The old saying goes, ‘God is not in power, but in truth,’ and all the truth is on our side: it was they who invaded and trampled on everything. Truth alone, however, will not deter or overcome them. Or is God, perhaps, now on the side of power?
To start with, the whole calamity of the war was blamed on Hitler, the evildoer, the mass murderer, the accursed Herod. He alone had caused all the misery. As the war has gone on, though, and spread, the German soldiers, their death-dealing army, their tanks and motorcycles, their swastikabearing planes, their seizure of our lands, the brutality, everything and everyone German that now fills our hearts with hatred has become united with Hitler, has become Hitler. He is now the collective image of the Nazis.
An order issued in Yelnya: ‘All Jews, of both sexes, are to wear a six-pointed star of David on their right and left sleeves.’
Another ‘reminder’ for the German soldier:
‘You have no heart, no nerves, they are not needed in war. Kill any Russian, any Soviet. Do not stop if before you is an old man or a woman, a young girl or boy. Kill them.’
You have only to become the slightest bit detached from your routine, walking by yourself along a road, or given a lift by a truck driver or on a cart, to be suddenly aware of how unusual everything is, how new, and you try to write something down. Being shaken about means much of it is almost illegible, the letters jumping all over the place, the words piling up on each other. Afterwards you can hardly decipher it.
The Germans are banging on again about ‘The Führer’s invincible line’. They mean our poor, suffering Rzhev.
He was sitting hunched on a tree stump with his arms around his rifle, completely exhausted.
‘Time to stop roosting,’ his comrade prompted him, getting up.
They staggered off to the front line.
We have been forced to become warlike,’ the girl sniper tells me. She is wearing a quilted jumpsuit. When she is going out on ambush she also wears a white sheepskin jacket and white camouflage smock with a hood. She lies in the snow with her sights trained on a German bunker they have found, or think they have found, just waiting for one of the enemy to stick his head out. She lies there all the daylight hours, with unbelievable female patience. With all due respect, I cannot help feeling her work is more like hunting than warfare.
She studied at an economic planning college and sounds bookish when she speaks, tense but truthful. She worries that she may get too cold, lying there in the snow, and then find herself unable to have children.
War opens wounds, it injects something into your soul that was not there before it… Everything is ‘seen from the viewpoint of war’, ‘from the standpoint of war’. It takes over everything. What else is there besides its cruel dictates. Even the ability to feel pity can be remade into something more attuned to war. I am no better, no wiser, no more contemptible or purer than war. I, too, belong to it.
An evil-smelling aspen grove swimming in autumn mist; the invasive, inky smell of wet boughs beginning to sprout. The squelch of marsh mud beneath boots. The pealing thunder of battle. In this grove are several Germans we have already interrogated, no longer squealers, just prisoners, but we cannot spare anyone to escort them to the rear: everyone fit for combat is fighting, so for now we have to keep these prisoners within our headquarters compound. They have made themselves a lean-to and sleep in that, then spend the day outside awaiting whatever fate has in store for them. In the light of dawn, when everything is spectral in that dank aspen grove, the moment I emerge from the bunker the Germans, waiting and raring to go, start their comedy jazz routine. These ghostly, chilled Germans alongside their lean-to, their jazz antics to greet me in the morning, making fun of themselves and me, their efforts to attract my attention, to incline fate more kindly towards them, and simply to warm themselves up: that too is something that will stay with me now and give me no peace.
The prisoner was brought to headquarters blindfolded in accordance with the regulations, although this was the first time I had seen them observed. The new commander of our army interrogated him personally, with me interpreting.
The questioning left us none the wiser: the prisoner had arrived in this sector two days previously and knew nothing about anything. Suddenly, right at the end, he dropped in passing the fact that yesterday they had been ordered to hand in their second blanket to the baggage train, keeping just one for themselves. From my experience as an interpreter I recognized that this was of major significance: soldiers usually surrendered surplus items to the baggage train immediately before a move, so it was true: the Germans were preparing to retreat before the ring of encirclement closed around Rzhev.
In the bunker of the divisional chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Rodionov. The regimental commander’s courier brought a first report from Rzhev. I asked permission to copy it into my diary: ‘We are clearing the city of snipers. The Regimental Headquarters is located at 128 Kalinin Street.’
A second courier: ‘1,000 wagons of captured goods. The population has been driven into the church. It has been boarded up and mines laid round it.’
How poignant, solemn and simple these moments are. We are in Rzhev. 3 March 1943.
The bullet-riddled water tower sticks up bizarrely over everything. Black ruins of buildings blanketed in snow. That is all there is. Can this be what remains of Rzhev?
It is getting dark. An armoured train steams down the track.
This time there were no great battles, no tank engagements. The enemy surrendered the city without a fight, withdrew, using rearguard units to cover the main forces’ retreat. But what of it, when the seventeen months it has taken to get back here into Rzhev, every metre we advanced or even just managed to hold, has been paid for by the crucifixion of the Red Army?
But now I am writing in my diary, ‘I am in Rzhev’ and, having written it, I am awestruck. I have been advancing towards this turning point for years, losing one after another of those with whom I should have been sharing these emotions and the sense of responsibility imposed by this return to Rzhev.
Seventeen peaceful years after the end of the war in 1945 I returned to Rzhev, following the same route I had taken to the front in February 1942, freezing in the back of a truck with my warrant of assignment. It had been a dog-legged route via recently liberated Kalinin, because the direct road to Rzhev at that time was the front line.
This time when I reached Kalinin I went to visit the local history museum. There was a special exhibition on ‘The Patriotic War of 1812’, the war with Napoleon, because that year we were separated from it by a full 150 years. About ‘The Second Patriotic War’, also known as ‘The Second World War’, there was nothing, and by the time they get round to mounting an exhibition on it in connection with some suitably round number of elapsed years, the memory will have faded away, the would-be exhibits will be buried in the earth, and it will be just as dull, official and devoid of human reality as the exhibition presented here for a 150th anniversary.
Where are our banners riddled with bullet holes, discoloured by the rain, shredded by the wind? Our soot-covered mess tins, cape groundsheets, and soldiers’ foot wrappings a verst long? Where are our 1891-vintage rifles, the local kilometre-to-the-centimetre maps, the morse code telegraph keys, the dried bread you softened in a puddle? Where are the dog tags that identified dead soldiers?