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While we were talking howitzers, the Hs 126, the Ju 88, paragraphs of their regulations, everything seemed more or less in its right place: tidy, alien, intangible and menacing; but that memorandum suddenly gave us a vivid insight into what these people were going through. They were suffering from the cold. They were, damn their eyes, animate beings.

The iced-over Volga cut us off from the outside world, but late one evening the news broke in those muffled, snowbound streets: the Germans were being driven back from Moscow! We could not sit still at school and rushed back to the hostel to the boys, hugging them and singing. Next I received a letter from my brother, a cavalry scout in a Moscow volunteer regiment: ‘Where we are, the Germans are on the run!’ What could be better?

14 December 1941. Enemy broke through to behind our lines. Unable to destroy them… Risk being cut off. Immediate retreat essential. Encounter other retreating regiments creating first bottlenecks, but complete chaos in next village, Likhovo: numerous units pouring in as divisions roll back.

15 December 1941. On the road I travel on, boxes of ammunition and shells abandoned everywhere, mountains of them. Gridlock. Can’t go backwards or forwards.

16 December 1941. I think the only time I saw anything like this was during the campaign in the West, when the French troops were retreating.

I remember last summer. We were at war now. We had been told, ‘The Soviet people will defend the Fatherland, honour and freedom.’ Moscow: already cars with foreign flags were dashing through the streets, rescuing embassy families from our disaster. I stood in a silent crowd by a loudspeaker at Nikita Gate. The announcer warned that the situation was menacing. Across the road, the classic films cinema was advertising When the Dead Awaken.

I remember, too, on the very first day of the war, blackout ‘curtains’ were being issued to everyone. They were made of strong, heavy paper no one had ever seen before. We tacked them up, adjusted them, curtained the windows, masking the lights. They were to be in place ‘for the duration of the war’. Now everything imaginable, everything you had to do had just one measure of time: ‘for the duration’. If I was ironing a pair of trousers: ‘Here, now you can wear them for the duration.’

It was a new concept of time: not present, not future, but a present extending into the future; not even into the future but into an invocation of a future when the war would be over. The invocation, though, was halfhearted. Yes, we were agitated, taken aback, bemused by the new ways. ‘Oh, so this is it, the war we’ve had hanging over us for so long.’ But everyone was still fine, still alive, not yet affected.

Now Churchill had said, ‘We shall bomb Berlin night and day.’

Now the first bombs had fallen on Moscow.

Now ration cards had been introduced.

The city had shortages, but it also revealed to us unsuspected dimensions and hitherto unseen surfaces. We had ‘our’ roofs, on which, high above the ground, we did our stint, looking out for incendiary bombs. People had ‘their’ cellars, to which indestructible men and women with gas masks over their shoulders directed panicky citizens; from where explosions in the streets above could be heard; where children cried and women sobbed; where a boy of six, standing beside his mother who was sitting on the floor rocking a child wrapped in a blanket, held on to her shoulder and reassured her, pouting his lips: ‘They won’t get us.’

Moscow was not so easy to destroy, not so easy to crush by war. The city had many levels and was inseparable from the recent past, hence not wholly immersed in the war, but even its ordinary aspects came now to seem unusual. The scent of the nicotiana flowers in the courtyard of our block, the shooting stars falling on the city from a now very deep sky. It was August, so there were shooting stars. I noted in my diary then, in August 1941, ‘Remember this is how it all really was: the nicotiana, Soviet power, shooting stars.’ The mailbox by the entrance door had a postcard announcing classes would begin at college on 1 September, as usual. The routes of the trams and trolleybuses had not changed since I was at school. There was the little restaurant on Tverskoy Boulevard where I had to shelter from the rain, and found the throaty voices of the gypsies as impassioned as ever. The war had not stopped the town clock on Pushkin Square, the beacon for all our rendezvous.

Only we would not be going to college on 1 September. We would be saying goodbye to Moscow, never to return, because when we did return it would be to an entirely different city.

Our course, and a semblance of examinations, went on for about another week. On our way to the canteen we sang our customary ditty one last time.

He is marching out the gate a military translator. But though he strained and strained, He is far from being trained. A maiden, like his shadow…

Actually, we had received some training, but suddenly realized (Auerbach raised the alarm) that we had not learned any German swear words. What if an officer needed to swear at a prisoner and the interpreter did not have the vocabulary? Consternation. The command instructed Auerbach to compile, as a matter of extreme urgency, a dictionary of German swear words. He would appear of an evening in the propaganda room, where we were preparing for the exams in the bright light of the topped up oil lamps. ‘“Beanpole”, is that a very serious insult?’ he enquired (he knew German much better than Russian). Suddenly melancholy, he gazed at a girl from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History [IPLH] for whom he had a weakness and told her gallantly, ‘Your appearance at the front would cause the moral disintegration of a full-strength Bavarian division.’

In the final lessons he is teaching us hastily: ‘You are being parachuted in behind enemy lines. You land. Suddenly out of the bushes – a Nazi! Imagine yourself for a moment…’ Personally, I cannot imagine it, but nod affirmatively.

‘You shout, “Halt!” But that is not enough. To crush his morale you must swear very hard!’ Towering on tiptoe, he exclaims threateningly, ‘In a minute I am going to hit you so hard that your head will crash into the wall and your brains will have to be scooped up with spoons!’

Genosse [Comrade] Auerbach, do they not have any more succinct ways of swearing?’

The dictionary of German swearing was sent after us to the front but never reached headquarters. Although this particular reference work proved unnecessary, I was sad not to be in possession of such a unique publication. Learning this, one of my readers – by now in the 1990s – kindly donated me hers. It was a more than generous gift because, judging from the inscription, its author’s relationship with her had been more than is customary between teacher and student.

As I browsed through the pages I immediately noticed ‘beanpole’, sometimes alternating with ‘hatrack’, again and again in different pejorative phrases. Auerbach’s favourite term of abuse was perhaps not unrelated to the complexes of a man of diminutive stature. ‘Swindler’, ‘cunning thief’, ‘cannibal’, ‘milksop’, ‘coffee grinder’ (chatterbox), ‘illegitimate person’, ‘cutthroat’, ‘clapped-out nag’, ‘obscurantist’, ‘Hitler dog’, ‘bumhole’. A member of the SS, the dictionary advises, should be called a ‘lacquered turd’. Auerbach achieved the feat of getting past the military censor several words that at that time were considered totally unprintable, and beneath the dedication signed himself, ‘Author of the world’s only dictionary of swearing, Theo Auerbach’.

It strikes me as I write this that his time at Stavropol, the era of his dictionary, was probably Auerbach’s finest hour. That makes me a little wistful.