Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The padre leaves the bounds of the village and makes for the POW camp up ahead in the gorge. The grey wilderness is wreathed in silence as dusk falls. There comes the sound of a single shot, somewhere in the distance. All is light now within Padre Paters, though; the darkness of the past weeks has lifted.

Suddenly, the calm is broken. Silent figures step forward out of the mist, white-clad figures wearing fur ushankas [2] ushankas – Russian army hat with fur-lined earflaps. and with their rifles at the ready… Red Army troops! Peters stands still – he can feel his heart racing, while his hand tightly grips the crucifix in his pocket. Yet his agitation is in no way tinged with fear. Slowly, hesitantly, the strange figures approach him. Peters takes out the crucifix and raises it to heaven:

‘ Christos voskresty! ’ [3] Christos voskresty! – ‘Christ is risen!’ he cries. His voice rings out clear as a bell across the snowy landscape.

‘ Ya svyashchennik! ’ [4] Ya svyashchennik! – ‘I’m a priest!’ Dear Lord, Peters prays to himself, if this be Thy will, then Thy will be done! But what happens next takes the padre completely by surprise. The Russians stop. One man who was ahead of the others, scouting out the terrain, lowers his weapon and his face cracks into a smile – and he laughs, a deep and hearty laugh. He lumbers up to Peters, places his hands on his shoulders and gives him an affable shake.

‘ Batyushka! ’ he says, and for a moment this little, friendly word entirely eclipses the war. The other soldiers stand around, seven small figures with snub-nosed, childlike, Ukrainian faces that appear somehow unfinished. They stare inquisitively at this curious saint. But in the background, three of them silently and bashfully make the sign of the Cross. Padre Peters falls to his knees and buries his face in his hands.

Back at the airfield, time passes excruciatingly slowly for the waiting First Lieutenant Breuer. Suddenly, though, the major tugs at his sleeve.

‘Hey, look over there! I think that’s him!’

‘Where? Who?’

‘The bloke with the passes!’

It is indeed the MO from Flight Control. Breuer and the major rush forward to speak to him. Has he got their sick passes, they want to know. Yes, he has them, and they have the requisite countersignatures. They urge him to hand them over without delay. Already, another aircraft is circling overhead. But the doctor is determined to take his time. He makes great play of deciphering their names, mistrustfully scrutinizing the recipients to make sure they are bona fide and asking to see their pay-books to confirm their identity. Finally, though, Breuer gets his hands on his sick pass. A signature has been hastily scrawled on it in ink – ‘Approved, Dr Rinoldi’. Above them, the plane keeps banking over the field. Breuer sprints over to the dispatch officer, who is busy selecting passengers from the seething crowd of soldiers.

‘Hey, hey, over here!’ he shouts ‘I’ve got an eye injury! Look here… here’s my authorization!’

By now the harassed officer is a bundle of nerves.

‘Shit on your eye injury!’ he yells. Even so, he gives Breuer a shove that propels him into the midst of the little cluster of chosen ones. The major’s approach, on the other hand, is to have a word on the q.t. with the officer. He must have a silver tongue, because he too finds himself joining the select ranks of passengers. The crowd of men who have been passed over seethe and yell angrily.

Darkness starts to fall. To the north, artillery fire lights up the milky sky with red flashes. The plane is still circling overhead. The pilot has switched on his navigation lights. He seems to be having second thoughts about landing. Little wonder; if he crash-lands, then he and his crew will be caught in the mousetrap, too. Suddenly, a small parachute drops from the fuselage and begins its slow, rocking descent. A few solid objects also plummet to earth, where the guard detail immediately pounces on them. The aircraft makes one final turn before disappearing into the gathering gloom.

Anger, disappointment and rancour seep through the waiting crowd. Their pent-up fury threatens to break over the head of the dispatch officer. He spots the danger in time and seeks to head it off.

‘Hey, just hold your horses there!’ he croaks. ‘There’ll be plenty more planes along! Lots more are on their way! See? There’s another one already!’

It’s true; somewhere in the sea of grey cloud a new droning noise can be heard. The aircraft begins to corkscrew down. Is this one going to land? Yes, it’s dropping all the time – no, wait a minute – yes, yes, it’s touched down, a textbook landing on the rapidly darkening airfield. The engines are throttled back and tick over lazily; the big bird waits there, shuddering, ready to take off again and depart at any moment. The doors fly open and the ladder shoots down; a few provisions are unloaded, and then the crew, like cats on a hot tin roof, are urging everyone to hurry it up. To a man, the twelve chosen ones are seized by a terror of being left behind. They lunge forward to the plane like shipwrecked men grasping at lifeboats, pushing and shoving to be the first to board. Reason dictates that every one of them is certain of a seat. But reason flies out of the window at times like this! The dispatch officer couldn’t care less about the mayhem; he’s done his duty, and the ones left behind are causing him enough headaches as it is.

Breuer finds himself trapped in a tangle of shouting people and is crushed against the short set of steps up to the plane.

‘Go on, go on!’ urges the major from behind. He can already see into the plane’s cabin through the legs of the man who’s gone before him, and looks directly into the face of the radio operator…

Then something unforeseen occurs. Something truly absurd, a horrible twist of fate. It happens so fast, in a split second, that, even when he looks back on it later, Breuer can never fully fathom quite what happened. With his impaired vision, did he perhaps miss his footing on the smooth metal steps of the ladder? Or was the furious red face of the radio operator to blame for the whole incident – that face whose passing resemblance to Wiese’s caused him to hesitate momentarily? And did that brief hesitation of his prompt the swearing major to shove him in the side? Or was he simply overcome by a fit of giddiness? Or maybe his nerves failed him in the final, critical moment? Perhaps his body had somehow instinctively refused to carry out the instructions it was being given by a none-too-certain will?

By the time the slipstream from the propellers rouses him from where he is lying on the ground – he had fallen hard, hitting his chin on the metal steps and presumably knocking himself out for a few moments – it is too late. No one takes any notice of him. The ladder has long since been pulled up, the door closed, and the plane is lumbering off down the airstrip, clumsy as a fleeing chicken. Off to one side, the crowd of men left behind are still roaring and bellowing.

Unnoticed by them (their self-interest leaves them no time or inclination for mockery or scorn), Breuer stands there and watches the plane recede into the distance. Dazed, he feels his bruised limbs. His sick pass is lying at his feet. And as he bends down to pick it up, he suddenly realizes that there’s no point now. There was no repairing the damage. No more planes were going to land in Stalingrad. A decision had been made, and it was irrevocable…

Despair rages through Breuer’s brain like a centrifuge that threatens any minute to reduce his body to atoms. Hot blood surges through his head and limbs, and the dizzying whirl forces clear thoughts and feelings to the surface once more. And suddenly an image reappears that had been erased during the last few hours of high emotion. This image grows ever clearer and firmer and becomes, so to speak, the axis around which everything else rotates: it is the picture of his dying friend in a snow hole in Gumrak. And he knows now for sure that there is no way back!