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

Just now, rereading your conversation with Zhukov, I was struck by his words, ‘I trust your conscience as a writer.’ I was brought up short: not ‘your account as an eyewitness’, not ‘you as a researcher of the archives’, but ‘your conscience as a writer’. That chimes with what you say about getting to a truth that is more profound than a conscientious, direct relation of the facts: to an artistic truth.

I think what he most likely meant was the moral responsibility of the person writing.

He had already suffered during his years in disfavour from all sorts of writers; what would have made him think he could trust the profession as such? No, he was referring to your own, personal talent. The military leader who led us to victory was the first to recognize your secret, your gift of trustworthiness.

What sort of a gift is that? It’s more of a burden.

Because you carry it as a responsibility. But Berlin, May 1945 is not only a documentary account of the death and identification of Hitler. Look at the subtle brushstrokes and details which, perhaps, nobody else would have spotted, with which you paint the portrait of those days? Modern historians draw on you to reconstruct them.

And your Rzhev, a cycle of novellas and stories giving a unique evocation of the people’s war! Everything seems to be happening right here and now, before our eyes, even though I had not been born at that time.

It is a kind of alternative memory, not memoirs but a constant presence of past experience in me. Even now, many decades later, it sometimes prods me very forcefully. The pre-war years, the war and everything that came after it have not just been swallowed up in the mire of life. Landmarks. They are not equal in how long they lasted or how significant they were, they differ in their spirit, their meaning, their content and what they teach us; some of them are interrelated while others diverge or merge, but there is an interaction, a debate going on as we strive to find our bearings in reality. It is a great shame that human life is so short – from a distance and in the depths some things are more clearly visible.

The sense of affliction is precious, it enlightens us. What it anchors in memory is sometimes not the great, momentous events. It makes its own unaccountable selections. That is probably true for all of us.

But does affliction not turn to hatred of those who have caused it?

It does. And how! I was asked on Swedish television, ‘How have you been able to overcome hatred for Germans, knowing only too well at first hand all the evil their army perpetrated on the territory of your homeland?’

What did you say?

My answer was never going to be anything conventional. An army interpreter is in a peculiar position in the avalanche of war. I had not only to know about what was happening to the enemy behind the front line that divided us, to recognize telltale signs of what they might be planning and how they were preparing to implement it, to make sense of intercepted orders, letters and diaries, but also to be in direct contact with Germans at the very moment catastrophe struck them, when one of them had just been seized in battle, or kidnapped by our scouts from a lookout post – when he was a ‘squealer’. Whether he was dumbstruck with shock, dejected, or stoical and trying to suppress his dismay – he was always vulnerable and unhappy.

The enemy in captivity. I found that contact a hard, trying experience. With rare exceptions it was difficult to feel that the person presently in front of you was a Nazi. Ejected from the sinister community he had shortly before belonged to, he did not conform to the notion the word ‘Nazi’ conjured up for us. But nobody could understand what he was saying, and the language barrier cut him off from the possibility of being seen as anything other than ‘the enemy’.

Between the German prisoner and his opponents, in whose power he now found himself, I was a kind of connective tissue. His eyes followed me anxiously; I could see he was frightened. The hatred I felt for the armed enemy bringing death, brutal violence and devastation, receded. A sense of acute pity interceded for this prisoner – a victim of the Nazis’ lunatic war.

The gift of compassion. Without it there would probably be no gift of trustworthiness.

I am not sure I would call the feeling compassion. I called it involvement.

That is a very important word for you. Tell me what involvement is?

I participated in a multi-part documentary, The World at War, made by Thames Television. I saw several of the episodes and wrote about them.

And then there was one about the occupation of Holland by the Nazi army. On the screen is a close-up of a man who was in the Resistance. When he was still just a very young lad, he heard the Jews were being deported from Amsterdam and went to the station.

There was a goods wagon already there. They were brought, under escort. Armed German soldiers with assault rifles and dogs had cordoned them off. What could I do, on my own, unarmed?

‘But I had seen that!’ he said emphatically. ‘I had seen it.’ And, he said, if he had seen it he was involved in it. He felt complicit, and became actively involved in the Resistance.

So, what about me? God only knows the things I have seen. Perhaps if I wrote about that I would get the horror out of my system. But what would that leave?

Now, with the passing of so many years, it is difficult for me to get a clear understanding myself of why, when the war came crashing down upon us, I decided to go to the front. I had not been brainwashed, I did not read the newspapers, I had no dreams of heroism. I had no illusions on that score, but probably something had been building up in me. Spain, of course; Spain was a landmark. For the first time in our lives, and the last time before the war, the Spanish Civil War united us in solidarity with the Western intelligentsia who were prepared to stand up against fascism. The environment in which I spent my youth also readied me for signing up, despite the fact that in practical terms I was totally unqualified: I was not sporty and have never learned to shoot, having bunked off military training classes. There was a sort of shooting gallery in the basement of our institute and, in the spirit of the times, some girls visited it. They were really keen to do a parachute jump and get the badge: I was too scared even to try jumping off the parachute tower in Gorky Park. The practical side of the military training was, as it were, one thing, while a readiness to go to war was something separate, and seems to have been what mattered most. Whether I would actually be any use there was something I never asked myself. A desire to play a part in our common destiny was something I think many people who signed up felt.

But did you not at first work in an arms factory?

In No. 2 Clock Factory, which was immediately switched, under the mobilization plan, to manufacturing cartridge cases. My job at the lathe was to chisel the burr off the blanks. ‘Lathe Operator, Class 3’ is how I was described in my work record book. There is nothing following that: after the war I was out of luck as a job-seeker, at least as an employee.

Point Five in my CV (‘Nationality: Jewish’), told against me.

You write that at the beginning of the war it was difficult for a girl not liable for military service, let alone one with no relevant peacetime skills, to get to the front. In the end, though, you did train as a military translator and interpreter and went off to the war. I simply can’t imagine what it must have been like for you, a young girl, under conditions that would have been hard for a man. Svetlana Alexiyevich has written about ‘the unwomanly face of war’. Do you think she is right?