Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

It was with such thoughts as this that Lakosch tried to reassure himself. But he didn’t have much joy. Other images kept obtruding: schools and polyclinics with dentistry facilities, even in the smallest villages; the large, modern housing and administration blocks nestling between the wooden shacks in Russian towns; the neat model estates in the southern part of the Don elbow, with their combine harvesters and tractor stations; the huge industrial plants in the Donetsk region and the massive hydroelectric dam at Zaporozhye.

So maybe there was something to this talk about the achievements of socialism after all. And then there was the thing with the Jews. Whenever Lakosch hit upon this subject, he vividly recalled an incident from the summer of ’41.

It had been a hot July day. After driving along dust-choked roads, they’d arrived at the Ukrainian village of Talnoye, at the northeastern corner of the Uman Pocket. Just the previous day, the Russians had attempted a breakout here. In the village streets, which still showed signs of the fighting, Lakosch came across a jeering crowd of soldiers, who were herding a bunch of small figures dressed in strange black garb ahead of them down the street.

‘What’s going on here then?’ he asked.

‘They were firing at us from a basement!’

‘What, this lot here?’

‘No idea! Someone was, at any rate!’

‘So what now?’

‘What now? We’re gonna do ’em in, that’s what! It’s all their fault, the swine!’

Lakosch joined the procession. A sick feeling began to rise in his gorge, but at the same time he was gripped by a wild urge to witness the impending slaughter. Amid a tumult of shouts and blows, the Jews – he estimated there were around fifty of them, all men of middle age, with black beards, ragged clothes, and very poor, too, by the look of it – were driven into a courtyard, where they were pushed up against a wall. Boys who were there on fatigue duty, anti-aircraft gunners and men from every conceivable unit were jostling and shoving and yelling all at once and waving rifles and pistols in the air.

A stocky NCO from a flak battalion had appointed himself the ringleader of the mob. His bloodshot eyes were bulging out of his puffy face, and there were flecks of frothy yellow spittle in the corners of his mouth. Lakosch had seen this sort of thing in a rabid dog once, but never before in a human being. The Jews huddled in front of the whitewashed brick wall and clung fast to one another, forming an indissoluble entity of both abject misery and a black, piercing hatred that seemed to well up from the innermost core of their being. Though fear and loathing flickered over this group like a living flame, not one of them cried out or made the slightest sound whatsoever. Indeed, if anyone so much as opened his mouth, blows immediately rained down upon him. Here and there, trickles of blood appeared, which only seemed to whip the lynch mob into an even greater frenzy. Efforts were already being made to clear a space in front of the wall. Someone called out:

‘Who’s going to bury these pigs afterwards?’

Of course, how the devil were they to bury them? There was a momentary pause.

‘This filth can dig their own graves!’

‘Yeah, dead right! Let’s have some spades!’

Some of the crowd broke off to fetch the necessary tools. While they were gone, the NCO from the flak battery continued to lay into the defenceless victims. His rage knew no bounds. His voice, hoarse from shouting, now produced only an animal-like bellow. Out of the blue, an officer suddenly appeared on the scene.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’

The troops flinched, instantly brought to their senses. The NCO approached, swearing and gesticulating wildly.

‘Get a grip on yourself, man!’ the officer barked at him. ‘Who gave you orders to do this?’

Suddenly waking from his frenzy, the NCO stood there silently gaping before slumping down, a broken man. Taking a furious swing, the officer batted the pistol out of his hand.

‘Get out of my sight, you animal!’ The NCO slunk off there and then, without a word. ‘And the rest of you, disperse this instant!’

Muttering among themselves, the soldiers retreated, but stayed loitering around the scene. An elderly man detached himself from the group of Jews. The lobe of his left ear was badly torn, and blood was running from his broken nose into his matted beard. Bowing deeply and clutching his greasy hat in his hands, he thanked the officer for saving them.

‘Oy too, moy dear sir, velcome from ze bottom of my heart ze noo Churman goffernment!’

An impotent loathing shone through the mask of slavish subjugation imposed by centuries of serfdom. The officer turned his back on the man.

‘Just piss off,’ he said curtly ‘and don’t show your faces here again!’

Lakosch also found himself seized with rage at the time, because the officer’s intervention had deprived him of a ghoulish spectacle. Even so, he could never rid himself of the memory of this incident. And this recollection changed his outlook. Now, whenever he thought of the faces of the seventeen-year-old boys on fatigue duty – predatory children’s faces distorted with bloodlust – all he felt was disgust and shame.

‘That isn’t war any more,’ he would recall with a shudder, ‘it’s…’

But he couldn’t even find the words to express what was troubling him.

Lakosch had been hugely nonplussed one time when he discovered that Lenin and Stalin weren’t Jewish. He had no idea where he’d picked up this curious bit of information, but it had been an article of faith with him. His disappointment on learning the truth shocked him and shook his confidence in Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda. Who on earth had ever come up with such a bunch of shit in the first place? Rosenberg [1] Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) was one of the principal theorists of the Nazi movement. A Baltic German, Rosenberg was instrumental in devising Nazism’s racial policies and advocated a new mystical ‘religion of the blood’ to replace Christianity. He was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials and hanged. most likely, that Baltic German whose arse the Russians had given a good kicking. He’d probably bamboozled Adolf, too, with his fabrications and horror stories about Russia! After all, for a while Germany had rubbed along just fine with Soviet Russia, when they’d signed the Non-Aggression Pact that everyone had been so pleased about. And then along comes this snake-oil salesman from the Baltics, who gets Hitler all worked up over absolutely nothing! Maybe Stalin wanted just the same thing as Hitler, maybe he wanted socialism as well – and this entire war was nothing but a stupid misunderstanding? If only the two of them could get their heads together, in private. Hadn’t there been some rumour recently about Stalin and Hitler possibly meeting in Turkey?

That would sort things out all right – for the troops trapped at Stalingrad, too. It would mean the end of this war! He was at a loss to think how it might otherwise come to a sensible conclusion.

The little ginger-haired driver would ruminate long and hard on such hopes and deliberations while picking lice out of his clay-caked shirt, and would lie awake at night cogitating on these matters while planes droned overhead and the bunker shook gently from the shockwaves of distant bomb blasts. His freckled face took on a tortured expression from the effort of thinking.

‘I dunno what’s the matter with you! Are you hungry or something?’ asked Geibel anxiously, offering Lakosch a bit of crispbread.

‘Don’t talk such utter crap, you simpleton!’ Lakosch spat back venomously. Casting a pitying glance at Geibel, he added: ‘It’s all right for you, mate. You’ve got the consolation of being a moron!’