Enemy at the Gates (38 page)

The Italian finally were crowded into barracks and, in pitch darkness, fell prostrate on the floor. Bracci was one of the last to get inside. Looking for a space to rest, he found a horizontal beam three feet off the floor and straddling it, tried to sleep. His body sagged, his head drooped. Several times he lost his balance and had to brace his feet on the ground for support. When his shoe hit a small box, he picked it up and thought it seemed full of butter. He dug greedily into it with his fingers and the greasy mixture went down easily. Only later did he find that he had eaten an automotive lubricant.

Outside the barracks, very far off, the lieutenant heard the sound of bells tolling, ringing out across the icy steppe. From a church somewhere, an organ played a solemn melody. Bracci knew what the sounds meant. He had known all day. Outside, where ordinary people lived, whether in Russia or in his beloved Rome, it was a time for happiness, for family and for love. It was Christmas Eve, 1942.

Chapter Twenty-three

Vassili Chuikov was in a festive mood. Within the past twentyfour hours, Col. Ivan Lyudnikov's 138th Division finally had made contact with the rest of the Soviet Sixty-second Army. For more than a month, Lyudnikov and his men had held off both the German 305th Division and the pioneers, who had first driven them onto the Volga beach. Now replenished by food, ammunition, and recruits brought over the ice bridge from the east bank, the 138th Division surged up from the shore to the flat ground behind the factories and turned south. Sixty-second Army headquarters triumphantly recorded the success: "Direct communication with Lyudnikov's division has now been established."

His worries ended on that score, Chuikov spent most of December 24 saying good-bye to old comrades. In his tunneledout office, he smoked his leather-holdered cigarettes and raised tumblers of vodka to toast fellow heroes of the siege, who tearfully embraced their commander. Among them were Gen. Ivan Petrovich Sologub, with whom he had fought since the summer battles on the steppe; Gen. Fedor Nikandrovich Smekhotvorov, who defended the Red October Plant almost to the last man; and Gen. Victor Grigorievich Zholudev, whose elite commandos died at the tractor factory.

These officers had been ordered out of battle to the far side of the Volga and rest camps, taking their shattered divisions with them. Once numbering more than twenty thousand strong, the two thousand survivors now walked eastward across the icecovered river, congested with heavy trucks and thousands of fresh infantrymen going the other way.

Only a short distance from Chuikov's farewell party for his generals, a child ran through the ruins of the suburb of Dar Goya. "Come quick!" he screamed. "They've taken Sacha!"

The Fillipovs were not surprised. They had been anticipating this awful moment for weeks, and Mrs. Fillipov quickly scooped up some food the Germans had given Sacha for his shoe repairs and rushed out into the front yard.

Accompanied by two other teenagers, one a girl, Sacha was just going by. A platoon of enemy troops hemmed in the young Russians, who were walking barefoot through the snow. Mrs. Fillipov reached past the guards and wordlessly thrust the food at her son. As he took it, a soldier pushed her out of the way, and the procession wound around the corner to a barren clump of trees on Brianskaya Street.

A small crowd of Russian civilians gathered. The Fillipovs clung to each other, staring hypnotically at lengths of rope being flung over branches of the forlorn acacias. A German looped a noose around Sacha's head and tightened the thick knot under his left ear; Mr. Fillipov moaned pathetically and broke away from his wife. Blinded by tears, he stumbled away, never looking back as the command was given for the execution. Mrs. Fillipov stood alone, facing Sacha while his tongue shot out from between his teeth and his face turned blue.

Their task accomplished, the German soldiers formed ranks and marched away. The Russian witnesses scattered silently into the gloom, and Brianskaya Street suddenly was deserted except for the three children dangling in the wind and Mrs. Fillipov, who moved to her son's body. She listened for a moment to the creaking rope, then reached up and stroked her boy's leg and spoke softly, lovingly to him.

Darkness fell. Mrs. Fillipov continued her solitary vigil, standing dutifully beside the stiffening bare feet of her master cobbler, dead by hanging at the age of fifteen.

"
O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine .Blatter. . ."
almost every German bunker rang with the melody until suddenly the night was torn apart by the simultaneous explosions of thousands of multicolored flares that flashed across the sky from Orlovka in the northeast, to Baburkin in the west, on down to Marinovka and Karpovka, and back eastward through Zybenko to the Tsaritsa Gorge at the Volga. The brilliant fireworks display lasted for several minutes. Underneath the dazzling lights, German soldiers shielded their eyes and marveled at the beauty surrounding them.

It was their salute to the Holy Season, a joyous time to every German, and for several days, German officers and men alike had prepared feverishly for the celebration. Capt. Gerhard Meunch even drafted a speech. At his command post in a cellar of the Red October Plant, he labored for hours to hone his message, then, in the early evening, he went to a nearby garage where a Christmas tree, carved from wood, adorned one corner of the cavernous room. In groups of thirty, his infantrymen appeared to sit around him as he welcomed them and distributed cigarettes, wine, or tea with rum, a piece of bread, and a slice of horse meat.

Relaxed by the liquor, the men listened attentively while Meunch spoke quietly of the need for keeping up the fight against the Russians. Still slightly unnerved by his recent brush with mutineers in the ranks, he took pains to underline a soldier's duty to orders, especially in such a dreadful situation as at Stalingrad. The pep talk seemed to appeal to the troops, who all joined in singing
"Stille Nacht"
("Silent Night") with him. Meunch noticed that in midchorus, a number of the men were so choked with emotion they had to stop singing and wipe tears from their eyes.

After talking personally with every enlisted man, Meunch went back to the Red October Plant to drink with fellow officers. One of them, a forty-year-old captain, suddenly shouted, "What is this whole battle good for?" and pulled out his pistol.

"Let's all shoot each other!" he roared. "This is all nonsense. None of us will ever get out of here."

Stunned by the outburst, Meunch calmly replied, "Now take it easy." But the other captain kept looking wildly about him. Continuing to speak in a soothing voice, Meunch sat down with his friend to argue the merits of suicide.

Sgt. Albert Pflüger's broken arm hurt too much for him to care about the holiday. With his wound probed and dressed, and his arm in a sling, he wandered into a bunker where a rush of warm, sale air engulfed him. His head reeling, Pflüger stared at a crowd of thirteen other patients who were standing and sitting in a room meant for four. Seeing that Pflüger was about to faint, one man jumped down from a top bunk and gave his place to him.

After climbing laboriously into the cot, the sergeant promptly dozed off. Several hours later, he woke because of a terrible itch inside the cast on his right arm and, pulling back the covers, he saw a line of lice marching from the mattress over his hand, under the edge of the plaster mold. In shock and disgust, Pflüger jumped down from the bed and tore at the bugs. Grabbing a stick, he jabbed frantically at them, but they crawled deeper into the cast and hid. His arm was now a mass of gray parasites, feasting on the wound.

In thousands of bunkers in the sides of
balkas,
in concrete pillboxes at the edge of no-man's-land, German soldiers snatched a few brief hours from the horrors of encirclement. Despite the absence of trees on the steppe, creative minds had cleverly improvised a semblance of the Christmas spirit. Iron bars, drilled with holes and filled with slivers of wood, stood as centerpieces on dirt floors; puffs of cotton snatched from medical aid stations served as ornamental bulbs. Stars made from colored paper adorned metal treetops.

At Ekkehart Brunnert's party, his comrades outdid themselves. A beautifully carved wooden Christmas tree dominated a shaky table. Someone had brought a gramophone with records and amid riotous singing, Brunnert received a bag filled with delicacies: a small cake smeared with chocolate frosting, several bars of chocolate candy, bread, biscuits, coffee, cigarettes, even three cigars. Overwhelmed by the banquet, the starving private asked where all the food had been stored for so long. No one knew. Dismissing his suspicions, Brunnert gorged himself, then lit up a cigarette. Basking in the glow of improvised Advent wreaths sparkling with candles, he momentarily forgot his anguish over the truckload of warm clothing, burned in his presence just a few days before.

Several hours later, when his turn came to stand guard, he stared into the star-filled sky and tried to imagine his parents and wife, Irene, celebrating at home in Boblingen—the tree and the presents and Irene thinking of him and perhaps crying. Pacing up and down the trench, Brunnert wanted to cry himself.

On his way to a church service, Quartermaster Karl Binder had seen mounds of unburied bodies lining the road. Shocked by this breakdown of army organization, he brooded about it for hours until he wrote a letter to his family. Now filled with a sense of foreboding about his own fate, Binder sought to prepare his wife and children for the worst:

Christmas 1942

…During the past weeks all of us have begun to think about the end of everything. The insignificance of everyday life pales against this, and we have never been more grateful for the Christmas Gospel than in these hours of hardship. Deep in one's heart one lives with the idea of Christmas, the meaning of Christmas. It is a feast of love, salvation and pity on mankind. We have nothing else here but the thought of Christmas. It must and will tide us over grievous hours. . . . However hard it may be, we shall do our utmost to master fate and try everything in our power to defeat the subhumanity that is wildly attacking us. Nothing can shake our belief in victory, for we must win, if Germany wants to live....

I have not received any mail from you for some time . . . there is a terrible longing for some dear words from home at Christmas, but there are more important things at present. We are men who know how to bear everything. The main thing is that you and the children are all right. Don't worry about me; nothing can happen to me any longer. Today I have made my peace with God….

I give you all my love and a thousand kisses—I love you to my last breath.

Yours,

Karl

Affectionate kisses for the children. Be dear children and remember your father….

Oblivious to the noise in his bunker, Lt. Emil Metzger sat reading a letter from his wife, Kaethe. It was the best Christmas present he had ever received, and at 10:00
P.M.
, he quietly withdrew from the celebration to go out—into the clear, frosty night, where a lonely sentry walked his post. Metzger relieved the shivering man of the responsibility and shouldered his rifle. He wanted this time alone.

Under a bower of brilliant stars he paced back and forth, ignoring the Russians and the war. Concentrating intensely on Kaethe, Emil relived their life together: the first dance when they fell in love, the exhilarating hikes through the cathedral hush of forests, the four brief days of honeymoon they shared before he rushed back to duty, the furlough he had given up in August because he believed the war was about to end.

For over an hour, Emil held a spiritual communion with Kaethe beneath a thousand miles of stars. It was the only gift he could give her.

While German soldiers sought escape in celebration, their generals were discussing the diminishing prospects of Sixth Army's salvation.

Teletype: General Schmidt—General Schulz

+++ Dear Schmidt, tonight the field marshal and we all are particularly thinking of the entire Sixth Army. I do not have much new information for you today.

Hoth [the German relief column south of the
Kessel] is
still engaged in defensive operations. It appears that the enemy…[around Vassilevska at the Mishkova]…has received further reinforcements….As regards your situation, we still did not receive a decision from the Supreme Command of the Army. The field marshal wants you to know that you had better reconcile yourself to the idea that the solution will in all probability be "Thunderclap." [Even Field Marshal Manstein did not believe this anymore, but Schulz did not have the heart to deny Schmidt one last hope of freedom.] We are waiting for better weather so that we may commit all available airplanes to provide you with the necessary fuel and provisions. What's new on your side?

[Schmidt was querulous, demanding : ] +++ Is it certain that the airplanes can start although Tatsinskaya is threatened? [Schmidt did not know that Tatsinskaya was already in Russian hands.]

[Schulz lied:] +++ Their start is ensured and alternative airfields were prepared.

[Sensing that Hoth's relief attempt from the south had already failed, Schmidt asked:] +++ Will [Hoth]…be able to hold the Mishkova [river] section?

[Schulz:] +++ We hope so. However, there is a possibility that he will have to narrow the present bridgehead. [At that moment, the bridgehead had already been evacuated by the German rear guard.]

[Schmidt:] +++ Was an armored division withdrawn from…Hoth…to the west bank of the Don?

Again, General Schulz was unable to strip his friend of hope.

+++ One armored division [the 6th, which had left the previous evening] had to be withdrawn to the west bank of the Don in order to protect Morosovskaya [Airfield]. However, as of tomorrow the SS Division Viking [a fully motorized division] will be arriving in the area of Salsk by train and road….Besides, we have again urgently requested considerable reinforcements from Army Group A [in the Caucasus], but we are still waiting for the decision of the Supreme Command of the Army.