Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘Did they all die?’

‘They were still a powerful force. But on 10 January Soviet artillery and planes began to bombard them incessantly day and night, while Soviet tanks advanced. The surrounded German soldiers, their supplies and munitions cut off and deprived of food and cover, surrendered en masse.’

‘If they had agreed to capitulate, would they have had better conditions and fewer losses?’

‘Between 27 and 29 January 1943 the Russians captured more than fifteen thousand German and allied soldiers. On 31 January Von Paulus was made a prisoner.’

‘Did they kill him?’

‘They asked him why he hadn’t escaped by air as he could have done and he answered that he had to remain with his men, and this earned him the esteem of the Russians who treated him with a certain respect.’

‘A gentleman of the old school.’

‘Probably, judging by his aristocratic name. Even so, the Battle of Stalingrad remains one of the biggest and most ferocious battles in human history. The Axis lost a million and a half men, three thousand five hundred tanks, twelve thousand cannon and mortars and three thousand planes. Who knows how the Normandy landings of June 1944 would have gone if the greater part of the German forces had not been encircled in Russia.’

‘And the Italian ARMIR?’

‘It suffered disastrously from the lunatic ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini. Yet the boys of the ARMIR fought with great courage. For a whole month the Vicenza division managed to make headway against the Russians who were ten times more numerous and hidden in frozen holes in the steppes. And the Julia division held its position north of Stalingrad. Even if on 26 January ’43 they were finally defeated and dispersed.’

‘You promised to read me an Italian letter.’

‘Of course, here’s one: “Dear Amelia. It’s thirty degrees below today. Many of our men have frozen feet. I keep mine moving, the way Grandpa taught me. It’s a great advantage to have been born and lived in the Friuli Mountains. Grandpa used to say: Never give way to the cold; fight back, jump, shout, leap about, but if you don’t keep moving you’re fucked. The trouble is our weapons freeze. They jam like a solid block of ice. How can we fire them? Yesterday we fought a battle for a place called Nikolayevka. We fought from twelve to three. I don’t know how many died. You couldn’t even walk there were so many bodies on the ground. I never stopped moving and this saved me from freezing to death. It was terrible seeing Giovanni crying because he could not walk any more and his tears turning to ice on his face. I hope I’ll get home again, love Giacomo …”’

‘Did Giacomo get home?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t say here. But it’s been calculated that among the Italians there were twenty-six thousand dead, forty-three thousand wounded and nearly seventy thousand missing.’

‘How many did come home?’

‘After the war the Soviet Union repatriated ten thousand Italian prisoners of war. Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand had left Italy and what with those repatriated, wounded and frostbitten, twenty-nine thousand six hundred and ninety came back. Wholesale butchery. It has been said the only corps that can regard itself as having been undefeated on Russian soil is the Italian Alpine Army Corps. No one knows who said it. But they were certainly heroic.’

‘Which contributed more to the defeat of Hitler, Stalingrad or the Normandy landings?’

‘The one couldn’t have happened without the other. Remember Hitler had invaded the whole of Europe and had decided beforehand to occupy Britain, as well as Russia of course. Europe was at his feet and this made him ever more sure of himself and increasingly bold and irrational. I don’t know if he understood when he lost the Battle of Stalingrad, where he had been crushed as if by a boa constrictor, that he was on his way to total defeat. I’ve no idea. But he had been totally convinced he could conquer everything and everybody.’

‘But these letters from the front; did they reach their destinations? And who read them?’

‘Someone collected them to make a memorial volume.’

At that moment the Old Testament prophet, the elderly librarian with enormous feet and a halo of white hair, came up to them smiling.

‘I am the soldier called Horvath,’ he says in a small voice. He seems moved. ‘It was I who collected these letters from fellow soldiers to preserve the memory of the horror.’

The man with the gazelles looks at him with surprise and curiosity.

‘Were you actually at Stalingrad? Are you Hungarian?’

‘My father was from Pécs and my mother from Klagenfurt. I was born in Budapest.’

‘How old were you when you were called up?’

‘Forty-five. But by then everyone was involved. In my heart I was against the Hitler regime, but I couldn’t admit it. I was sent with many other reservists who like me had served in the First World War, to the Russian front. They needed fresh forces there. In those days I was still tough, not like now when a puff of wind could blow me away. I was young and strong and had a full head of dark hair. My hair went white in ’43 after forty-eight consecutive hours in the midst of a monstrous battle with shells whistling from all sides. People died without a cry or a word, our eyes blinded by fog. The sky rained down bombs. It was 28 January. I was oiling my rifle when the storm began; they fired at us from all sides. We no longer had any rearguard and even if we’d wanted to we couldn’t have retreated. All we could do was hold up our hands and surrender, hoping our enemies wouldn’t kill us. I grabbed a white rag and went up to a Soviet tank. I’d been wounded by a grenade which didn’t quite miss me but stripped off my clothes, singeing my hair and neck. A soldier stuck his head out of the tank and roared with laughter. He said something to his friends in a dialect I didn’t understand and pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was so funny, being almost naked, though I still had my socks round my ankles; I was singed black all over including my head and neck, with my few remaining hairs standing on end. The man must have felt sorry for me because he said ‘Get in,’ so I did. Among other things I told him I was a Hungarian who had been forced to fight with the Germans. I spoke to him in Russian but he just went on and on laughing. That’s how I survived. Then they put me in a camp for Axis prisoners. It wasn’t too bad. They gave us clothes and food. Shirts from dead men, but so what, better than nothing. They treated our wounds. And fed us once a day, potatoes boiled in broth. And powdered fish dissolved in the water that made a grey scum, but it was hot and we liked it. Like manna from heaven to us.’

‘And when did you get home?’

‘Three years later, at the end of the war. My hair had gone completely white and I was full of parasites. I had to delouse myself very thoroughly. But like all the poor I had parasites in my stomach: a bulging belly full of voracious worms that devoured everything I ate. But by now I was less exhausted and skeletal and was even beginning to put on weight. When I got back to my village they said, ‘Hi, Horvath, welcome home! We thought you were dead.’ And when they saw I was putting on weight they said, ‘We can see it’s not quite true that you starved at Stalingrad!’ No one realised that three years had passed since those horrors. But that didn’t matter to me. That was for the others. And that’s how I got the idea of collecting letters sent home by soldiers who didn’t survive. I went to see people and gathered together a large number of letters. I wrote letters to people myself and went to a lot of trouble. Then the library here helped me to publish the book. I’m glad it interested you. I’ll give you a copy. I’ve got heaps of them. Not many people want them. It seems the voices of the dead are of no interest. I deliberately put it up there in full view in the hope people might look at it. But no one touches it. You’re the first to have opened it and read it. For this I’d like to offer you a coffee. Come with me to my den.’