William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

When another air raid alert sounded, Nerozia turned off the stove, left the two eggs in the pan, and went to the battalion headquarters of his workers’ fighting detachment.

The air raid siren that Nerozia reacted to was just another in the series of false alarms that Stalingrad residents had endured during the day. By late afternoon, the center of the city had lapsed into apathy. Incredibly enough, despite the presence of Yeremenko’s nerve center in the Tsaritsa Gorge and the unusual military traffic on roads leading north to the factory area, most people in the downtown part of the city remained completely ignorant of the crisis.

Lt. Viktor Nekrassov had finally gotten up from his comfortable log heap and, with his friend, wandered over to the main library at the river’s edge. In the quiet and cozy reading room, he sprawled into a wicker chair and begn to thumb through a magazine containing short articles on Peru. At a long table, two young boys laughed out loud at a book of drawings about Baron Munchhausen. On the wall, a big clock struck each quarter hour. After a while, Nekrassov and his frend got up and left.

Loudspeakers were spewing yet another warning across squares, intersections, and side streets. The voice minced no words: “Attention. Attention. Citizens, we have an air raid! We have an air raid!”

As if to underscore that it was not just another drill, antiaircraft guns around Red Square banged loudly in frenzied cadence. Small black puffs marched across the clear blue sky; auto mobiles quickly screeched to a halt. Tramcars let off passengers who stood mute for a moment, shaded their eyes and looked into the sun to gauge the danger point.

Then they saw them, the lead groups of more than six hundred German planes, coming from beyond the Don. Like strings of gulls, flying in perfect V’s, the Stukas and Ju-88s droned over the sun-drenched city and tipped over into their dives. Their bombs fell into the crowded downtown residential area and, because of the long drought, flames spread like wildfire. In seconds, Stalingrad was ablaze.

Concussions blew down most of the houses on Gogol and Pushkin streets. Outside a cinema, a woman was decapitated as she ran along the sidewalk. The city waterworks building collapsed from a direct hit. The telephone exchange fell in on itself; all regular phone communications blinked out. The screams of trapped operators came up through a jumble of broken switchboards and control panels.

At Stalingrad Pravda, on the northern side of Red Square, bombs smashed the outer walls and brought survivors streaming out to seek safety in a nearby cellar. In the meantime, the loudspeakers on Red Square tonelessly asked people to shoulder arms and fight the invader.

On Medevditskaya Street, every house burned briskly. When firemen arrived, they saw a hysterical woman running down the middle of the road, while clutching a baby tightly to her breast. One of the men jumped out, grabbed her and pushed her down into a trench. A bomb went off, killing the man as he tried to get down beside her.

On Permskaya Street, Mrs. Konstantin Karmanova returned home after seeing her two older sons march off with their factory unit. As she and her sixteen-year-old son Genn turned into the street, they saw the whole block burned out except for their own home, a one-storey brick dwelling. Mrs. Karmanova ran inside to save what she could. She grabbed a bundle of papers left by her husband when he went off to war: some of them dated back to 1918 when he fought as a Bolshevik for Tsaritsyn. Rushing into the backyard, she dug a hole and buried the documents and some silver heirlooms. Around her, houses continued to burn.

In Dar Goya, railroad man Constantin Viskov woke from his drugged sleep to hear bombs crumping down near the train station. As he jumped out of bed, his wife handed him a package of food and kissed him good-bye. Viskov raced away through smoke and fire toward the terminal.

The first bombs fell as Pyotr Nerozia unlocked the safe at battalion headquarters. His superior, a woman named Denisova, rushed in and told him to send guns to the tractor factory. After issuing orders for their transfer, Nerozia reminded himself to go home and pick up some food.

Outside the headquarters, the city shook in agony. Smoke pouring through the windows choked him, and suddenly he was thirsty. Comrade Denisova grabbed at his arm and pointed to the main hospital, which collapsed while they watched. Running over to help the patients, they shepherded a group on to the nearby children’s clinic. But it caught fire immediately and the invalids inside were roasted to death.

Nerozia then went off to assemble a workers’ detachment at the Factory Krasny Zastava. It was a mass of flames. He moved on to the City Soviet at Red Square, but it, too, had flared and broken under a string of bombs. He ran ahead to the Metro, a cavernous underground air-raid shelter, now crammed with screaming and suffocating people. Nerozia balked at going into this hellhole and, remembering the food at home, circled back to his own street where his house was still standing.

Going to the bedroom he found his parrot squawking for attention as it hopped frantically about its cage. Taking the trembling bird in his hands, he held it at the window and released it into gray clouds of smoke. The parrot flew off and flitted nervously from tree to tree.

Nerozia watched his pet for a moment, then ran back to the kitchen and filled a bedsheet with farina, wheat grain, dried bread, and a bottle of vodka. When he finished he gazed wistfully at the stove where his two fried eggs lay under a coverlet of fallen plaster. With a final shrug, he hoisted the sack of rations onto his shoulder and left his house for the last time.

At 7:00 P.M .,during the height of the bombing, the City Soviet leaders managed to function from an improvised network of cellars. They sent out orders to continue publication of Pravda and Mikhail Vodolagin, a thick-lipped, bespectacled member of the Central Committee, hurried over to Pravda headquarters on Red Square and found the entire building a shambles. A few hundred yards away, he stumbled on the newspaper staff, cowering in a basement and too stunned to work.

Vodolagin commandeered a car and went north toward the tractor factory, which he knew had a printing press. The trip normally took twenty minutes, but with German planes overhead and bodies and debris clogging the main road, the passage was torturous. To Vodolagin’s right, liquid fire from ruptured oil tanks passed down the slope and spilled into the Volga. To his left, the lower slopes of Mamaev Hill were covered with the bodies of picnickers.

After two harrowing hours, Vodolagin arrived at the nearly deserted tractor works. He found his printing press, collared a militiaman who said he knew how to set type and, as plaster fell from the ceiling, he started to bring out a special issue of Pravda.

Close to 9:00 P.M .,with the Stukas and Ju-88s still overhead, Mrs. Vlasa Kliagina hurried back from digging ditches in Yelshanka. She was anxious to find her daughter, Nadia, who had gone home early to be with little Vovo. At a roadblock, Mrs. Kliagina fretted impatiently until a soldier finally waved her through into her own neighborhood, crackling from a hundred fires. She ran along Sovietskaya Street and turned into Karl Marx Gardens where thousands of people huddled around benches. Homeless, crying, many had already lost relatives. Mrs. Kliagina searched for her children, but did not find them in the crowd.

When she came to her own home, her heart sank. It was a smoldering ruin. She called out several times but no one answered and she fled down Komsomolskaya Street. A friend saw her there, sobbing incoherently, and shouted that Nadia was safe in a nearby cellar. At that moment, her daughter ran out and told her mother that Vovo had vanished. Mrs. Kliagina refused to believe her and broke away, screaming, “Vovo! Vovo! Where are you?” She never saw him again.