A Writer at War (53 page)

2
Grossman may have been referring to the Church of the Virgin’s Blood at 34 Leshno Street, the centre of Catholics of Jewish descent.

3
They were not all Jewish ashes. The Nazis also used the ruins of the ghetto as an execution ground for Catholic Poles.

4
He was a member of the National Council of the Polish Government in Exile.

5
Lieutenant General Karl Litzmann was the German commander who died in 1915 while attempting to capture
ód
in the First World War. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite, the ‘Blue Max’.

6
Volksdeutsche
were ethnic Germans living outside the Reich. These were either members of the local German minority or, more likely, members of other German minorities brought in by the Nazi authorities to settle their new
Gau
, or Nazi district, the Warthegau, an area of north-west Poland, ethnically cleansed of Poles and annexed as part of the Reich. German commanders, such as General Guderian, were given large estates there by a grateful government.

7
Out of a population of just under five million in 1939, the Warthegau contained 380,000 Jews and 325,000 ethnic Germans.

8
Himmler gave the order to liquidate the ghetto on 10 June 1944, a few days after D-Day.

9
Maslovitsy was also where Major Sharapovich discovered the German cache of valuable books which they had seized from the Turgenev Library in Paris. These were taken back to Moscow to the Lenin Library.

10
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowsky was a controversial character to say the least. A bankrupt businessman appointed
Judenälteste
, or Jewish elder, by the Germans, he obtained complete power in the ghetto, through controlling the food supply. In an autocratic fashion, he not only ran the ghetto as if it were his private fiefdom, but decided who was to die and who was to survive, by selecting those for transports to Chelmno and later Auschwitz. Grossman’s account of the ghetto seems rather optimistic. Even within a year nearly 20 per cent of the population was dying from disease and starvation.

11
Her name was Regine Weinberger.

12
Rumkowsky’s ‘mistresses’ were young women threatened and forced into becoming his concubines.

13
Literally ‘neck-shot’ in German, in practice to the base of the skull.

14
A
Bauerführer
was the local Nazi Party leader and organiser of peasants and farmers.

15
Red Army soldiers were looting from Polish farmers just as much as from German settlers.

16
In this case, by
Volksdeutsche
he means ethnic Germans from Poland.
Reichsdeutsche
are, of course, those from pre-1939 German territory.

During this part of the advance, Grossman remained attached to the headquarters of General Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army. Chuikov was furious when Marshal Zhukov, whom he detested for having claimed so much of the glory over Stalingrad, ordered his army to reduce the fortress city of Pozna
, while the other armies rushed on towards the River Oder. Fighting in Pozna
was the toughest street-fighting battle which the Red Army had faced since Stalingrad.

The regimental commander complains: ‘Well, we broke into a street, and civilians rushed up to us shouting: “Our liberators! Our saviours!” At this moment, the Germans counter-attacked and pushed us back. Their self-propelled gun appeared. And I saw the same civilians rush out and start hugging Germans. Well, I gave the order to fire at them with canister.’

Street fighting is going on. The quieter streets are filled with people. Ladies wearing fashionable hats, carrying bright handbags, are cutting pieces of meat off dead horses lying on the pavement.

Chuikov is organising the street fighting in Pozna
. After Stalingrad, he is considered the top expert in street fighting. Theory: the essence of the battle of Stalingrad is that our infantry created a wedge between the force of German mechanical power and the weakness of German infantry. And now, circumstances have driven Academician
¹
Chuikov into a situation which he cannot avoid, into the same situation as at Stalingrad, but here in Pozna
, it’s vice versa. He is furiously attacking the Germans in the streets of Pozna
, with a huge mechanised force and little infantry. And the more numerous German infantry is stubbornly fighting its hopeless battle.

Chuikov is sitting in a cold, brightly lit room on the first floor of a two-storey villa. A telephone is ringing on the table. Commanders of units report on the street fighting in Pozna
. In the pauses between telephone calls and reports, Chuikov tells me about breaking the Germans defences in the area of Warsaw.

‘We had been studying the Germans’ daily timetable for a month. During the day, they left the first line of trenches, and returned to it at night. Before we began to advance, we kept sending messages on the radio the whole night, we were broadcasting music and dances, and made use of confusion, bringing all our forces up into front-line positions.

‘At eight thirty, the time when they usually left the first line, we fired a salvo from 250 guns. On the first day, we breached the first line. We heard on the radio how the commander of the Ninth Army was calling his divisions, getting no bloody answer. At the same time, we destroyed two panzer divisions which they had pulled up from the rear. On the whole, we did it the following way: an air raid, a barrage of fire, and then we advanced. There was a milky fog on that morning. We stopped them on the anvil of the first line and hit them with the hammer of our artillery. If we were an hour late, we would have been hitting an empty spot. And the Germans thought that we had been strategically exhausted. There were
Landwehr
and
Volkssturm
there.’
²

Chuikov listens to the telephone, reaches to look at the map and says: ‘Just a minute, I’ll put on my glasses.’ He reads the report, laughs happily and taps his orderly on the nose with his pencil. He says: ‘Marchenko’s right flank can already feel Glebov’s fire. There’s a fire overlap, soon there will be live communications, too.’ He shouts into the telephone: ‘If they try to break through to the west, let them into the open, and then squash them like mites, damn them.’