A Writer at War (43 page)

Few believed they’d manage to hold the line. More often, they speak about the gigantic ‘Belorussian’ mousetrap.

[Before the Soviet attack] Feldmarschall Bush went round the front units to ‘inspire cheerfulness and perseverance’. Germans have already withdrawn some units from the front and are pulling them far inland, probably in connection with the invasion by the Allies.

For the advance against Minsk to the north-west, Grossman rejoined General Batov’s 65th Army. In just over a week, the defence lines of Army Group Centre had been destroyed. The Germans had lost 200,000 men and 900 tanks, but Soviet casualties had also been terrifying in many sectors. Even Red Army generals hardened to the slaughter were shaken. Yet the battle had only just begun. Hitler and the German high command had still not realised that the Soviet strategy was aimed at two sets of pincers, an inner encirclement of Minsk, and an outer encirclement to trap the whole of Army Group Centre.

On 3 July, Soviet tanks entered the suburbs of Minsk. Another 100,000 German soldiers were trapped, and nearly half of them were killed. Grossman’s notes at this stage are random, including past atrocities, revenge and descriptions. Italian soldiers, who had already suffered in Russia for the fascist cause which most of them did not believe in, then found themselves after the armistice as prisoners and slave labourers of the
Germans. Grossman even heard of some being killed by former Red Army soldiers serving the Wehrmacht in some capacity.

Italians executed by Vlasov men
.
⁹
Mass killing of [Red Army] prisoners of war on the 12/13 February 1944. In the morning the whole length of Sovyetskaya Street was piled with many thousands of bodies.

Fire in the districts close to the river: hundreds of thousands of people who have lost all their possessions in the fire are sitting on their bundles. Armchairs, paintings, deer’s heads with horns; girls holding kittens.

[German] Prisoners are walking on their own; they are sulky. One of them straightens his uniform whenever he sees a vehicle, and salutes it.

Another version of this description suggests that the German prisoner in question was probably suffering from battle-shock.

Revenge killings were unsurprising after the appalling anti-partisan war waged in Belorussia by the Germans and their auxiliaries, whom the Red Army often referred to generically as
Vlasovtsy
.

A partisan, a small man
, has killed two Germans with a stake. He had pleaded with the guards of the column to give him these Germans. He had convinced himself that they were the ones who had killed his daughter Olya and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, and smashed their skulls, and while he was beating them, he was crying and shouting: ‘Here you are – for Olya! Here you are – for Kolya!’ When they were dead, he propped the bodies up against a tree stump and continued to beat them.

Vlasovtsy
are being killed. People are killing their compatriots, a man from Orel kills a man from the Orel region, an Uzbek kills an Uzbek.

There are already next to no German airfields left on our territory. Our fighters are already flying over their land. It won’t be long now before their country is ablaze.

Harmonicas. Everyone has got hold of a German harmonica. It is a soldier’s musical instrument, because it is the only one which can be played, even quite easily, when sitting on a jolting cart or a vehicle.

There are fourteen nationalities in the division.
¹⁰

It’s so hard to find any paper to make cigarettes that there are cases of men using their wound certificates and other documents.

Signaller Skvortsov is small
, plain. He has three fiancées. One of them has sent him a photo, but this wasn’t her photo. The second one has made a suit for him, size 48, while he wears 46. He shouts to the girls from the political department: ‘We’re all in the reserve here. Why are you chasing stars and shoulder-boards? When the war ends, you’ll be left with nothing.’

A gun-layer, Guards Sergeant Konkov, was the only one to survive. He forced forty captured Germans, threatening them with his submachine gun, to manhandle the howitzer, and fired point-blank.

Grossman had great admiration for General Batov, the commander of the 65th Army, who had been ordered by Rokossovsky to head west for Warsaw.

Batov is not prone to Russian optimism. Routine is harmful even in victorious actions.

And like the best commanders at Stalingrad, such as Gurtiev who had made his men dig trenches, then ‘steamed’ them with tanks, Batov believed in realistic exercises.

Training before an offensive. ‘If there’s a swamp with water up to one’s chest, one must train in the swamp. If there’s a gully – then lie down in the gully.’

Conversation with the chief of staff of artillery. Russian artillery. Russian guns. The masterpiece of Russian artillery is the 152mm howitzer. It is a cannon and howitzer at the same time.

Artillery suits the spirit of the Russian people. An artillery spotter is an infantryman, he brings to the gun the richness and enterprise of his character. Strength of firepower. The Germans, having started with [an emphasis on] technology at the beginning of the war, are now turning to infantry, while we, having started with infantry, are finding more and more support in technology.

German reconnaissance is poor. They fire on an area. They [also] abandon guns easily. They flee [even] before the infantry does, while our infantry usually starts running away before the artillerists.

Although the German artillery’s bag-charge of nitroglycerine is more powerful than our pyroxylin, German cannon is fragile and does not last long.

On 13 July, another blow was launched at the Germans. The 1st Ukrainian Front, now commanded by Marshal Konev, attacked Lvov, the operation the Germans had been expecting before Operation Bagration. It was the first stage of a charge which would take Konev’s armies right through to the Vistula, where, just over two weeks after crossing the start line, they seized the Sandomierz bridgehead on the western bank less than two hundred kilometres south of Warsaw. Meanwhile, Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front charged westwards towards the Vistula north and south of Warsaw.

As the 65th Army stormed on to Polish territory, Soviet troops had mixed, if not deeply confused, feelings about the local population. This must have been especially true of those who knew how the Soviet Union had behaved towards Poland in 1939, stabbing it in the back as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. The Poles were their traditional enemy, they were largely anti-communist and reactionary in Soviet eyes, yet they were ferociously anti-German and had resisted bravely. Now they suffered looting and rape at the hands of their supposed liberators. Grossman, no doubt conscious of the Poles’ reputation for anti-Semitism, may have felt ambivalent himself as he scribbled a note to prompt him later. ‘About Poles. Belief in God. Platoons of believers. Platoons of non-believers. Catholic priests. Hierarchy.’

He wrote an article celebrating the liberation of Poland. Grossman had no idea of how appallingly the people of eastern Poland had been treated after the Red Army invasion of 1939, when the country was divided up between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Many of the poorer peasants looked forward to the land reform promised by the Polish Communist puppet government set up in Lublin. The more educated,
however, had good cause to fear that the Stalinists would again continue their policy of eradicating all those who might attempt to challenge communist hegemony.

From deciduous forests, from marshes
overgrown with bright and thick grass, thousands of Polish peasants are drifting, by foot and in carts, along the deep sandy surfaces of country roads. They are carrying back to their villages the belongings that they hid from the Germans. They are driving cows, calves and horses. These crowds of peasants in felt hats and jackets, walking barefoot, these peasant women in headkerchiefs and aprons, loaded with winter clothes, pillows, blankets, mirrors, home-woven carpets, walking towards our front tank, infantry and cavalry units, are, in fact, expressing inexhaustibly the friendship and trust Polish people have for the Red Army. This countermarch of the Polish peasants driving livestock from the forests and carrying their belongings back to their houses among the thunder of Soviet artillery expresses the Polish peasants’ understanding of the moral and political honour of our troops.

I asked whether people had looked forward to the Red Army’s arrival. Several people said the words which I had heard before:

‘We waited for it like for God!’

There’s only one kind of complaint and lament that I didn’t hear in Poland, only one kind of tears that I didn’t see: those of Jews. There are no Jews in Poland. They have all been suffocated, killed, from elders to newly-born babies. Their dead bodies have been burned in furnaces. And in Lublin, the Polish city with the biggest Jewish population, where more than 40,000 Jews had been living before the war, I haven’t seen a single child, a single woman, a single old man who could speak the language that my grandparents spoke.

Yet, as Grossman would soon find out for himself when he continued to investigate the operation of the Holocaust in Central Europe, the Poles, despite their anti-communism, were quite unlike the Ukrainians. Very few had collaborated with the Nazis.

1
General Aleksei I. Antonov (1896–1962) was regarded as the most competent staff officer produced by the Red Army during the war, and became chief of the general staff in 1945.

2
General Sergei M. Shtemenko (1907–1976) was chief of the operations directorate and took over from Antonov when he was promoted in 1945. Shtemenko did not suffer when Stalin purged, sidelined and threatened other senior Soviet generals in the immediate post-war years. He became chief of the general staff in 1948.

3
Lieutenant General Hamann was captured. He was later executed in 1945 for war crimes.

4
This is presumably the former 308th Rifle Division, commanded at Stalingrad by General Gurtiev, which became the 120th Guards Rifle Division in September 1943. This mainly Siberian formation had defended the Barrikady factory in Stalingrad. During Operation Bagration it formed part of the 3rd Army.

5
Kuznechik, the camel, became even more famous less than a year later when he did reach Berlin and was led across the city by his driver to spit at the Reichstag.

6
Generalleutnant Kurt-Jürgen Freiherr Henning von Lützov, who had been born in 1892 near Marienwerder, was sentenced in Moscow on 29 June 1950 to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for war crimes (a sentence handed out to many German generals as the Cold War intensified). He was released and repatriated in January 1956.

7
OKH (
Oberkommando des Heeres
), the army general staff, had responsibility for all operations on the eastern front. The OKW (
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
) was responsible for all operations everywhere else.

8
Lieutenant General Hans-Walter Heyne, commander of the 6th Infantry Division, was also captured in the area of Bobruisk. Heyne was not a member of the SS, a term which many Soviet accounts use with abandon. ‘
Frontschwein
’ was presumably Heyne’s heavy joke. The usual phrase was ‘
Fronthase
’, or ‘front hare’. Heyne, a fifty-year-old from Hanover, was sentenced to twenty-five years, and served most of his sentence in Vorkuta. He was released and repatriated in December 1955.

9
It is most unlikely that they would have been members of General Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army (ROA), as he states. ROA units had been transferred to the Western Front. The term ‘Vlasov men’ was inaccurately used by the Red Army for any ‘former Soviet citizen’ in Wehrmacht uniform, even
Hiwis
, or
Hilfsfreiwillige
, the most reluctant form of recruit from prison camps used for heavy labour.

10
It is not clear whether Grossman was still with the 120th Guards Rifle Division at this stage. Nationalities refer to different state identities within the Soviet Union – Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, etc. Even Soviet Jews were classified in many Red Army documents and tables of statistics as a separate nationality.

In July 1944, Grossman, once again accompanied by Troyanovsky, rejoined General Chuikov and his Stalingrad Army, now renamed the 8th Guards Army. Troyanovsky described the approach to the city of Lublin in eastern Poland. ‘
The road to Lublin
is literally crammed with troops. There is much air activity on both sides. Writer Vasily Grossman and I take turns to watch the sky. It had been raining. There is water in the ditches and in bomb and shell craters, yet one still often has to hide in them from the enemy’s Messerschmitts.’

Troyanovsky also recorded their meeting with General Chuikov. Grossman wasted no time in questioning the general, both of whose hands were bandaged.

‘
What about Lublin
?’ Grossman asked.

‘Lublin will be liberated. It’s a matter of a few hours. It’s something else that I am concerned about.’ We said nothing. ‘Look, one could almost touch Berlin with one’s hand now. And it’s the dream of every Soviet warrior to take part in capturing Berlin. But I’m afraid that the [
Stavka
] leadership could change their minds and move my army to another axis. It’s happened a few times before. Yet it’s perfect logic and common sense. Just think:
stalingradtsy
advancing on Berlin!’

While Chuikov fretted over his army’s right to glory in the advance on Berlin, his soldiers were just about to discover the camp of Majdanek, on the other side of Lublin.

The Red Army’s deep thrusts into Poland in the summer of 1944 produced even more ghastly revelations than those of the massacres at Babi Yar, Berdichev and Odessa. Majdanek, a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Red Army soldiers, had been turned into a concentration and extermination camp. Prisoners from Gestapo headquarters in Lublin were executed in the camp while fighting continued in the city. On 24 July,
the crematorium itself was set on fire, in an attempt to cover the crimes, just before Soviet troops reached the camp.