On the course for military translators, skipping the firing practice and anything military, we did in an odd, unconventional way, as if from the wrong end, get drawn into the war, immediately coming into contact with the enemy, his German language, his pass and record book – the Soldbuch – his regulations and commands, his personal letters (how those Germans tormented us with their letters!), his intricate Gothic script, his military terms we found it so difficult to learn. And to enable us to master the language as such, children’s reading books and stilted dialogues: ‘Wo warst du, Otto?’ ‘Where have you been, Otto?’ ‘Oh Karl, I had a lovely boat trip on the lake.’ And Heine: ‘Mein Liebchen, was willst du mehr?’ And our role-play interrogations, when we took it in turns to be the German prisoner and then the Soviet commander interrogating him.
And then, when we were about to go off to the front, charged up, if very hastily, with the German language, I felt my heart contract with fear that, when I met an actual prisoner, I might suddenly have to witness him being subjected to cruelty and violence.
On my first morning at the front, in a lull between two frenzied bombings, I came out of a peasant hut to see a sleigh being drawn along the street bearing a wounded prisoner. I followed it, fascinated, and it soon stopped. I caught up when the driver had just got off and was thinking something over. I drew myself up and asked loudly, ‘Are you taking him to be shot?’ assuming that must be the case. The elderly, moustachioed driver scowled at me over his shoulder and said rattily, ‘We don’t shoot prisoners,’ and went off behind the hut to relieve himself.
Then I excitedly asked the German lying in the sledge where he came from, and heard his listless response, ‘Oh, whatever next!’ The wounded man was not in the mood for polite conversation. I walked back, grateful to the old driver for the lesson he had taught me with his contemptuous scowl. At the time, I wrote down in my notebook, ‘This war will be won by those who show magnanimity,’ hoping that we would be those winners.
However, our strong and, for the time being successful, adversary had long ago rejected the concept of greatness of heart. What mattered was only strength and brutality. The world was increasingly divided into the conquerors and the conquered, with no gradations in between. What place did that leave for greatness of heart? Increasingly what was being inculcated, and accepted, was that against victorious strength and brutality we should pitch our own strength, hardware, and brutality.
The army in which you found yourself had retreated all the way from the frontier and become charged with hatred of the enemy, but you too saw a lot of dreadful, inhuman sights, and your experiences were soon the equal of theirs.
The Rzhev concentration camp was monstrous. The living and the dead were lying side by side on the ground. The Germans derided their prisoners: they would bring frozen potatoes and scatter them on the ground; the halfdead prisoners would crawl to get them, and the guards would lash them with whips. In the middle of the camp a gallows operated tirelessly.
Advancing westward, we walked over trenches full of bodies. Trenches. In addition to the large, well-known concentration camps, there were so many local camps. In the camps the bodies were dumped in pits and had a light covering of soil thrown over them, and when our armies were advancing, the Germans started digging them up and burning the bodies to cover their tracks. They rarely had time to finish the job.
Burned villages. There were dedicated arsonists, ‘torchers’ in the German units. Hitler’s order for scorched earth when they retreated, that was Nazism in action. Destruction of the land, destruction of the people. When we entered a village there was no longer a village, just embers and ashes. Out of a ravine, or some dugout they had put together, an old, exhausted man would emerge, women, a child barely alive. Yes, that made you feel hatred.
But I can say, looking back now after so many years, my humane feelings were not eradicated. It was hard, but something I had brought from my childhood, that had grown stronger when I was a young student, my – and I am not going to shrink from using the word – my internationalism, stayed with me. In the institute where I studied there was not and could not have been any discrimination along racial or national lines, and after many years, when we reminisced about one of our fellow students, we often could not remember what his or her nationality had been. There was then, there really was, an amazing sense of national fraternity and unity, and it is unforgivable that it has been perverted and destroyed. It will be a long time yet before we recover from the consequences of that.
Your youth was identified with the amazing, unique Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History that existed for seven years and was closed down at the outbreak of war and merged with Moscow State University. You have written wonderfully evocative words about it, which echo in the heart of anyone who has been touched by the sense of community in colleges and special schools or even dreamed of it.
I was looking to explain to myself what it was about the institute that remains so indelibly alive in all of us who studied there: a generation cut across and crippled by the war, that endured such terrible losses and upheavals.
What was it about IPLH? Just pronouncing those initials aloud is a signal, they radiate something. Unacquainted people, when they discover they both came from IPLH, immediately feel they have something in common. Is it because that is where we spent our youth? Of course, but that is not the whole story. Or perhaps the IPLH legend is just an illusion, albeit a longlasting one. But if it is, then it is one of those about which a clever English writer said that an illusion is one of the most important facts of life.
It seems to me that IPLH is a code yet to be decoded. IPLH was something new, somebody’s secret plan and intention, something that for a brief moment seemed to be possible, a brief twinkling of light in that succession of brutal years. And something more: IPLH was the spirit of a time whose very passing was history. We could feel that, and it fostered a passion for life in us.
The phenomenon that was the 1930s was a surge of covertly accumulated culture, but already a reckoning was near, the executioners were biding their time. IPLH was part of that brief break in the clouds, and of the mayhem that was to come. This was a coming together of students with great potential, broad interests and aspirations: future philosophers, major literary specialists, critics, historians, literary translators, journalists, experts on world culture, folklorists, linguists, publishers and editors who did so much for our country’s culture in those difficult times. For those alumni of IPLH who became writers, the war was tremendously important, as it was for me.
At that time IPLH brought together the thirst of students for knowledge in the humanities with an ardent desire on the part of its amazingly distinguished professors and dazzling young academics to impart it to them.
It would be a mistake to suppose all those who graduated from IPLH were like-minded people. No, for me some were close to my values while others were not; but when we marked the fortieth anniversary of the day the Germany attacked the USSR, the reunion of graduates of IPLH was held in a state of joyful emotion; we were glad in all sincerity to see each other, without raking over old grudges, and deeply moved. We assembled by the old familiar building in Rostokino Street and filled Lecture Theatre 15. Neither in what was said, nor in the atmosphere of the reunion were there any reproaches or embittered reminders of misdeeds dating back to the bad old days. It was a friendly, sincere, open-hearted occasion.