“Shit,” someone shouted. “Another attack like that, and there won’t be anyone left. They’ve just left us here. We’ll never get out….”
“Shut up!” shouted the lieutenant, who was supporting a wounded man. “War is never a picnic.”
Who did he think he was telling? We gathered around him. He lifted the shoulders of a poor fellow covered with mud and blood, who was laughing to split his sides. For a moment, I thought he was crying with pain, but he was in fact howling with laughter.
“Das ist der Philosoph,” someone said.
I had never noticed the man before. His friend added that he had always believed he would return home unscathed. Three of us tried to lift him to his feet, but soon realized this was impossible. His bursts of laughter were interrupted by words which I understood perfectly, and thought about for a long time afterward, and which still trouble me. As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly. No one questioned the philosopher, but he himself, through his hilarity and his agony, tried to explain:
“Now I know why…. I know why…. It’s too simple…. It’s idiotic….”
Perhaps we would have learned what he meant, but a sudden surge of blood poured from his mouth, and ended his life. We dug graves for the new victims, and then stretched out, exhausted, on the bed of warm ashes that marked the site of the destroyed buildings.
At nightfall, we were wakened by the sound of guns, which seemed to be following us. By now we all felt desperately hungry and thirsty. Despite our rest, we had not recovered our strength, and we looked appalling. We stared at each other suspiciously, wondering if the next fellow didn’t have a couple of biscuits hidden somewhere, forgetting the lessons of comradeship we had been taught in Poland. But apparently we were all cleaned out. If anyone had been hiding something, we could scarcely have reproached him, as we all might easily have done the same thing.
In the darkness, as we fled the curtain of flares which had pursued us since our retreat from the Don, we heard once again the sound of a moving column, and were once again filled with panic. The night was as black as pitch. A fine rain was falling. We followed the lieutenant: God knows where he was taking us. No one spoke. Our strength seemed barely adequate to move our legs, weighted by exhaustion and mud.
Finally the lieutenant spoke: “Maybe they’ll go by without seeing us. Are any of you anti-tank gunners?”
Quickly, our solitary spandau was set up for a final effort of defense. Luckily, the exhaustion which made my temples throb under my leaden helmet prevented me from clearly grasping the seriousness of our situation. The simple fact that we had stopped walking presented my foundering body with a moment of relief which had to be used to the utmost. I knew that my fear would return with my breath, and that I would again be aware of everything that was happening.
The first black mass which came into view, with all its lights out, seemed to be some kind of light vehicle. We tried to see what it was, but the darkness was too thick. Then we heard tank treads, unmistakable and frightening, as those who have heard the sound on the front at night will appreciate.
As the noise grew louder, our panic increased. While some were trying to see where the tanks would come from, others — including myself — lay with their faces pressed into the ground. Two black shapes loomed against the sky some thirty meters away. Another, less than ten meters from us, made the earth shake, and every hair stand on end. Someone called out: “Die Maltakreuze, mein Gott!… Kameraden! Hilfe! Hilfe!”
For me, who spoke German so badly, and understood it even worse, this was a signal for everyone to save his skin. I jumped up and started to run. This, evidently, is what one should not do. Through the noise of the tanks, I could hear shouts and curses. The group had taken my action as a signal for general flight. Everyone had jumped up, and was running, shouting at the tanks — with the exception of the lieutenant and one or two more reflective, prudent soldiers. Later it occurred to me that even German tanks might have machine-gunned us, taking us for Russians. Also, they might have been Russian tanks.
However, we managed to make ourselves recognized, and were taken in by a detachment of the 25th Panzerdivision, commanded by General Guderian.
These men were extremely well-equipped, and had not been involved in our retreat. They put us wherever there was room, on the backs of the tanks, where the heat of the engine burned our buttocks. No one asked if we’d eaten, and it wasn’t until hours later, under the rolling fire of the Russian artillery which was raking Kharkov, that we were served a hot, greasy soup, which we received like a benediction.
It was here that I first saw one of the enormous Tiger tanks and two or three Panthers. I also saw, a few hours later, the appalling avalanche of the famous Katushas, which poured hours of devastating fire on the German infantry advancing with appalling losses through the outlying district of Slaviansk-Kiniskov. Guderian’s tanks took us right into Kharkov, where the Donets battles had already been in progress for more than a week. Once again, the Wehrmacht took the battered city, before losing it finally in September, after the failure of the Belgorod counter-offensive.
Dawn found us in the sand pits to the northwest of the city, where our group was gone over with a fine-toothed comb by the Kommandos responsible for sending men back to their original units. As they didn’t know where most of these units were, the best they could do was to form the strays into new groups, which everyone wished to avoid. These new units, with no official affiliation or assignments, simply sapped the actual strength of the army as recorded by military registration and on the maps at headquarters. The men assigned to these varied and un-measurable groups could not be fitted into any logical organization. Already classified as missing or dead by their original units, they were officially considered dead, and used as unexpected reinforcements whom there was no reason to spare. Long lines of soldiers, sitting, lying down, asleep and awake, were waiting for orders which would somehow fit them into the battle.
I can still remember the look of the Donets Valley, and the river, with its wide sand banks stretching some eight or ten miles back from the water. The thunder of guns reached us from the front, which was about twenty miles to the south. The German attack was moving from the north and west. With their left wing protected by the Donets, the Panzer assault was driving into the Russian artillery, which had rapidly crossed the river in an attempt to follow up their counter-offensive. Now these batteries had been driven back to the river, and were unable to re-cross it, as all the bridges were out. In effect, the Russians had just made the same mistake as the Germans at Stalingrad, although not on the same scale. In their haste to drive us out, they had overextended their supply lines and underestimated the forces pitted against them. A hundred thousand Russians, of whom fifty thousand were killed, were caught for over a week in the Slaviansk-Kiniskov pocket.
Of course, I didn’t know what had happened around Kharkov until months later. For me, the Donets battle, like the battles of the Don and of Outcheni, was a smoking chaos, a wellspring of continuous fear, alarm and rumor, and thousands of explosions.
I had just been reassigned, and was waiting for further instructions with a handful of other filthy, shaggy men, when a policeman handed me a scrap of paper. The police, like the Kommandos, were authorized to organize strays, and the scrap of paper purported to give us the route we must take to return to our company. It seemed that the 19th Rollbahn was operating in the neighborhood, and the three other fellows also belonged to it.