“Well, you know, there really isn’t too much you can do. When I broke my knee, I was thinking about my head. The best thing would be to go in the other direction.”
“That’s it! And quit on our comrades at the front!”
He looked at me, and for a moment stopped smiling. Then his face relaxed again, and he added in the same offhand tone as before: “All they have to do is what I just said: half-turn, right face.” He imitated the tone of a feldwebel.
“You’re not really thinking about what you’re saying,” I said. “The Bolsheviks would certainly take advantage of anything like that. It’s impossible. The war isn’t over. You have no right to talk that way.”
He looked me full in the face. “You’re too young. You thought I was serious. No. We’ve got to go as fast as we can, and faster.” As if to emphasize his remarks, he stepped on the gas.
“I’m too young! You all drive me crazy saying that. As if only fellows your age were any good. Don’t I wear the same uniform you do?”
I didn’t really believe what I was saying with such passion, or even that I was really there, among all those soldiers.
“If you’re not satisfied, get another taxi.” He was openly laughing at me.
As he plainly wasn’t going to take me seriously, I was silent. I was both furious and sad. First they beat me up for lack of vigilance, then they bawl me out. Our line of trucks was continuing its sliding advance across the ice and snow. Night was falling, and with the darkness the cold was increasing. The thought that we were nearly at the end of our journey was in some way encouraging. We would be approaching the outskirts of Kharkov within a half hour. What condition would the town be in? It was the last big city before the front, before the Don, and beyond that, the Volga, and Stalingrad. Stalingrad was still four hundred miles from Kharkov. Secretly, despite my feeling of revulsion toward the Soviet countryside, I felt almost disappointed that we weren’t yet at the front.
Then came the crushing blow.
I remember that we were going down a hill. The trucks ahead of us slowed down, and then stopped.
“What now?”
I had already opened the door.
“Shut that door. It’s too cold.”
I slammed the door in his face, and walked across the icy crust that covered the narrow “Third International” highway. A sidecar had just come to a stop ahead of me, and was still skidding on the ice. A courier from Kharkov was bringing us an order. In the gray light I could see some officers talking rapidly to each other. They seemed to be trying to make a plan, to be discussing some serious news. One of them, our captain, was reading a paper.
Another moment went by, and then a sergeant ran down the length of the convoy, blowing the whistle for assembly. While everyone was collecting, the sidecar, which had started up again, drove by in front of me. There were two soldiers in it, wearing what looked like diving suits. The captain came over to us, followed by his two lieutenants and three feldwebels. He didn’t lift his eyes from the ground, and his expression was one of despair.
A shiver of anxiety ran across our shaggy and exhausted faces.
“Achtung! Stillgestanden!” shouted a feldwebel.
We stood at attention. The captain gave us a long look. Then slowly, in his gloved hand, he lifted a paper to the level of his eyes.
“Soldiers,” he said. “I have some very serious news for you; serious for you, for all the fighting men of the Axis, for our people, and for everything our faith and sacrifice represents. Wherever this news will be heard this evening, it will be received with emotion and profound grief. Everywhere along our vast front, and in the heart of our fatherland, we will find it difficult to contain our emotion.”
“Stillgestanden!” insisted the feldwebel.
“Stalingrad has fallen!” the captain continued. “Marshal von Paulus and his Sixth Army, driven to the ultimate sacrifice, have been obliged to lay down their arms unconditionally.”
We felt stunned and profoundly anxious. The captain continued after a moment of silence.
“Marshal von Paulus, in the next to last message he sent, informed the Fuhrer that he was awarding the Cross for bravery with exceptional merit to every one of his soldiers. The Marshal added that the Calvary of these unfortunate combatants had reached a peak, and that after the hell of this battle, which lasted for months, the halo of glory has never been more truly deserved. I have here the last message picked up by short wave from the ruins of the tractor factory Red October. The High Command requests that I read it to you.
“It was sent by one of the last fighting soldiers of the Sixth Army, Heinrich Stoda. Heinrich states in this message that in the southwest district of Stalingrad he could still hear the sound of fighting. Here is the message:
“We are the last seven survivors in this place. Four of us are wounded. We have been entrenched in the wreckage of the tractor factory for four days. We have not had any food for four days. I have just opened the last magazine for my automatic. In ten minutes the Bolsheviks will overrun us. Tell my father that I have done my duty, and that I shall know how to die. Long live Germany! Heil Hitler!”
Heinrich Stoda was the son of Doctor of Medicine Adolph Stoda of Munich. There was an impressive silence, broken only by a few blasts of wind. I thought of my uncle there, whom I had never met because of the rupture between our two families. I had only seen his photograph, and they had told me he was a poet. I felt very keenly that I had lost a friend. A man in the ranks began to whimper. His white temples made him look like an old man. Then he quit his rigid posture and began to walk toward the officers, crying and shouting at the same time.
“My two sons are dead. It was bound to happen. It’s all your fault — you officers. It’s fatal. We’ll never be able to stand up to the Russian winter.” He bowed almost double, and burst into tears. “My two children have died there… my poor children…”
“At ease,” ordered the feldwebel.
“No. Kill me if you like. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters… Two soldiers stepped forward and took the poor man by the arms, trying to lead him back to his place before anything worse happened. Hadn’t he just insulted the officers? Unfortunately he struggled, like someone possessed by demons.
“Take him to the infirmary,” the captain said. “Give him a sedative.” I thought he was going to add something else, but his expression remained fixed. Perhaps he too had lost a relative.
“At ease.”
We returned to our trucks in small, silent groups. By now it was full night. The rolling white horizon was tinged with a cold bluish gray. I shivered.
“It’s getting colder and colder,” I said to the fellow walking beside me.
“Yes. Colder and colder,” he answered, staring into the distance.
For the first time I was strongly impressed by the dismal vastness of Russia. I felt quite distinctly that the huge, heavy gray horizon was closing in around us, and shivered more violently than ever. Three quarters of an hour later, we were rolling through the ravaged outskirts of Kharkov. We couldn’t see very much by our dim headlights but everything that appeared in the path of the light was damaged.
The next day, after one more night on the floor of the Renault, I was able to look at the chaos which was all that remained of Kharkov, a city of considerable importance, despite the devastation of war.
During the years 1941, 1942, and 1943 it was taken by our army, retaken by the Russians, taken back by the Germans, and then finally retaken by the Russians. At this particular moment, our troops were holding it for the first time. But the town looked like a jumble of burnt-out wreckage. Acres of total destruction had been used as dumps for the piles of wrecked machinery of every kind which the occupying troops had collected in their efforts to clear the roads. This mass of twisted, torn metal reflected the ferocious violence of the battle. It was all too easy to imagine the fate of the combatants. Now, motionless beneath the shroud of snow which only partially covered them, these steel cadavers marked a stage of the war: the battles of Kharkov.