Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

When the medical staff first set foot in the building and start making their way through the rooms, they are horrified by what they find. They have been used to many terrible things, but have never seen anything like this. What can they do? Is there anything to be done?

‘Clear out the dead first off!’ the staff doctor urgently orders. The corpses are duly removed. The first day’s body count alone is one hundred and fifty. Out in the courtyard is a large open wooden shed. The dead men are stacked in there like logs. This task goes on seemingly without end. Men are dying on an hourly basis from fever or starvation or cold, or shoot themselves or slash their wrists.

‘Then I want all the riff-raff out of here!’

All kinds of people, it’s true, are still washing about the large building, especially its upper floors. There, for quite some time, shadowy figures have been leading a wild, gypsy-like existence. Soldiers from all manner of units, and Croatians and Romanians, plus two completely feral German women and railway employees. The open camp fires they keep alight up there all the while, with the windows closed, are endangering the fabric of the building. Several hundred of them are turned out onto the street. But like mice they keep sneaking back in, day and night. Keeping them out also proves an unending task.

One medical company still has a couple of horses, and these are now slaughtered. Violent clashes break out around the field kitchen. Armed orderlies end up having to protect it. In the twinkling of an eye, the entrails and feet of the butchered horses are stolen.

Herbert goes downstairs armed with mess tins. He’s not heading for the field kitchen. You get nothing there unless it’s your turn. He’s after some snow, as Geibel’s contracted a fever and needs cold compresses. And they must have something to drink. But it’s becoming harder and harder to find the stuff. All the snow around the building has been collected and eaten, despite having been trampled by boots and sullied by all and sundry relieving themselves there. As Herbert makes to cross the road, a lorry draws up. It stops. It has been loaded up with provisions. Suddenly, there comes a whistling sound, followed by an explosion and a sheet of flame. People standing around the truck are scythed to the ground. The driver slumps from his cab into the road. A piece of shrapnel has clearly sliced through his thighs, as his legs are bent backwards up to his neck. A steaming pool of blood is forming underneath him. He’s still alive, gasping for air like a landed fish. His co-driver has jumped down from the other side. He catches holds of the gurgling man, spins him round, and claps him on the shoulder. ‘Where are the keys, Otto? … Hey, Otto!’

While this is going on, other men start ransacking the cargo. By the time the co-driver turns round to see what’s going on, the lorry is empty. Herbert didn’t have his wits about him. He’s standing with his back pressed against the wall. His whole body is shaking…

When he’s filled the mess tins with snow and tries to get back into the building, a corporal from the Medical Corps bars his way. ‘What do you think you’re doing skulking about here, eh?’

‘I wanted… I’ve… My comrade in there…’

‘Comrade, comrade… You’ll feel the sole of my boot up your arse, you bloody vagrant! Make yourself scarce, d’you hear? Go on – scram!’

Herbert is wearing his coat. But he’s left his blanket and his kitbag of clothes upstairs. And Geibel’s lying up there too. But he can’t get back into the building now.

‘So, what else should we be doing?’ asks the senior doctor.

‘Triage. We should be laying out the hopeless cases in the corridors. That’ll make more room for the rest,’ replies the staff doctor.

Seeing the shocked face of his colleague, he adds, under his breath: ‘Freezing to death is a kind way to go.’

That afternoon, Herbert manages to get back to his room by sneaking through the back entrance of the building. Geibel isn’t there any more. His things have gone too. The babbling man and the lad with the lice have disappeared as well. Others have taken their place, in some cases men with dreadful mutilations.

‘They’re from the floor above!’ says the gnome, who’s still there on his pile of coats; he points at the ceiling. ‘Hit by a shell burst… What’s that, you want to know what’s happened to the others?’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘No idea. They came and took them away round noon today.’

Herbert wanders round the rooms and corridors. He finds the delirious man in a freezing-cold passageway where all the windows have been blown out. He’s still alive, singing and chuckling to himself. He also tracks down the young soldier; they’ve taken away his lice-ridden blanket, along with his boots and greatcoat. He’s already frozen to death. But Geibel’s nowhere to be seen.

Cold, clear weather set in again. Every now and then, a pallid reflection of the winter sun shone through the window of the cellar room, which was fitted with bars and made opaque by a dirty pane of glass. Someone always had to be ready to cushion this windowpane against the blast whenever heavy mortar rounds exploded outside. With stubborn regularity, the mortars targeted the same spots: the road outside the house and the courtyard. After suffering a number of shrapnel injuries and two fatalities (one of whom was Corporal Görz, who’d been searching for food in a derelict car) from these insidious munitions, which made no noise as they came in, they only dared to venture outside in extremis. Eichert and the junior doctor now dreaded doing their daily rounds of the surrounding basements to tend to the wounded. The men relieved themselves right outside the door; as a result, a mirror-smooth sheet of ice formed, on which two men slipped and broke their legs at night. Whenever Breuer stuck his nose out into the courtyard, an eerie feeling crept over him. Each time, the silhouette of the red-brick ruins of houses had changed noticeably. Here a new hole now gaped, and there yet another entire floor was missing. Way up high, the interior of a room was suddenly exposed, suspended in mid-air with all its furniture, beds, and pictures on the walls like a theatre set. But not for long! Pretty soon, all that remained there were some jagged stumps of masonry. Down in the courtyard, the brick- and plaster-dust lay inches thick and the piles of rubble grew and grew. A city was gradually being levelled. It was as if the decay of all man-made objects, a process normally concealed from mortal eyes by the slow passage of the years, was here being made visible by some merciless time-lapse camera.

The sun brought the planes with it. They moved across the backdrop of a light-blue sky, tiny and distant and detached, as pale and transparent as the lice you picked off your shirt. But down below, the bombs they dropped whistled and wailed and tore new wounds in the bleeding city. The crump and roar of their detonations, magnified a hundred times over by the bare walls and the rickety rafters and the corrugated iron roofs of blasted factory buildings, shook at the ruins of the houses and the shattered hearts of men with a dreadful rumbling reverberation. At night it was quieter. Then the air was filled with the rumble of transport aircraft circling at low altitude; their shadows flitted beneath the stars like the outlines of enormous bats. All around, colourful flares shot up, and hidden faces scanned the sky anxiously for the hazy shapes of parachutes floating down and listened out for the near or distant impact of air-dropped supplies hitting the ground – authorized search parties and desperate marauders always found themselves in a race to get to these first. For provisions were now only being distributed to those who were able and willing to fight. The wounded officers sat in their cellar, not speaking to one another. Each of them was far away in his thoughts, mentally taking leave of the past and quietly asking himself the question: ‘What now?’ There was more than enough wood here in the ruins, so the stove was kept fully stoked. A pot of coffee always sat steaming there. Enough coffee was still to be had – it was pretty much all they had to sustain and fortify them. Occasionally Jankuhn, the popular paymaster, would produce some tinned meat. Bread was a very scarce commodity now. Everything was shared between everyone.