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

Peter braced himself in this contrast of military and political wills, his stomach tight, drum-like. He realised he had not eaten that day, was relieved, as his body prepared for a battle of survival. He knew that each day, each time the fire truck left the camp’s relative safety he, or any of the prisoners, may not return. There was a sense of entrapment over this once-great, free-spirited coastal city, now made incomparably dangerous by the ‘shuttle’ bombing raids devised by the Allied powers, and even more so since Hitler lost control of Rumania and its vital oilfields, allowing the Allied squadrons to extend their ‘country-hopping’ from British to Italian and Soviet soil.

And the liberation of Paris in these past days had made a cataclysmic difference to both sides: the Allies bolstered by eventual victory, Hitler’s Reich more shrill, determined it would succeed. Peter felt a conflicting foreboding: each day, each hour would be more risky, treacherous, for all those within the reach of this city; yet he hoped, somehow, peace could come quickly to this beleaguered continent. Hitler’s erratic manoeuvres had already cost Germany a million soldiers’ lives in the western Europe campaigns alone this year, similarly the enemy soldiers’. D-Day, the hoped-for salvation to end Hitler’s madness in Europe, was long gone. The Allied leaders had not counted on the blinded vision and vindictive power-wielding of the Fuhrer to over-rule even the most hardened and experienced realism of his rotating generals.

A wall of fire met the trucks as they converged on the bombed-out building. The Allied bomb had met its target, made a direct hit on the manufacturing plant, its diesel oil, hidden in bunker-like storage now adding to the massive caustic fumes, choking all nearby.

“Stand back!” their crew leader shouted, gesticulating. “The Volkssturm crew is checking the tanks—they have to save them! The Fuhrer’s orders!” Peter pulled out the large sooty rag, tied it around his face, but his eyes, blinking away the flying embers, revealed the reality that his tightened stomach could not. Before them, the whole building was in flames. As he stepped back, waiting for his orders, he could see through a bombed-out chasm of rubble men in bright blue protective jackets feverishly working. Himmler’s newly-extended Volkssturm crew had somehow managed to reach the central yard of the burning building, and were desperately trying to contain a leaking tank, hosing, shovelling earth in an attempt to stop the holocaust.

“Now! We go in now! All of us! Together!” their leader yelled, almost hysterically, his voice belying his bravado. He waved them on, stepping aside to ensure the dozen men under his control moved as one. They had stepped into a building that was now open to the skies, but only the billowing black fumes and fiendish licks of flames were visible. Peter, his legs astride for balance and directing the powerful water hose with both hands, twisted his head as best he could to avoid the hot-red ember feathers that floated like misspent atoms about them and realised that no water force or volume could save this building and its contents.

As he repositioned himself, closer to the flames, the water hose shuddered. He looked back through the blackened haze, uncertain what was causing it, dismayed. The heat of a molten metal machine had burnt the hose, rendering it useless. He took a gasping breath, was about to call out to his leader, Hermann, a few metres ahead of him, and closest to him. Suddenly, his senses were even further sharpened by a strange sensation, which he had never previously experienced. The flames, the billowing smoke were there… but the usual whooshing, crackling noise of the fire had subsided.

He could not explain it, had no logical reason for his reactions, felt the imminent danger. He sensed he had only split moments to run to safety. But he could still make out the shape of Hermann, the only man within reach. Already the deathly quiet was changing, about to expel its heated fury upon them. He instinctively grabbed his crew leader’s arm. “Danger! Danger! We must leave now!” But the man could not hear him: he was transfixed, as if mesmerised, awaiting his fate in vacuous heat, then collapsed as Peter pulled at his arm again.

The backdraft had begun. The weird sensation of skin, clothes reacting to meteoric temperature in seconds was excruciating. Peter used every muscle in his wilting body to haul his leader over his shoulder as he followed the melting threads of the fire hose towards safety. The heat was insufferable. The smell of flesh burning pulsed through his suffocating nostrils. He could not see the end of the hose, or the waiting scorched fire truck. He stumbled over the rubble, desperately hoping his sense of direction had not failed him. Lightheaded, unable to breathe, he willed himself to the hoped-for exit. His logic told him that, had he retreated at that crucial moment of inner sense, he would have reached safety by now. But his heart told him a different story. He had witnessed enough of life and death, and of sacrifice, of both sides of the ideological divide. In those last moments, of searching through the black haze for the rubble-strewn opening, he knew that in life, as in death, we are all equal, and that any life saved, whatever the cost, must count for something in humanity.

At that fraction of a moment, he could not look to the blackened skies for an answer. Hundreds of kilometres from Wilhelmshaven’s burning, in the safety of his Ziegenberg bunker, the Fuhrer could. Yet no re-reading of Hitler’s astrologers’ charts would help his Reich: the clash of empires had already rained down from the universe, the imminent result obvious even before the auspicious planets had aligned for him. If there needed to be proof of that, he needed only to leave his Ziegenberg den to witness the visitation of the heavens onto his cities. Those below, in those infernos, could scream the horrors out to him, even above the shrill sirens and earth-quaking bombs. Peter knew, if he and all others like him ever survived this madman’s totalitarian nightmare, those walls of flames of destruction would be etched for ever.

Alone wolf’s howl, high-pitched like a misguided V1 flying bomb, pierced the temporary lull of night, sending a chill through the women’s dormitory. Evdokia, always only half-asleep these nights, shuddered. Comforted by the sleeping shapes of Nadia and Mykola crammed at her side on the rough timber bunk, she rose to check the pram at her bedside. The wailing wolf signalled again from its hidden vantage point across the forested gully.

She lifted the perena square she had hand-sewn in her last days of confinement, touched her baby Ola’s face and drew close to her. She was such a still infant, Evdokia was in constant fear for her baby’s survival, and even more so with each shrieking air raid. In the still and seeming calm of the night, she wanted to hold her close, as much for her own reassurance as to protect this new life, but resisted. There were too few hours, now, in any day in which children could rest unfrightened by the thunderous sound of bombers from the north-west and south-west of this small hidden camp that was too close to Wilhelmshaven.

The lone wolf cried its final siren-like warning, sending another shiver down Evdokia’s spine. “At least we know the ways of the wolf, its territory,” she thought, her mind drifting in half-sleep, “but who can understand all this other horror around us?” She trusted Peter’s observation that the bombers seemed to approach Wilhelmshaven from the west and north-west, from England and the North Sea or, more recently, from some safe south-western airstrip in France, now that Paris was liberated from Nazi control. This last camp, strategically located on the south-eastern periphery of Wilhelmshaven, and at the end of a small gully covered by a thick forest of firs, gave them protection from the carpet-bombing as the planes targeted the city’s vital port and industrial heart.