We had again to fight in battle. After a long railway journey we arrived in Smolensk. I shall never forget the bitterly fought battles that resulted in heavy losses on both sides.
On 18 October my commanding officer awarded me the Iron Cross, First Class. After that I had to endure the season of impassable mud, and during this time I learned to ride a horse. I especially remember the Khloshchevka Stadium deep in mud. We crossed the field of Borodino, where Napoleon fought a battle, of which there are still reminders in the form of numerous obelisks on soldiers’ graves. We waded across the Moscow River, then marched to Vishenki. We repulsed an enemy attack. Our first acquaintance with Siberian divisions. Beginning of the advance on Moscow.
In early October I was still in Moscow. Columns of volunteers – students, workers, academics – streamed along Leningrad Highway (now Leningrad Prospekt) on their way to the front to defend Moscow. The Moscow Conservatory marched past, our famous musicians. Everybody was marching out to defend Moscow. On the other side of the highway the No. 12 trolleybus (which today still follows the same route) was bringing back the wounded from the front line to the trolleybus terminal on Volokolamsk Highway; that is how close the front line was. By now long-distance trains were departing from just three railway stations; from the others local trains travelled only to suburban stops. At Byelorussia Station, near my house, there were anti-tank stakes and ‘hedgehogs’, and barricades on the Garden Ring Road. Shop windows were bricked up, with gun slits left in them. Moscow was preparing for fighting in the streets.
When war comes, you defend your home. My duty was to keep watch from the roof of a high neighbouring building and put out incendiary bombs. I had a supply of sand, but had not yet been told what to do with it. There I was, however, alone, looking out over the city, part of the war effort.
There is an explosion as a bomb drops nearby. An anti-aircraft gun opens up from an adjacent roof, giving away our whereabouts. A blacked-out city, everything swallowed up in darkness, lit only by the snaking of tracer bullets. It is all so peculiar, so unfathomable, so monstrously beautiful and breathtaking.
In those early weeks of intensive mobilization, when the recruitment offices were working flat out, it was impossible, and would have been pointless, for a girl not liable for conscription and devoid of useful qualifications to push her way into the enlistment centre.
My friend Vika Malt and I were sent to work at No. 2 Moscow Clock Factory in a workshop that, under the mobilization plan, had been switched to producing cartridge cases. Vika and I had no intention, however, of sitting out the war in a factory and enrolled, while continuing our contribution to producing military supplies, on an intensive evening course in nursing.
It was a course of no fixed abode and shifted up and down deserted Malaya Bronnaya Street. Our fellow nomad was a cumbersome visual aid, a large skeleton whose ribs rattled but who stood on his own two firmly fixed feet, and who had an inventory tag with the number ‘4417’ attached to his pubic bone. He migrated with us to the food hall of a grocer’s shop, then to a school gymnasium, and even on to the stage of the Malaya Bronnaya Jewish Theatre, behind a partition: ‘Shhh! There’s a rehearsal going on!’ The theatre was preparing for the start of the season.
We received certificates testifying to our completion of an intensive nursing course, but then discovered nobody had any intention of sending us to the front: hospitals were being set up in the east of the country. Our thoughts, however, were only of going to the front line. I heard there was an urgent campaign to enlist students on military translation courses. Interpreters were in desperately short supply: this was not the First World War, when the officers themselves were fluent in the language of the enemy. The situation now was very different.
In those days there were no special schools teaching a foreign language, but almost all schools taught German at some level. How well it was taught, and what we thought of it, is conveyed by a verse that did the rounds in our schooclass="underline"
At the front, then, there was an acute shortage of interpreters, and it transpired that without them it was impossible to wage war at all competently. That eventually sank in, and, by order of General Headquarters, courses for military translators were hastily set up at the Army Faculty of Western Languages.
The entrance exam was laughable, and entirely appropriate to the level of our competence. Some of us, though, including me, had been learning the language since childhood, and I found my name on the lists of those who had passed. For the moment, however, I was on a waiting list because only boys were being enrolled; there was a rumour the interpreters would also be given parachute training.
Days passed. There was fighting on the approaches to Kalinin. Oryol had fallen. Finally, on 9 October, I went to ask when I would be able to join the course. ‘You haven’t taken the oath yet,’ the major said. ‘It’s for you to decide. You can see for yourself what the situation is. But if you haven’t changed your mind…’ He named a time and place for me to present myself the next day.
Packing did not take long. I had done a lot of laundry the day before but the sheets and pillowcases just would not dry in my cold apartment, so I left them hanging on lines in the kitchen. I packed an old blanket in my suitcase; it had long been serving as an underlay for ironing and was covered in scorch marks, but it was to accompany me everywhere for the duration of the war. I could hardly take a quilt.
What else I packed I do not remember, because I even forgot to take a towel. I was sure that, like the volunteers, we would be sent to the nearest sector of the front to defend Moscow. In the army, I was also sure, we would be issued everything we needed. The reality was different.
A steamer was moored waiting for us, and we sailed out along the Moscow–Volga canal. There was already fighting on the approaches to Moscow. It was 10 October and the journey was long and slow. Aggravation, unease, but also curiosity: might something happen to us? We were hungry, we had a sense of foreboding, and we did not know where we were being taken because that was a military secret. The steamer finally tied up at a little town called Stavropol-on-Volga.
Later, at the front at Rzhev, I was to translate a captured document dated October 1941:
Soldiers! Before you lies Moscow! In two years of warfare all the capitals of the continent have bowed before you; you have marched through the streets of the finest cities. That leaves Moscow. Force her to bow, show her the power of your weapons, stroll through her squares. Moscow is the end of the war!
From the diary of Lieutenant Kurt Grumann:
18 November 1941. The day has come. We are to take part in the encirclement of Moscow.