William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

In the suburb of Dar Goya, the advance caught hundreds of these noncombatants in their homes. Among them was fifteenyear- old Sacha Fillipov and his family. While his parents and tenyear- old brother stayed inside their house, the diminutive, frail

Sacha went out to fraternize with the enemy. A master cobbler from his training at trade school, Sacha introduced himself to German officers occupying a nearby building and offered his services to them. Amused at the thought of someone so young .and delicate having such a skill, the Germans promised him work soling army boots.

Sacha returned home that night with the news that he was going to work for the enemy. He did not tell his parents that he had also contacted Russian intelligence officers and arranged to spy on German headquarters in Dar Goya.

Mrs. Katrina Karmanova was also caught by the swift German advance. She had lingered at home for days, carrying valuables to the backyard for burial. Silver, jewelry, family heirlooms, all were dumped into a hole and covered over. Now, with her son Genn, she listened to the sounds of machine guns at the end of the block and knew she had waited too long to leave.

An artillery shell exploded on the roof, setting the house on fire; she and Genn ran next door and hid behind a sofa in the parlor. Grenades popped outside and then a fiery string of tracer bullets flew through the room. Genn suddenly cried out, “Don’t be afraid, Mother. Please pull the bullet out of my arm!”

With trembling fingers, Mrs. Karmanova picked at the metal and finally removed it. Ripping off a piece of her slip, she fashioned a crude bandage and then shouted: “Let’s get out or we’ll be killed.”

They ran into the street and fell into a zig-zag trench beside Russian soldiers and civilians. A little girl lay huddled up, her body punctured with shrapnel. She screamed and screamed: “Find my mama before I die.”

Mrs. Karmanova could not bear it. As she crouched under a hail of bullets and tried to block out the sounds of the dying child, she saw a family dart from shelter and run toward the river. At the same moment, a German sniper tracked them and quickly killed the son, the father, and then the mother. The sole survivor, a little girl, paused in bewilderment over her mother’s body. In the trench, Russian soldiers cupped their hands and hollered, “Run! Run!” Others took up the cry. The girl hesitated, then bolted from the corpses into the darkness. The German sniper did not fire again.

Throughout the night, Mrs. Karmanova and Genn stayed in the trench. A few yards away, rescuers frantically tried to save several soldiers buried alive by a shellburst. At dawn on September 16, during a temporary lull, she and Genn jumped up and ran to the Volga. The Germans let them go.

In their wooden cottage, eleven-year-old Natasha Kornilov and her mother were not as lucky. Wounded days previously by bomb fragments, they lay helpless while German soldiers broke down the front door and stood over them with machine guns. The woman thought they were about to be raped, but the Germans ignored them and ransacked the house for pots, pans, food, even bedding.

When they left, Mrs. Kornilov scrawled the word “Typhus” on a board and had Natasha put it up on the door. The ruse backfired. Within hours, a German medical team saw the sign and set fire to the supposedly plague-ridden home. As flames danced around her, Natasha dragged her crippled mother into the backyard and into a concrete storage shack. There, under a thin blanket on the cold floor, the Kornilovs listened to the gunfire from the direction of Red Square and wondered whether anyone would come to their rescue.

On September 17, with Germans pressing in from north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, Vassili Chuikov had to seek a new home. All during the day, while bullets ricocheted off rocks and shells exploded outside the Pushkinskaya Street entrance to the bunker, the headquarters staff of the Sixty-second Army scrambled away toward the main ferry. At midnight, Chuikov and his personal assistants went across the Volga to Krasnaya Sloboda, where they took hot baths and relaxed with food and drink.

As the hours passed, Chuikov failed to notice the sunrise. Suddenly panic-stricken, he and his men raced out to catch the ferry back to Stalingrad. The last boat was leaving the dock and Chuikov sprinted ahead. With a running leap, he fell on board and identified himself to the startled helmsman, who returned to pick up the rest of the army staff at the dock.

Several hours later, Chuikov set up a new headquarters five miles north of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Just a trench with some boards over it, it was in an open space between the Red October and Barrikady plants. On a slope above their bunker was an oil tank farm and a concrete oil reservoir. According to everyone familiar with the area, the tanks were empty.

At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, forty miles west of Stalingrad, German newspapermen badgered Gen. Friedrich von Paulus for permission to flash word home that the city had been taken.

Smiling cheerfully, Paulus parried their queries, saying, “Any time now, any time.”

But in his stifling quarters, the general played his gramophone, smoked endless quantities of cigarettes, and tried to calm his stomach, which was churning with dysentery; he had lost most of his hopes for a quick victory.

In Germany, some newspapers printed a special edition with a banner headline: “ Stalingrad Gefallen! ” The papers were bundled for distribution, then held at the last moment while Goebbels’s ministry sought confirmation from Paulus. He could not give it.

In Stalingrad’s main railroad station, west of Red Square, Lt. Anton Dragan’s company was enduring ferocious bombing that blew down the walls and buckled the iron girders. When the Germans surrounded him on three sides, Dragan took his men across the street to another building, the nail factory, from which he commanded a good view of the intersection leading east to the Volga.

Barely settled in a workshop, Dragan took stock of his supplies and realized he had no food, little ammunition, and no water. In a frantic search for something to quench their thirst, the Russians fired machine guns into drain pipes to see if any liquid remained. There was not a drop.

From the Tsaritsa Gorge to the slopes of Mamaev Hill, the German 295th and 71st divisions were suffering from Chuikov’s renewed strength. The 71st’s Division’s Intelligence Chief, Col. Gunter von Below, whose brother Nikolaus served Hitler as air attaché, walked through the devastation near the main railroad station and found it difficult to comprehend the enormity of the destruction. As he carefully sidestepped debris, a master sergeant came up to him and pleaded, “What am I going to do? I have only nine men left.” Colonel Below sat beside the distraught man on a curb and they discussed the toll the Russians had taken of the sergeant’s company in past hours. After a while, the sergeant calmed down and went back to his nine soldiers. Günter von Below remained, staring at the ruins. Thoroughly shaken, he wondered whether the Russians would collapse before his own division ran out of men.

Günter von Below’s main antagonists, the soldiers of the 13th Guards Division, lay in heaps from Mamaev to Red Square. Nearly six thousand guardsmen had been killed, but they had bought the Russians several days of precious time.

One of the fortresses which had slowed the German timetable was the huge grain elevator, whose cement silos rose high on the plain just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. For nearly a week, since September 14, a group of less than fifty able-bodied Russians had holed up in the corrugated metal side tower, and defied the guns of three Nazi divisions. Reinforced on the night of September 17 by Lt. Andrei Khoyzyanov and a platoon of marines dressed in striped shirts and navy hats, the garrison fought with renewed spirit, the men joking with each other while shells whistled through their hideout.