Olga Chaplin - The Man from Talalaivka - A Tale of Love, Life and Loss from Ukraine

At last, she heard the rumbling in the near-darkness and heaved a sigh of relief. The train was running erratically late. A few night workers stood nearby, waiting to board it. She peered into the darkness, searching for the dimmed train lights, but none appeared. Suddenly she realised, too late, what the rumbling whooshing noise was. Her skin pricked with uncontrolled panic as she grabbed Nadia and Mykola, pushed them as far under the heavy seat as she could, lay between them and the sparks of ricocheting bullets and shrapnel, as the Allied plane swooped past. Too close, on one side of the station, the bomb exploded, as it missed its railway target. With her face pressed into the gravelled dirt of the platform, she could smell her singed hair as the cinders scattered about them. Her eyes followed a night bomber’s path as it swooped its way towards Wilhelmshaven, towards Peter’s nearby camp. Another bomber growled high above her, and another, and another. “Boje mye,” she began, pushed her body closer to the ground, to the children, as the shrapnel slated about her. Her darkened world was in a state of chaos, and somewhere amongst it was Peter, engulfed in fighting the furious inferno of reprisal.

In the fiery furnace raging about her, she did not think she would survive another moment. In self-protection, her mind went into slow motion, like a fragmented newsreel inexplicably unravelling at great speed, her mind’s eye gathering fractions of moments of her life one last time: parents, siblings, children, Manya… an icon and priest before whom she and Peter had given their vows. She moved her parched lips in prayer, for her children, her husband, before yet another bomb crater burst nearby.

Her mind would take no more. She could feel her consciousness shutting down: the fear, the imminent presence of death too great. In those last moments, her mind tried to reason with the events. If there was any justice in this world, of country fighting country, totalitarian dictator against dictator, then it was that, perhaps, the chaos Hitler brought on Europe, that now hounded him back to Germany, would eventually one day cease, with the Allies’ bombings. Her comfort—as her mind went into blackness—was that she and her loved ones would die on God-given soil and not in the gas chambers so ingeniously planned and executed by the brains of Hitler’s regime. At last, in this death, she and her children were closer to the heavens, could look for the distant stars, could draw themselves even closer to their All-Seeing Maker.

Like primeval creatures trapped by their hunters, the camp sirens shrieked out their death-warnings to the inmates. Peter, disoriented for a few moments, jumped from his bunk; his senses, body, numbed by fitful sleep, the torturous duties still impacting on him since the previous air raid only hours earlier.

“Dyna!” he called out, his mind foggy but sharpening in the urgency. He peered down the dim mid-afternoon light shaft of his barracks block as men, dragging heavy jackets, hurled themselves towards the far open door. With only seconds remaining before the revved-up fire trucks would charge to their destination, he pulled back the board covering the glassless emergency-exit window, forced himself through its narrow opening and ran to the women’s block.

“Dyna! The truck’s leaving early! This could be your only chance! Leave everything—the women,” he nodded to her traumatised inmates, “will take care of the children!”

He helped Evdokia to move as best she could. Though panicked, she had waited for such a moment. None of the women in this makeshift camp, treacherously close to Wilhelmshaven, had experience of delivering a child. She gasped for air in her severely uncomfortable state, paused again to catch her breath, then followed Peter’s running outline to the fire truck.

It was imperative she go, this time. The fire truck was permitted only one deviation from the Wilhelmstrasse route to the smaller hospital on the fringe of the city. The shrewd camp commandant, calculating the risks—the disruption to the camp and the men should this woman Evdokia have an unfortunate birth—had made his decision. The hospital authorities would do what they could in these extreme circumstances.

“Schnell! Schnell!” Hermann, their crew leader shouted at them, his commands drowned out by the siren’s shrill warning. Seeing Evdokia’s condition, he ordered his men to help her onto the truck, raised his arm for the driver to go. In the choking fumes of their over-revved exhausts, the trucks crawled stealthily from their forest camouflage, waited while yet another squadron of Allied bombers passed over them, then charged out from the natural bunker of heavily-foliaged trees.

Peter breathed in deeply, rubbed his eyes, prepared for the coming debacle. He held in his emotions as he looked at Evdokia, held her shoulder firmly as the fire truck rumbled along pitted roadways towards the bomb-blasted city. “You’ll be safe in this hospital, Dyna,” he whispered reassuringly, smiling at her determined stoicism. “Don’t worry, everything will work out well here.”

He would not allow himself to think that this may be the last time he would see his wife, or his children. Such all-too-realistic thoughts would only undermine the duty which lay ahead of him, could even inadvertently affect his split-second judgment in the impending danger. He squeezed her shoulder, his taut muscled arms feeling the vulnerable compliance of her over-stretched body, and grinned confidently, his smoke-dusted face eliciting a smile from his anxious wife. He would remember that smile, he told himself, to come back to, to the safety of their prison camp. His eyes followed her heaving body as the hospital receded from view, returned sombrely to his prisoner compatriots in the fire truck as they prepared for their next life-or-death ordeal of duty.

It was yet another fire storm, wreaked on Wilhelmshaven by the combined Allied bombings. He sensed something was changing in this never-ending conflict. It was as if the Allies had cranked up another notch in their aim of fire against this important German city. These bombings were no longer the regularly-expected daytime and night raids. They were more frequent, punctuated by shorter and irregular intervals and seemed, almost, to come from all directions. Though there was no knowing the true situation of Germany’s military might, he had heard of Goebbels’ excited speeches on behalf of the Fuhrer, predicting that the enemy Air Forces’ collapse was imminent, now that Hitler’s ‘secret weapon’ was ‘eliminating’ their dwindling air power.

But Peter sensed this was far from the reality. The desperate measures being taken in the city and satellite towns of Wilhelmshaven by Himmler’s newly-ranked Gauleiter Commissioners pointed to a very different reality. Goering’s Luftwaffe was still game and seemed indomitable, but was, with each week, less and less effective against increased Allied bombing raids. His mind flashed back to Germany’s retreat from his Ukraine: to Russia’s increasing fire power, spear-headed by the Russian Air Force, which grew daily as their production lines improved. Germany, now, was facing a similar situation of retreat, right here, on its own territory. Even Albert Speers’s genius in munitions and production organising could no longer outwit the Allies’ chessboard moves in this deathly game.

His skin pricked with tension as their trucks reached their targeted part of the city. Massive plumes of black smoke warned them this was another monstrously successful sortie unleashed on the city. Whatever Goebbels’ and Goering’s daily propaganda churnings, whatever Goering’s right-hand man Milch had devised in the return flak, using Russian prisoner gunners conscripted for these air attacks, Hitler’s war against the Allies was flagging.