A Writer at War (31 page)

Soviet troops prepare for Operation Uranus round Stalingrad, November 1942.

A soldier who had been a prisoner of war during the last war looks at a diving plane: ‘Must be my lad bombing,’ he says.

They run into the attack protecting their faces with sapper spades. In the attack, a rifle is better than a sub-machine gun.

The Romanian troops, dressed in brown uniforms and Balkan sheepskin caps, lacked modern equipment, leadership and anti-tank guns. They soon threw down their rifles and shouted ‘
Antonescu kaputt!
’,
¹
but surrender did not save them. Thousands of prisoners were shot out of hand, and the frozen roads were littered with the detritus of a defeated army.

Troops are marching. Their spirits are higher now. ‘Ah, it would be great to get to Kiev.’ Another man: ‘Ah, I’d like to get to Berlin!’

An image: a strongpoint destroyed by a tank. There is a flattened Romanian. A tank has driven over him. His face has become a bas-relief. Next to him, there are two crushed Germans. There is one of our soldiers, too, lying in the trench half buried.

Empty cans, grenades, hand grenades, a blanket stained with blood, pages from German magazines. Our soldiers are sitting among the corpses, cooking in a cauldron slices cut from a dead horse, and stretching their frozen hands towards the fire.

A killed Romanian and a killed Russian were lying next to each other on the battlefield. The Romanian had a sheet of paper and a child’s drawing of a hare and a boat. Our soldier had a letter: ‘Good afternoon, or maybe good evening. Hello, Daddy . . .’ And the end of the letter: ‘Come and visit us, because when you aren’t here, I come back home as if to a rented flat. I miss you very much. Come and visit, I wish I could see you, if only for an hour. I am
writing this and tears are pouring. That was your daughter Nina writing.’

During the rapid advance, when there was no clear front line, Grossman found himself in unexpected danger. He was accompanied by Aleksei Kapler, the film director who became the first love of Svetlana Stalin. For daring to fondle the tyrant’s young daughter, Kapler was beaten up by Beria’s men and sent to the Gulag for ten years in 1943. After Stalin’s death, Kapler recounted his adventure with Grossman during this advance. ‘
We wandered into an empty house
and decided to stay there for the night. Then some soldiers appeared. We saw their shadows on the ceiling and realised that they were not our soldiers, because their helmets were different from ours. They turned out to be Romanians. Fortunately they did not spot us and went away.’

Red Army soldiers were furious to find what their Romanian prisoners had looted from the homes of the local population. ‘
Old women’s kerchiefs and earrings
, linen and skirts, babies’ napkins and brightly coloured girls’ blouses. One soldier had twenty-two pairs of woollen stockings in his possession.’

The greatest joy was that of liberated civilians.

‘How did we find out that our troops had arrived? We were listening by the window: “Yegor, crank the engine!” [we heard] “Ours!” we cried.’

They soon expressed their loathing of the Romanians who, following the German example, had whipped or beaten civilians until they revealed where they had hidden their food.

Romanians. An old man called them ‘turkeys’. Real Gypsies. They kept saying all the time: ‘War is bad, we should go home.’ [Yet] they whipped the old man four times. They forced him to go and harvest cereals, and took the grain. They had fruit drops and canned food to eat.

Some civilians had also suffered from Soviet military action.

A babushka told us how
one of our own pilots wounded her: ‘He dropped a bomb, the son of a bitch, fuck him,’ she says angrily, then looks at the commander who is changing his boots and corrects herself: ‘Son of a bitch, sonny. There are no cows, no cows to drive to the pasture, no cows to let back in. There is no life [left] for us.’

Grossman’s notes contributed to his article ‘On the Roads of the Advance’ about the offensive south of Stalingrad.

Ice is moving down the Volga
. Ice floes are rustling, crumbling, crushing against one another. The river is almost wholly covered with ice. Only from time to time can one see patches of water in this wide, white ribbon floating between the dark snowless banks. The white ice of the Volga is carrying tree trunks, wood. A big raven is sitting sulkily on an ice floe. A dead Red Fleet soldier in a striped shirt floats past. Men from a freight steamer take him from the ice. It is difficult to tear the dead man out of the ice. He is rooted in it. It is as if he doesn’t want to leave the Volga where he has fought and died.

Barges full of captured Romanians pass us. They are standing in their skimpy greatcoats, in tall white hats, stamping their feet, rubbing their frozen hands. ‘They’ve seen the Volga now,’ say the sailors.

A group of two hundred prisoners usually marches under the guard of two or three soldiers. The Romanians march in an organised manner, some groups are even lined up and keeping in step, and this makes those who see them laugh . . . Prisoners move on and on in crowds, their mess tins and flasks rattling, belted with pieces of rope, or wire, blankets of different colours upon their shoulders. And women say, laughing: ‘Oh, these Romanians are travelling just like Gypsies.’

Romanian corpses are lying along the roads; abandoned cannons camouflaged with dry steppe grass point eastwards. Horses wander about in
balkas
dragging behind them broken traces, vehicles hit by shellfire are giving off a blue-grey smoke. On the roads lie helmets decorated with the Romanian royal coat of arms, thousands of cartridges, grenades, rifles. A Romanian strongpoint. A mountain of empty, sooty cartridges by the machine-gun nest. White sheets of writing paper are lying in the communication trench. The brown winter steppe has turned brick red from blood. There are rifles with butts splintered by Russian bullets. And crowds of prisoners are moving towards us all the time.

They are searched before being sent off to the rear. Heaps of peasant women’s belongings that were found in rucksacks and pockets of Romanians look comic and pitiful. There are old women’s shawls, women’s earrings, underwear, skirts, swaddling clothes. The further
on we move, the more abandoned vehicles and cannons we see. There are trucks, armoured vehicles and staff cars.

We enter Abganerovo. An old peasant woman told us about the three months of the occupation. ‘It became empty here. Not a single hen to cackle, not a single cock to sing. There isn’t a single cow left to let out in the morning and let in in the evening. Romanians have pinched everything. They whipped almost all our old men: one didn’t report for work, another one failed to hand in his grain. The starosta in Plodovitaya was whipped four times. They took away my son, a cripple, and with him a girl and a nine-year-old boy. We’ve been crying for four days, waiting for them to return.’

Abganerovo station is full of captured materiel. The Germans had already managed to alter the railway track.
²
There are French and Belgian freight carriages here, and Polish ones, too. There are whole trains loaded with flour, corn, mines, shells, fat in big square tins, freight cars full of ersatz
valenki
with thick wooden soles, sheepskin hats, equipment, searchlights. Our medical
teplushkas
look pitiful and destitute with their hastily made bunk beds covered with dirty rags. Soldiers grunt as they carry paper sacks of flour out of the freight cars and load them on to trucks. A [Nazi] eagle is printed boldly on each sack.

The faces of Red Army soldiers have become bronze red from the severe winter winds. It isn’t easy to fight in this kind of weather, to spend long winter nights out in the steppe under this icy wind that penetrates everywhere, yet the men are marching cheerfully. This is the Stalingrad advance. The army is in exceptionally high spirits.

By 26 November, over a quarter of a million men from Paulus’s Sixth Army, the largest formation in the Wehrmacht, had been surrounded between the Volga and the Don. The Red Army, underestimating the size of the force it had surrounded, immediately launched a series of attacks to smash the perimeter, but the Germans, believing that Hitler would never abandon them, resisted fiercely.

A happy, bright day. Preliminary bombardment.
Katyushas
. Ivan the Terrible. Roaring. Smoke. And failure. The Germans have dug themselves in, we couldn’t hunt them out.

Grossman reads a newspaper, perhaps checking one of his own articles in
Krasnaya Zvezda.
The camel in the background may be the famous Kuznechik who accompanied the 308th Rifle Division all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin.

The weather became increasingly harsh, with snow and hard frosts, which reduced the chances of the Sixth Army being able to fight its way out. The Red Army was far more used to such conditions.

At the front line out in the steppe, winter. A hole covered with a groundsheet. A stove made from a helmet. A chimney from a brass shell. The fuel [consists of] tall weeds. On the march, one soldier carries an armful of tall weeds, another one a handful of chips, the third one a shell, the fourth one the stove.

At the beginning of December, Grossman returned to the east bank opposite Stalingrad. He wrote to the editor of
Krasnaya Zvezda
.

Comrade Ortenberg, I am planning to leave for the city tomorrow. I had wanted to start a big essay,
³
but I realise that I have to postpone
writing and spend some time collecting material in the city. As the crossing is complicated now,
⁴
my trip is going to take at least a week. This is why you should not be angry if there is a delay in sending you my work. In the city, my plan is to have conversations with Chuikov and divisional commanders and to visit the front units. Also I would like to inform you that I will need to visit Moscow, approximately in January. I would be very grateful, if you could summon me back. In fact, I feel somewhat overloaded with impressions and overexhausted after the three months of tension in Stalingrad. If something unfortunate and unexpected happens during my visit to the city, could you please help my family? Vasily Grossman.

Grossman managed to get across and went to 62nd Army headquarters. Life was much quieter, since the now besieged Germans were short of ammunition as well as food. Their survival depended entirely on resupply by air to Pitomnik airfield, in the centre of the encircled area. Goering had told Hitler it was perfectly possible to resupply the Sixth Army by air, even though his own Luftwaffe generals had warned him that such a huge task was impossible. The soldiers of the Sixth Army were encouraged to hold out with vain stories of an SS panzer army coming to their aid. General Chuikov told Grossman: ‘There was a rumour among Germans that Hitler himself had visited Pitomnik and that he had said: “Stand firm! I am leading an army to rescue you.” (He was dressed as a corporal).’

This battlefield legend bore a resemblance to the equally untrue story on the Soviet side during the desperate September days that Stalin himself had been seen in Stalingrad.

Chuikov also outlined the situation his own 62nd Army faced due to virtual impossibility of resupply across the half-frozen Volga. They had to rely almost entirely on radio communications with the east bank, because all the land-lines had been snapped by the ice. Their one great advantage, however, remained the artillery positions concentrated on the west bank. Their resupply of ammunition was not affected.

Grossman described Chuikov’s bunker in an article entitled ‘Military Council’.

When one enters a bunker
and the underground quarters of officers and soldiers, one feels again an ardent wish to retain for ever
in one’s memory the remarkable traits of this unique life. The lamps and the chimney made from artillery shell cases, cups made of brass shell bases standing on tables near crystal glasses. Next to an anti-tank grenade sits a china ashtray on which is written ‘Wife, don’t make your husband angry’. There is a huge dull electric bulb in the commander-in-chief’s bunker, and a smile from Chuikov, who says: ‘Yes, and a chandelier. Aren’t we living in a city?’ And this volume of Shakespeare in General Gurov’s underground office . . . All these samovars and gramophones, blue family sugar bowls and round mirrors in wooden frames on the clay walls of basements. All this everyday life, with peaceful household things rescued from the burning buildings.

Grossman, although fiercely satisfied by the inevitable victory over the Sixth Army, became increasingly depressed by the way his work was rewritten in the editorial offices of
Krasnaya Zvezda
and wrote about it to his wife on 5 December.

I work a lot
. You can probably see that from the newspaper. If you saw how they cut and distort [my writing], and not only that, they also add new phrases to my poor pieces, you would probably be more upset than happy about the fact that my writing sees the light at all. The editorial office has adopted a rule of cutting off the end of any essay, replacing dots with commas, crossing out the descriptions that I particularly like, changing titles and inserting phrases like: ‘This faith and love virtually made miracles.’ This editing is done in haste by professional editors, and sometimes I have to read a phrase several times to understand its meaning. All this upsets me very much because I am working in very difficult conditions . . .