In 1948 the arrests started again. They affected people close to us. The sense of vulnerability was aggravated by my sense of having no rights and being unable to get a job on account of Point Five. Nothing – four years of active service in the army, medals – was considered in your favour. And worse was to come.
Do you remember, Lyuba, that visual aid, the skeleton with inventory number 4417 who migrated together with the Russian Red Cross’ evening course up and down Malaya Bronnaya, turning up one moment in the food hall of a grocer’s shop and the next on the stage of the Jewish Theatre? Next to us evening students, two elderly ladies were talking loudly to each other on the stage and clicking away on their abacuses. Backstage the sceneshifters were moving things around. The theatre was preparing for the start of the season.
At the start of the war, in summer 1941?
Yes. But some quite different memories are also associated with that stage for me: taking our farewell of Solomon Mikhoels.[1] One dark, dank night in January 1948, I was waiting with my husband, Isaak Kramov, among a silent, dejected crowd who did not believe the story about a ‘road accident’. We were waiting for the coffin to be brought. It did not appear.
When I was very little, I lived on Tverskoy Boulevard in a building facing Malaya Bronnaya Street, and this nook of Moscow, with the colourful posters of the Jewish Theatre and the boulevard, bordered on my domain. That terrible evening it was tainted for me forever by something ominous and repulsive. In the towns and villages abandoned by the retreating Germans I remember the tragic face of Mikhoels in the role of King Lear, the duplicated photographs slapped on fences, stuck on wires, as the image of the Jew who must be exterminated. Now it had happened.
The following day the coffin was placed on the stage of the Jewish Theatre. We said goodbye to Mikhoels, along with a stream of people who walked past the coffin, crushed by our loss and this appalling sign of trouble brewing, from which there was no escape.
How could you live and write in a time like that?
You cannot live in constant fear: it just doesn’t happen. The contact between people, and love and friendship were more intense. We were close friends with some wonderful people. Despite all the hardships of daily life, we had such a creative atmosphere at home.
I was afraid of forgetting things about those events in Berlin, of letting them slip if I put everything off, so I began to write shortly after returning to Moscow, drawing on some entries in the notebook from that time. After Stalin’s death, in 1954, I took the manuscript to Znamya, which specializes in prose about the army. Because of the subject matter, the manuscript was sent for permission to publish to the Foreign Ministry. It was returned with their resolution: ‘At your discretion’: that is, they were not banning it. The editor, Vadim Kozhevnikov, was, however, highly circumspect in matters of discretion. He said to the editorial staff who were rooting for the manuscript, ‘This has never been written about before. Why should we be the first? And anyway, who is she?’ I was just someone off the street.
The manuscript was, nevertheless, published in Znamya (No. 2, 1955). It contained all the details of the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels, the discovery of Goebbels’ charred remains and those of his six children, murdered by their parents. They also kept in the testimony about the documents found in Hitler’s bunker and the main find: the diaries of Goebbels. There was the story of the removal and burning of Hitler’s body, and his burial there and then in the Reich Chancellery garden in a crater. In fact, everything except that we had found Hitler in that crater and identified him.
In other words, they left it hanging in the air whether this was fact or speculation. How did you manage to get round that ban?
That happened in 1961, in my book Spring in a Greatcoat, and in a fairly roundabout manner. After the war, I was drawn to impressions of life in peacetime. I wrote novellas that were far removed from my own biography, about life without the war, although interlayered with it.
The Soviet Writer publishing house was intending to publish a book consisting of two of my novellas, which I had already largely been paid for. It didn’t come off. Of course, I was very upset, but it was not the first or last time that a setback, providing it was not fatal, turned out to be all for the good. The publishing house had not forgotten the fee already paid and, two years later, suggested I should update the book. The writers Isaak Kramov and Boris Slutsky suggested I should slip in the Rzhev stories. So it was that in 1961 a book was published, titled Spring in a Greatcoat and containing stories about the war which had been lying around for fifteen years. They were warmly received, and that encouraged me to return to writing prose about the war. In addition, however, the book included my uncensored documentary account of how we found Hitler’s body. I put back in everything that had been taken out by Znamya: that is, everything about finding and identifying Hitler. Happily the censors paid no attention to the additions, because basically the text had already been published. And that is how, for the first time, the fact was made known that the Red Army had found Hitler’s body, although I had no documents to back that up, except for the one copy Ivan Klimenko had sent me.
Having that publication behind me was very helpful when I was trying to get permission to work in the Council of Ministers Archive. The Writers’ Union supported my application. I appealed to publishing houses and the Communist Party Central Committee, referring to the fact that I had been a participant in these events, that I was a writer who had already written about them, and that I now needed documentation for more in-depth and reliable work. For a long time it all seemed hopeless. The answer was always the same: ‘There is no access to these materials and no exceptions are likely to be made.’ But on the crest of the wave of national pride as the twentieth anniversary of victory approached, a miracle occurred and the doors of the secret archive opened before me. It was September 1964, and I got to work in the archive for twenty days.
At that time I did not know the name of the archive. During my conversation with Zhukov, he speculated that it was the Council of Ministers Archive, and he was right. Now that the documents are beginning to be published and the secrecy relaxed, we finally know which archive it was.
For me, the encounter with these documents was overwhelming. The intention had clearly been to leave them to moulder, silently covering up the mystery, and now it was my job to bring them out into the light, come hell or high water.
Here were our notes, documents, reports; and German orders, dispatches, letters, diaries, the folders I had worked through in the Reich Chancellery. There was much, too, that I now held in my hand for the first time. I plunged into the work, and made many amazing discoveries. For example, the testimony of Lieutenant General Rattenhuber, written under interrogation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs at General Staff Headquarters in Moscow; the testimony of Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Günsche; or a document revealing Hitler’s last plan, his gamble on a split between the Allies.
All the documents I did already know were also unique: the document about the discovery of Hitler’s body, the materials about our identification of it, and so on. In Western newspapers they were writing, and some information about it reached us, that the world still did not know the truth about Hitler’s fate. A shiver ran down my spine: ‘But I do, and I have the ability to describe it.’ It was all in my hands.
1
The artistic director of the Jewish Theatre, and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war. Tr.