A Writer at War (55 page)

A safe-deposit box in Landsberg. Our commission is opening safes. There’s gold, jewellery, and a lot of photographs of children, women and old people. A member of the removal commission says to me: ‘What the fuck did they keep these photos here for?’

The divisional commander says to his deputy who has come to get more exact instructions on signal flares: ‘I shit on your flares. Sit down and have dinner with me.’

In a stationery shop belonging to a fat Nazi man, on the day of his ruin. A tiny girl came in in the morning and asked him to show her postcards. The fat, gloomy, heavily breathing old man put a dozen postcards on the table in front of her. The girl was choosing, seriously, for a long time, and chose one of a girl in a beautiful dress standing by a broken egg, a chicken climbing out from the egg. The old man received twenty-five pfennig from her and put it into the cash register. That evening, the old man was lying dead in his bed. He had poisoned himself. The shop was closed, yet cheerful, noisy men were carrying boxes of goods and bundles of belongings out of his apartment.

As soon as Grossman caught up with old friends and acquaintances, he pumped them for their stories. Babadzhanyan, now commanding the
XI Guards Tank Corps in Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army, was the brave commander he had thought had been killed in 1941.

Babadzhanyan’s story: ‘We started on the Vistula on the evening of 15 January, by entering a breach on Chuikov’s sector. We reached the Oder on 28 January. One German captain was going to
to get cigarettes and we captured him right on the border. There was one day when we made 120 kilometres. All the main operations were carried out during the night. Tanks are safe at night. Our tanks are a terrifying force at night. They would break through sixty kilometres, even though we didn’t have local guides (who are very important), as we did in Poland. Although one night an old man, a German, took our tanks through very well.

‘A German general would peacefully take off his trousers and go to bed, having marked on the map that the enemy was sixty kilometres away, and we would attack this general at midnight.’

Grossman also came across Gusakovsky again, an officer clearly not handicapped by modesty.

Gusakovsky’s brigade had a stunning success. There was, among all these destroyed bridges and tank traps, an absolutely intact road, which [the Germans] had been planning to use for a powerful counter-attack. Gusakovsky rushed along this road and got round all the enemy’s defences. [His brigade] was rambling around in the enemy’s rear on its own for two days while other brigades advanced by a roundabout route, or attacked the enemy head-on.

Colonel Gusakovsky, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, commander of a tank brigade: ‘The town [presumably Landsberg] has been captured by one colonel, but the order of the commander-in-chief [Marshal Zhukov] mentions ten generals.’

As the Red Army approached Berlin, officers and soldiers alike dreamed of capturing Hitler alive. They were certain that they would be awarded the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union and would be famous until the end of their days. Intelligence officers in headquarters, meanwhile, pored over captured documents which might have come from the Reich Chancellery in the hope of discovering more about the Nazi leader. ‘At the intelligence department. I was shown an order with Hitler’s signature,
which was signed underneath: “Identical with original, Captain Sirkis.”’

In early February, Grossman reached the Oder, the last river before Berlin. The Red Army had counted each river in its advance westwards from the Volga at Stalingrad, and so had Grossman.

We reached the Oder on a sunny morning
, at the place where it ran most closely to Berlin. It seemed so bizzare that this slushy country road, these low prickly bushes, small trees, few and far between, low hills sloping towards the river, small houses scattered here and there among the fields covered with the bright greenery of winter crop – all this, so ordinary for my eyes, seen so many times, was just eighty kilometres from Berlin.

And suddenly on this spring morning by the Oder, I remembered how in that iron winter of 1942, in a severe January snowstorm, on a night which was crimson from the flames of a village which Germans had set on fire, a horse driver muffled in a sheepskin coat shouted suddenly: ‘Hey, comrades, where’s the road to Berlin?’ Drivers of vehicles and carts answered with a roar of laughter. I wonder if this joker, who had asked the way to Berlin near Balakleya, is still alive? And what about those who laughed at his question three years ago? And I wanted to shout, to call to all our brothers, our soldiers, who are lying in the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Polish earth, who sleep for ever on the fields of our battles: ‘Comrades, can you hear us? We’ve done it!’

On the second day after the Red Army invaded Germany, we saw eight hundred Soviet children walking eastwards on the road, the column stretching for many kilometres. Some soldiers and officers were standing by the road, peering into their faces intently and silently. They were fathers looking for their children who had been taken to Germany. One colonel had been standing there for several hours, upright, stern, with a dark, gloomy face. He went back to his car in the dusk: he hadn’t found his son.

I looked through the notebooks of pupils at school. From the first form, almost all the exercises, compositions and presentations, written in unsteady children’s handwriting, were on war themes and Nazi affairs. Portraits, placards, slogans on the classroom walls, all that pursued only one goal – glorifying Hitler and Nazism . . .

German civilians are trying to deny any guilt for the enormous destructions and suffering that fascist Germany and its troops brought to the Soviet Union.

1
He refers to Chuikov as ‘Academician’ using an old joke. It was Chuikov who claimed to have founded the academy of street fighting in Stalingrad.

2
There were no
Landwehr
, as they were the territorial reserves of the First World War. The
Volkssturm
was its Nazi equivalent. Regular officers referred to this force of elderly men and young boys as the ‘stew’, as it was a mixture of tough old meat and green vegetables.

3
Nestor Makhno led a large guerrilla force of anarchists in the Ukraine during the civil war, fighting both the Whites and the Reds. They moved rapidly with small horse-drawn carts, some of which had machine guns mounted on them.

4
Colonel-General M.I. Katukov, the commander of the 1st Guards Tank Army, which fought in tandem with the 8th Guards Army more or less from the Vistula all the way to the final assault on Berlin.

At the beginning of February, just after Zhukov’s armies reached the Oder less than a hundred kilometres from Berlin, a row broke out. Chuikov, the commander of the 8th Guards Army, criticised Zhukov for failing to push on immediately to Berlin. In fact, Stalin had forbidden a rash advance, when tank units needed to refit and rearm, and the infantry was exhausted. The
Stavka
ordered Zhukov and Rokossovsky to clear their right flank, the Baltic coast of Pomerania. This operation, and the redeployment of armies later, meant that the final Berlin operation was delayed until mid-April.

Grossman, in the meantime, had returned to Moscow, but he was determined to be in Berlin for the kill. Fortunately, his fellow correspondents, including his old companion Troyanovsky, requested that he should be there and
Krasnaya Zvezda
duly sent him. Troyanovsky then recorded: ‘
On 14 April, correspondents
of
Krasnaya Zvezda
were summoned by General K.F. Telegin, member of the Military Council of the Front. “I would recommend you cross the Oder,” he said. “You can choose any army. The only thing I would ask you, please don’t all go to Chuikov.” Perhaps Marshal Zhukov did not want his chief critic to get all the publicity.

The operation was launched on 16 April with Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front attacking due westwards from the Oder opposite Berlin, while Marshal Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front attacked futher south from the line of the River Neisse. Stalin gave Konev permission to swing north towards Berlin. He wanted to create an intense rivalry between the two marshals to accelerate the encirclement and capture of Berlin. Ever since the Americans took the bridge at Remagen on 7 March, Stalin was afraid that they might reach Berlin first.

Zhukov’s forces had a far tougher time than he had expected in storming the Seelow heights above the Oder flood plain, and they suffered many casualties as their commanders forced them on. Their artillery was not within range of Berlin until the evening of 20 April. But the real fight
for the city did not begin until four days later. Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army and Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army fought in from the southeast, the 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 3rd Shock Army from the north, and the 5th Shock Army from the east. Konev’s troops, the 3rd Guards Tank Army and the 28th Army, had also reached the south of the city and neighbouring formations began to bombard each other. Grossman, meanwhile, was making his way back to Berlin from Moscow. He left the Soviet capital for his final journey as a war correspondent on 20 April, the day of Hitler’s last birthday. He later described in an article what he saw and thought on the way to Berlin.

A village that had been burned by the Germans
. All that remains of it are low sandy hills of collapsed handmade brick, an abandoned well, and a few rusted metal constructions. Smoke was rising from a depression not far away, where former inhabitants of the village were living in earth bunkers dug by Red Army soldiers during the fighting. A white-haired woman, a mother whose sons had been killed in the war, brought us water in a can and said in a melancholy voice: ‘Will there be ressurrection for us?’ and she indicated the burned village with a movement of her head.

And further on, along all the great roads, leading to the Neva, and the Volkhov, and to the Terek, to the tall forests of Karelia, to the steppes and mountains of the Caucasus, there are hills and hillocks, burial mounds of soldiers’ graves.

Our dead children, the Red Army soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants, our good boys are asleep there for ever. Everywhere along the roads of our advance there are these kurgans, hills and hillocks, graves of our killed sons marked by plywood boards on sticks, tilted to one side, with washed-off inscriptions. The rain washed off the soldiers’ names when it was crying over the graves, and united them under the single name of the killed son.

The vehicle broke down close to the Polish border, and we had to spend many hours in a field. While [the Jeep] was being repaired, I visited a hamlet. It was Sunday, and the main resident of the hamlet and her children had gone to church. Only an old woman and a traveller, a soldier dismissed from the army because of his wounds, were at home. He told me he didn’t have to walk very far now: he was going to the Orel area. We began to talk. The traveller, whose name was Alexei Ivanovich, was over forty. He had served at the front since the first days of the war, and had
been wounded three times. He had been in a mortar unit. His greatcoat was torn by shrapnel and covered in black stains, he was wearing a
ushanka
winter hat, foot bandages and heavy boots. This soldiers’ gear was something he could bring back home. He had been living at the hamlet for about two weeks, helping the woman to sow, in return for which she gave him three poods of rye. He would be given a lift to the station at dawn, with her horses. There he intended to board an empty train going back from the front and get closer to home. Alexei Ivanovich was very happy about having earned this grain. He even led me to the hall and smiled, watching me pat the fat dense sack.

He then told me how Germans had burned his village, and his family are living in an earth bunker. ‘It’s good that I’m not going back empty-handed,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring them some grain from the war, because I saw how hard it’d become for them when I went back on leave after I was wounded the second time. What sort of life is it under the earth? It’s dark and wet, and there are insects. It’s not so bad in the summer, but in winter it’s hard.’

Grossman also made notes of that last journey to the front.

In a Willys [Jeep] from Moscow. Fires. As far as Minsk, we saw people setting grass on fire, the tall weeds that have grown in the fields during the war.

The leaden sky and frightening, cold rain for three days. An iron spring after the iron years of war. A severe peace is coming after the severe war: camps are being built everywhere, wire stretched, towers erected for the guards and [German] prisoners urged on by their escorts. After the war ends they will be repairing the roads broken by the movement of troops.

The road to Brest and Warsaw is also badly damaged. But the further west [one goes], the dryer the road and the clearer the sky. The trees along the road – apple and cherry, are all in blossom. The dachas of Berliners. Everything is wallowing in flowers – tulips, lilac, decorative pink flowers, apple, cherry and apricot blossom. The birds are singing. Nature does not mourn the last days of fascism.