix ready to be reborn in someone else’s lunatic dreams of power and violence.

Back then, in May 1945, I supposed our adventure was over and that I would soon be home. I did go home, but not soon by any means, only on 10 October 1945, four years to the day after I had gone off to the war. During those first postwar months I was again to encounter the documents from the Reich Chancellery. First, at front headquarters I was instructed to translate the Goebbels diaries, but things did not work out. There was nothing of operational value in his old diaries, and the historical value of documents from a war now ended, as I have said, declined rapidly. I was sent off back to Stendal, where the headquarters of our 3rd Shock Army was stationed.

The German town of Stendal was my last stop in a war that had lasted four years and that, no doubt, is why I so remember it. We moved there when the demarcation line was drawn on the map of Germany and Stendal, though situated to the west of Berlin, fell within the Russian zone. The Americans had been there in the morning, and we moved in at noon.

The city was intact and vibrant with life. We settled in a quiet street with detached houses covered in vines. From early morning middle-aged German housewives were busy in the orchards by the houses. Their hair in old-fashioned buns and the low hems of their skirts made them resemble their peers to the east.

German children played in the square, and never ceased to amaze us: they never cried and did not make a lot of noise when they were playing at war. In the square, old women dressed in black sat all day long on a bench. They had probably been brought together long ago by widowhood, and would not have been very young even at the time of the First World War. Sometimes they began to gossip excitedly about something, trying to outdo each other as they wagged fingers in black cotton gloves.

From time to time a black hearse would appear, drawn slowly, smoothly, contemplatively by two horses. What we knew about horses was that they were used for pulling artillery or galloped with a courier in the saddle, or died in battle, or were eaten. There had been none available for other purposes for years.

These black, gleaming, well-fed horses wearing a solemn funeral caparison and a fluffy pom-pom above their withers, with a black-clad driver wearing a bowler hat, sitting on the box of the glazed and lacquered hearse, were the custodians of the majesty and sacramental nature of death, of the death that is called ‘natural’. Not death in battle, or from wounds, or the agonies of captivity, but the death of someone who has passed away ‘naturally’, the kind of death that used to happen so long ago that we had forgotten during the war that it was possible.

In the evening, always at the same hour, a column of German prisoners of war returned. It turned off into our street through a dark archway, separating it from another street that led down to the market square.

All day the soldiers were taken off somewhere to work, and in the evening, at the exact same hour, they returned. You could hear them coming even before their first rank appeared under the archway. Tired, sweaty, hungry, they sang as they marched, and their singing reached our street before they marched down it. They sang in tune, like a good male voice choir, something of their own, something German, and they passed us in an orderly column.

The housewives peered out of open windows. Lying on embroidered cushions placed on the sills for that purpose, they were resting at the end of their day’s housework. Downstairs, by their front doors, the old men sat in chairs they had brought out, casting long, faint shadows on the pavement. Listening to the men marching, they rocked slowly in time to the song, and their shadows, etiolated by the late hour, also rocked a little.

But overall everything was so calm, not agitated. It was as if those presently marching into the street had no connection with those who lived on it. The appearance of the prisoners took me aback every time. Even later, when there was no singing because they had been forbidden to sing, they marched in line, silently, down our street, their steel-shod boots clacking rhythmically, to where they would be under guard by sentries. I stared at them transfixed. They were a living part of a war that was taking revenge on them for their defeat.

The town was intact, but there were ruins on the outskirts. By the time we got to Stendal, however, the ruins were no longer redolent with drama. The war in Germany had been over for two months, and the ruins already looked dilapidated. The inferno of war, it transpired, becomes extinct immediately the all-clear is sounded. You, a tiny ember, are still hissing and smouldering and flaring up, but it has gone out, and the flames of war no longer tint the now cold ruins. By now they only merit a paragraph as the property in the town is inventorized, an essential part of its variety.

These ruins are the town’s contribution to the past and its new starting point.

At the front, I did find myself talking to captured German soldiers whose psychology was wholly permeated by Nazism, but they were the exception. Much more commonly, the soldiers were just ordinary human beings bizarrely at odds with the monstrous monolith of which they had been a part until half an hour ago. That was distressing. In Stendal, up close, I found many of the town’s residents likeable, and the creature known as ‘a Nazi’ was nowhere to be found.

This was a strange period, without war, in a foreign, largely incomprehensible world that did not need you to come and organize it, because it was not you who were going to be living there. Shortly before I left Stendal, wandering through the streets one evening, I found myself in the town’s park. On the overgrown paths, a courting couple might be glimpsed in the distance, before disappearing and again leaving the park deserted. There was a brook with a little bridge over it. In the stagnant water matted with algae, the elongated leaves of a willow had clumped together. They were glued also to a moss-covered stone.

Along the bank the grass was swaying on long stems. A handful of sparrows flew up out of it. On the other side of the bridge I could see, where the pond weed had not taken over, the water moving on its way to somewhere. I gazed at it helplessly, surprised by a kind of awakening, having up till that moment been separated off by the war from that water, that grass, from everything that was not war.

Now it was August and the fourth month without war. In Stendal the headquarters of my army was accommodated in houses whose windows looked out to a highway. A barrier placed across the street was supposed to keep out the civilian population.

A retired railway official scuttled resolutely across the highway and burst through the screen of bushes that separated it from our street. He had come from wherever he had been temporarily resettled with his family. In a worn suit and wearing a bowler hat, wiry and tense, he came on some pretext into his house, which we had occupied, hoping by turning up to avert destruction and chaos. His carpets, rolled up and sewn into covers, stood in the corners of the rooms, but in the humid twilight, moths were in the air. The glass cabinet with his delicate porcelain coffee cups, which we used when cleaning our teeth, now had empty spaces on its shelves, and the cups were to be found in the bathroom perched precariously on the edge of the wash-hand basin, from where it was only too easy inadvertently to send them crashing to the tile floor. The house’s small garden was sadly and plaintively offering up its fruits.

Not far away, on the bridge or by the market square late at night, it did happen that a soldier would stop a lone passer-by and say, ‘Yer watch! Gerrit off,’ but by now marauding was being punished.