Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Hours pass. A few shells explode outside. Harras’s subconsciousness registers ‘air raid’ but lets his exhausted body sleep on. Suddenly the hatch to the bunker flies open. Along with gusts of icy wind and snow flurries, piercing shouts penetrate the room.

‘Alarm! Everybody out! The Russians are coming! Russian tanks!’

The paymaster is the first to leap up.

‘Oh Christ,’ he shouts. ‘The stores!’

He grabs his fur jacket and makes for the exit hatch, but then quickly turns back and crams some tins and loaves into his pockets before clambering out of the bunker.

‘Good idea!’ thinks Harras, still half-asleep. ‘Smart move. That’s one way of clearing out the bunker, at least!’ So he sits there calmly while everyone stumbles over him, shouting and swearing. But after the yelling and shooting continues for a while outside, he too struggles to his feet. The table has been overturned and the lantern extinguished. In the glow of the overheated stove he can still see some men crouching round the walls.

‘Hey! Don’t you want to leave? It’s not a drill! The Russians are here!’

No one answers, no one moves. Behind the table, a man is crawling on the ground scraping together bits of spilt fat from the dirty puddles on the floor.

Harras struggles out into the cold. A grotesque sight meets his eyes. All round him, people are emerging out of the ground! All of a sudden, he finds himself whisked up in a wild maelstrom of fleeing men and carried away. Images of blind panic flit past him: running and screaming figures carrying pieces of clothing, weapons and equipment or desperately trying to start frozen engines. With a dull roar, some vehicles spring into life and, bumping into one another, roar off, ploughing into the heaving mass of humanity ahead of them. He sees burning lorries glowing white-hot, the wide-open, yelling mouths of officers frantically and fruitlessly trying to stem the tide of retreat, and men grasping at the fleeing vehicles, attempting to get a handhold on radiator grilles, tarpaulin sides or gun barrels as they pass. As some soldiers try to climb on to tracked vehicles, they get trapped in the moving tracks and fall to the ground with lacerated hands. As he listens, the general cacophony of shouting, with some sharp cries repeatedly ringing above it, the rattling and barking of engines that haven’t yet warmed up, and the dry chattering of machine-gun bursts, which in the crystal-clear frosty air sound uncannily close at hand, all merge into a single, terrible din. Anti-tank shells come whizzing over their heads in a flattened arc. Beneath their flaming tails, the whimpering huddle of people pause and flinch like they’ve been whipped before rushing crazily on.

The seething Cauldron is finally boiling over. A single notion, hatched in several desperate individuals’ minds, lends the flow a direction and an objective: Stalingrad! Gumrak, Pitomnik, that was all a fraud. Stalingrad, though, that can’t possibly be an illusion. There, they’ll find thick walls, deep cellars, and warmth, warmth! There they’ll finally reach their destination and won’t have to keep on running through the night and the snow. There they can crawl into a hole and wait for either a miracle or the end. So, onward to Stalingrad!

The seething human tide rolls on to the east. It is a bright, clear night beneath a velvet-black sky sprinkled with points of light. A deadly cold descends from this vastness of space. The air itself seems to solidify, trembling and shimmering in a glittering dance of ice crystals as fine as dust.

The firing has ceased. Gradually the feverish flow begins to cool down into a viscous lava of vehicles and people, flowing on incessantly but now ever more sluggishly, creeping forward metre by metre. The lorries and cars advance several vehicles abreast, bumping and nudging past each other or grinding one another into immobility. The snow squeaks sharply under the pressure of their turning wheels. Heavy tracked vehicles come rumbling and rattling along, turning jerkily and making the hard ground rumble as they pass. Steadily, the clusters of men begin to drop off the canvas sides, mudguards, running boards and bonnets. One by one they fall off, frozen stiff, into the carriageway, where they are run over, mangled and crushed.

Harras trots along between the vehicles. That’s the only way of making any headway. On the verges the snow is lying knee-deep. By now his clothes have lost the last vestiges of the warmth from the bunker. An icy band of cold grips him ever tighter. The frost creeps up his arms, seeps through his felt boots and up his legs and gnaws at his entrails. He feels like his eyeballs are embedded in dishes of ice, that his nostrils are clogged up with frozen threads, and that every breath he takes is laced with sharp needles. A walrus moustache of ice is slowly forming on his balaclava. His brain feels like it has been paralysed. He hardly notices the people who are creeping along beside him, the horde of lost souls who have no more energy or willpower left to clamber on to a vehicle. Wrapped in blankets, their hands buried in their coat pockets and their heads shrouded in cloths and scarves, they haul themselves onward, supporting their wounded or frostbitten limbs on sticks and crutches or taking painful, staggering steps, one at a time, on feet wrapped in formless bundles of rags or straw overshoes. As they go, they leave elephants’ tracks behind them in the slushy snow. Hardly anyone is carrying a weapon any more; even through gloves, hands would freeze hard to metal barrels on a night like this. One or two of them are pulling along little sleds piled with bags or equipment, and paying no heed to anything that falls off. Cold and hunger have killed stone dead all thoughts and feelings, any glimmer of obedience or sense of duty or camaraderie, any last vestiges of helpfulness or even of pity. Somewhere deep within them there still glows a tiny spark of life, which drives them on. It is just enough to sustain the naked urge for self-preservation, and the impulse to find food and warmth. They creep along mechanically and ghostlike, on the edge of dying of exposure. Here and there, one of them topples over this edge, falling down silently. He makes one final effort to lift his torso from the snow, and falls back; slowly his hand tries to support his heavy head, but slips off. Then his body moves no more. The others stumble over him and go on their way.

Vehicles are also giving up the ghost during this night, dying of lack of fuel and of the snow, in which they stick fast. Three five-ton tractor units pulling light howitzers have stopped dead in the middle of the road. Several men are busy removing the breechblocks from the guns and fetching their few belongings down from the trucks. A lieutenant stands and supervises them; he should have blown up the guns back in Dubininsky. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it; instead he’d secretly siphoned off fuel from the tanks of some fully laden staff trucks. It has taken him and his guns as far as this, but now the games’s up… He stands there staring vacantly, his arm resting on one of the gun barrels. Staff cars sway past him, along with lorries piled high with crates, mattresses and bed frames. The transport section of a staff corps. One of the lorries is towing a car with a dismantled engine… The driver of a three-ton Opel truck stands beside his vehicle, clutching two loaves of army bread.

‘Bread for petrol!’ he whispers to the drivers of passing vehicles. ‘Anyone swap some fuel for a loaf?’ Someone knocks the bread from his hand as they drive by. With a cry of rage, the man leaps forward to retrieve it, but slips over and gets caught in the tracks of a self-propelled gun. The heavy vehicle rocks slightly as it lumbers over the obstacle. A short death scream is drowned out by the grinding rattle of the broad tracks. In the meantime, men have clambered into the back of the abandoned Opel and are silently rifling through its cargo for anything edible or for warm clothing. Crates are tipped out, presently followed by suitcases, items of uniform, boots, radio equipment and bundles of official documents. Down below, others are standing around, sorting through the plunder, rejecting some items but pointlessly encumbering themselves with others, only to cast them off, one by one, after just a few steps.