William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

In combat, Neist’s attitude changed. He fought hard all the way across the steppe, because it had become a matter of survival, and he won the Infantry Assault Badge. Promoted to radio specialist with Combat Group Engelke, he entered the maelstrom between the Barrikady and the tractor factory and ran through a bombed-out workers’ district. With ten men he plunged into the ground floor of what had once been an industrial shop. While setting up his wireless, word filtered in that some Russians had been trapped on an upper floor. The Germans threw satchel charges up the stairs but the Russians hurled them back down, wounding several Germans. Neist and his comrades were so exhausted they decided to leave the enemy alone for awhile. That night they slept two at a time, while the rest stood watch at windows, doors, and at the staircase. Upstairs, the Russians made no sound.

In the morning the battle began again. Two Russians crept down the stairs and fired bursts from tommy guns, then retreated. The Germans tried to figure out a way to retaliate; some thought of using a freight elevator in the corner, but ruled that out as too noisy. All were afraid to go up the stairway.

When Neist tried to radio headquarters, the iron girders in the room interfered with reception. Finally he managed to get through on a walkie-talkie: “This is Sea Rose,” he kept repeating, and the command post broke in to acknowledge. Neist told them, “We are in the third white house… and we need reinforcements urgently.”

The squad waited twenty-four hours before the new men came. In the meantime the Russians upstairs had been quiet. A runner brought hot coffee to Neist and his men and promised more food later in the day. From across the street, German snipers with telescopic sights tracked the Russians through the windows. Single shots rang out and Neist heard screams from above, then silence. After a few hours, the Germans cautiously moved up the dark stairwell. Outside the door, they paused. Their breath came heavily as they counted slowly and then smashed the door in. Seven Russians lay on the floor, shot to death.

Neist went down to the cellar and fell asleep. Around him the dreadful noise of battle continued without letup.

On October 24, Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser of the 100th Division celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. While he sat in a chair, a Russian tank fired a shell that went between his legs and on into the next room. Unhurt, Kreiser stayed low the rest of the day.

The following morning, he went into action against the Barrikady where the main line of resistance was along a railway embankment. Kreiser directed his platoons into their jumping-off sections and waited for the Stukas to prepare the way. When they arrived, their bombs fell only two hundred yards ahead and Kreiser had to fire recognition flares several times to keep the Stukas from attacking his people. Despite the pinpoint bombing, the attack failed.

After dinner, Kreiser received orders for another attack and, at 10:00 A.M. on October 26, thousands of German guns laid down a drumfire on the Russian positions. Kreiser had never heard or seen anything like it. The shelling lasted for half an hour. When it stopped, silence prevailed and in the stillness German soldiers jumped up and ran across the railroad tracks and onto the cliff. Kreiser saw tracer bullets arching up from the shore and knew his men had reached their final destination, the Volga itself. The lieutenant felt the war was over, the Russians finished at last. He miscalculated badly.

Stunned by the bombardment, Soviet soldiers had burrowed into cellars and holes and waited for the enemy to pass by. The Germans, standing on the Volga cliff, now had Russians behind them.

Kreiser moved forward with several platoons to help his men trapped on the riverbank. He came to a battered schoolhouse, put his men around it on three sides and called for artillery. But the antipersonnel shells merely bounced off the thick walls. Highexplosive rounds were not available.

Assuming that headquarters would send more troops past him to the Volga, Kreiser dove into a potato cellar to set up a command post. No support came. Night fell and the Germans trapped at the Volga stood their ground, firing at shadowy figures closing in on them. Only a few lived to crawl back to their own lines.

The front froze, immobile; neither side had the strength left to win.

Quartermaster Karl Binder came to the Barrikady that day, too. He had just returned from the grain silo, where he had taken out some of the precious wheat for which so many had died in September. On his way back, he noticed how much of the city had been destroyed. Almost all the smaller houses and mud cottages had been smashed. He saw Russian civilians dragging bodies into shell holes and covering them over, and Binder sensed it was going to get worse.

At the Barrikady he peered from an observation post and saw the chaos of iron rods and semifinished gun barrels lying about the railroad yards. While he stared in fascination, a German combat group advanced across open ground to take one of the factory halls. They crawled up to the doors and the windows, threw hand grenades and ran inside. Binder waited to see what would happen, but no one came out.

When he got back to his own sector he met Lieutenant Colonel Codre, who asked him his opinion of the situation at Stalingrad.

“The same as yours,” Binder grunted. He now knew, as Codre had for weeks, that what was going on in Stalingrad was totally futile.

Hersch Gurewicz would have agreed. Finally released from the 1 hospital after his awful experience on the road to Sety in August, he had walked into Stalingrad on a footbridge and gone directly into a trench south of the tractor plant. Almost immediately the lieutenant was ordered to mount an attack, and as he ran across an open stretch of ground, a German loomed in front of him with a bayonetted rifle. Gurewicz shoved his pistol in the man’s face and fired. Mortally wounded, the German fell forward and imbedded the bayonet in the palm of Gurewicz’s left hand.

After what seemed a long time, the German slid to the ground and died. Gurewicz pulled his hand off the bayonet and walked off to a field hospital for more surgery. While he recuperated there, he met a nurse, fell in love and slept with her frequently. Returned to his own company, Gurewicz met her whenever she made rounds on the battlefield. Their fragile relationship made life bearable for both of them.

He had not seen her for several days when he received an urgent summons to go to an aid station at the edge of the Volga. The nurse had been hurt and was asking for him. Gurewicz scrambled out of his trench and ran to the river.

She had stepped on a land mine and lay before him, swathed in bandages. He stared at the cot, wanting to scream but unable to make a sound. She was just a torso. Both of her arms and legs had been blown away and she was dying. For long minutes Gurewicz looked at the mummified thing he had embraced and loved. Then he turned and stumbled back to his hole near the tractor factory.

Unlike Hersch Gurewicz, some Russians in Stalingrad never paused to reflect on the daily slaughter. They regarded the appalling butchery as a punitive crusade, a purgative.

Commando captain Ignacy Changar, a curly-haired, longnosed twenty-one-year-old, had come into the city to do the job he knew best, killing Germans. Changar was an expert guerrilla fighter and preferred to work with a knife—a technique he had perfected in the forests of the Ukraine, where he spent months during the first year of the war. There he had seen the Germans at their worst and the experience affected him deeply.

Once, at the edge of a village, he watched from a tree line while two German soldiers accosted a woman, pushed her and demanded she give up her cow. When she said that other Germans had already taken it, they shoved her again. She continued to protest and the soldiers picked up her baby, grabbed a leg each and ripped the child apart.