The army at Rzhev in which I began my service was commanded by General Lelyushenko. ‘The Soldier General’, he was called out of earshot, always at the front line, with one foot in a jeep and the other on the ground. He could not abide women in the army, and for some reason called them ‘flatheads’ and bawled out a divisional commander he heard was keeping a woman. ‘Catching flatheads, are we?’ Everybody quailed before that reproach. At that very trying period in the war, moral standards in Lelyushenko’s army were markedly strict. But that only meant that emotions, which in any case no one was expected to show, were even more furtive. In war, when any hour might prove your last, feelings were intense and not even an army commander could abolish them.
After the war, when our army had reunions, Colonel Kozyryonok, the military prosecutor, told me there had not been a single military crime committed in our army by a young woman. They were significantly more reliable than men. The Germans might be on the outskirts of a village, but the telephone operator would not leave her post until given the order. The prosecutor was less complimentary about men. ‘If men could have got away from the front by becoming pregnant,’ he said laughingly, ‘we would have had an epidemic of desertion on those grounds.’ One girl was, in fact, court martialled for desertion after she ran away to another unit to which her boyfriend had been transferred.
Her time to love coincided with the war, and no doubt she was judged without pity, bearing the full brunt of martial law. All that sort of thing was hair-raising.
In war a man can dedicate himself wholeheartedly to warfare, but a woman continues to live to a much greater degree with her emotions. I think a woman living at the front is always in conflict with war (even if she doesn’t know it) and that it violates her emotions.
Is there such a thing as a woman’s view of war? What does it reveal?
I wouldn’t presume to say whether there is a women’s view that reveals something new, because that is what I write about. Someone less involved could probably be more objective. It might be simpler to talk about the general attitude of women towards war. Nowadays they are unanimously against it. Women do not accept war in any guise: it brings death and violence and they oppose it. As far as the Second World War is concerned, there is no evidence of a specifically women’s view of it in the literature.
We might well ask women who were young girls then, rushing headlong to the front without a clue as to what might be awaiting them, why, having found out and faced mortal danger, why when they were wounded and lying in hospital, they could not wait to get back to the front line, despite having every opportunity to stay in relative safety. Why today is it far more difficult to find a woman who will decry her years at the front and say her youth was ruined, than to find one who will say those were the best years of her life? Why? If we take their answers we will be get a sense of women’s views about what we rightly call the Patriotic War.
Did anything at the front remind you of the fact that you were Jewish?
On the very first night I arrived there, I found that our army was trapped in a pocket. From periodical reports we gathered the neck was widening at one moment, but contracting the next and might at any moment be closed completely. At the time I reached the front our neighbouring 39th Army was totally surrounded. Facing the risk of being taken prisoner, you could hardly forget the answer to Point Five. I did not yet have any comrades I could turn to; I was an unknown quantity to those I needed to escape with. Everything was rather wobbly. When I was eventually issued my own TT pistol I felt a whole lot more secure.
You were not taught to shoot on the course for translators…
That’s right. General Biyazi who was in charge of the course assured us we would be taught to shoot at the front, but that did not happen. I was given a loaded pistol and shown what to press. I had no expectation of going into battle, but at least I would be able to deal with myself.
What about the people you came into contact with. Did it matter that you were Jewish?
That did not affect me at all. What got you accepted was something different. They needed an interpreter, and now it turned out the interpreter was a woman. I was the only woman among a lot of men and it was awkward for them, too. They couldn’t swear in front of a woman, which meant they could hardly speak. I was deployed in an army that had retreated all the way from the USSR border. These people had been through a lot together, and then along comes some Muscovite, some student. They needed to be very tolerant. I was not one of them.
I had a Bible in my backpack, which I had seen for the first time in my life in the possession of my friend. Her mother worked in the Party publishing house and among her anti-religious armaments was a Bible published, for some reason, by the Seventh-Day Adventists. At the end of the course we went to General Staff Headquarters in Moscow to be assigned and I spent a couple of nights with Vika Malt. Noticing I was interested, Vika gave me the book with the thoroughly atheistic inscription, ‘Good luck, Lena. Vikukha.’ At the front I sat down one day to read the Bible still, of course, a bit disorientated. We had a major from the Border Guards assigned to us for a time. He had a pleasing, open expression. Someone pointed me out to him. ‘She reads the Bible.’ ‘And why not?’ he said. ‘A very fine work of literature.’ That took the heat out of the incident.
At the front I made notes, not systematically though, in fits and starts. That was looked askance at, too, at first, because keeping a diary or making notes was not allowed. I was well aware people would get curious and peep into it, so I wrote in the notebook, ‘Comrade Captain Borisov, are you not ashamed to be reading someone else’s diary?’ One day when I opened it, I found scrawled in large letters, ‘Should I be?’ I still have that notebook, complete with its obtrusive comment. After that I was left in peace, accepted, and in any case they appreciated my interpreting. I found I could do the job well. As time passed the attitude towards me became friendly.
You said once that, working as an interpreter, you found being a woman had its advantages.
I think in some ways it had. One prisoner told me that meeting a woman in such circumstances seemed like a good omen, a sign of mercy. The prisoners asked for help: one told me his wife had ‘a child on its way’ and asked me to let her know through the Red Cross that he was alive and in captivity; he did not know we were unconnected with the Red Cross. If I was on my own with a prisoner, which was usually the case, it was less like an interrogation than a conversation. And I had successes. Sometimes it was remembered I ought to have security and a soldier was assigned. On one occasion an officer who had come down to the dugout heard the guard snoring and grabbed a sheath knife lying on the table in front of me.
‘What’s this knife doing there?’ he asked.
‘It’s for sharpening my pencil.’
Did you find it difficult to play the role of interrogator?
I was helped in a way by a pilot who had been shot down and who had been strafing women. I asked him why he had been firing at them when he could see they were just women working in the fields. The plane had been flying very low, directly above them.
And he replied, ‘Ich habe meinen Spass daran.’
He did it just for fun. That made me shudder. It was the first time I had encountered a real Nazi, an enemy.
I felt sorry for the first prisoners. That was upsetting. The middle-aged German, the same age as my father, who was trying to remember the Russian word for melon and was feeling cold in the shed and asked for a blanket. Or handsome Thiel, with his university education. They were bewildered and feeling wretched. It is probably impossible to convey the feeling, to reproduce it artificially. What comes closest is perhaps the notes I jotted down in my notebook. I included them later in my book, Near Approaches.