People, Years, Life (an extract)

translated by Artem Abdumazhitov, Gleb Berezin, Milana Danchenko, Nika Kostoglod, Alina Kovalenko, Artem Stanulevich, Alexander Onistratenko, Maxim Shalavin, Mark Zebzeev, Mark Shadrin , students of the Gymnasium 32, Kaliningrad

edited by Yevgeniya Kislitsyna and Svetlana Aleksandrova, the teachers of the English language of the Gymnasium 32, Kaliningrad

In 1944, a war correspondent of Krasnaya Zvezda wrote about me, “A middle-aged unmistakably civilian man dressed in a baggy brown coat and a fur civilian hat, with a cigar in his mouth was riding in a mud-splattered Willys along the frontline strip. Slightly hunched, he was unhurriedly walking along the forward positions speaking in a quiet voice and never for a moment attempting to conceal the fact that he was a deeply civilian person.”

In late January, when I told General Talensky that I wanted to go to the East Prussia he smiled and said, “You’ll have to wear a uniform, or else, heaven forbid, they might take you for a kraut.” I had no rank and so my brand-new officer’s greatcoat lacking insignia probably looked even more ridiculous than the baggy brown coat on me. However, I did not realise it until the Germans began persistently calling me “Herr Kommissar.”

Our troops were rapidly advancing westward leaving behind isolated pockets where encircled German forces were still holding out. In the city of Bartenstein, buildings were still burning; enemy positions were nearby. I met General Chanchibadze there—he smirked and said, “This isn’t Rzhev…” He spoke about the soldiers’ eagerness to push forward but complained about the shortage of shells. (The Germans held out in that “cauldron” for another two months.) In Elbing, when I arrived, street fighting was still ongoing despite the previous day reports claiming the city had been taken. Sometimes the enemy retreated hastily, sometimes he resisted desperately. Mines were planted everywhere—in school buildings, peasant barns, shoe stores. A general shouted into the phone, “Listen, turn up the heat—he’s biting back, the devil…” And a soldier told me about his comrade, “He kept saying, ‘The Fritzes are spent,’—and in less than a day I had to carry him to the field hospital. They took one look and said, ‘Too late…’”

Everyone understood that the end was near but no one was sure they would live to see it. In early February, the weather changed sharply— spring had already come. The sun was warm. In the abandoned gardens, snowdrops and purple crocuses began to bloom. The nearness of the final victory made death seem all the more senseless and terrifying.

The thought that we were moving deeper into Germany made my head spin. I had written so much about this when the Nazis were at the Volga and now I was driving along a good, smooth road lined with linden trees, looking at the old castle, the town hall, and the shops with German signs, and I could not believe it: could we really be in Germany? At one point, I met my old friends – Cossacks from Tatsinskaya village in the Rostov Region. Smiling, we were mindlessly repeating for a long time: "So this is where..."

Almost everyone had their own grief: two brothers were killed, house was burned down and sisters were taken to Germany, mother was killed in Poltava, the whole family was tortured in Gomel' - the hatred was alive, not yet quieted. My God, if Hitler or Himmler, ministers, Gestapo officers or these executioners appeared before us! But on the road, there were only creaking wagons, elderly German women were running around helplessly, kids were crying because they had lost their parents, and my heart was filling with pity. Of course, I remembered that the Germans were not sparing our relatives, of course I did, but one thing is fascism, Reich, Germany, and another is an old man in a ridiculous Tyrolean feathered hat running around the damaged street, waving a shred of a sheet.

In Rastenburg, a soldier of the Red Army violently stabbed a woman made of papier-mâché, which was put on display in a wrecked shop. The doll smiled flirty, and he was stabbing again and again. I said, “Stop it! The Germans are watching...” He replied, “Bastards! They tortured my wife...” He was from Belorussia.

In the same Rastenburg, Mayor Rosenfeld was assigned the role of city's commandant. Hitlerites had killed his family but he did everything he could to protect the population of the German city. He let me stay overnight at his place. In the house of a wealthy fascist there was an amateur photo on the wall: the house owner's daughter giving a bouquet to Hitler. Locals told me that Hitler stayed in this house when he visited East Prussia. Mayor Rosenfeld honed for being separated from his regiment but he worked almost around the clock. While I was there, a small girl was brought to the governor - her parents had died. The mayor looked at her with some affection and sorrow in his eyes, perhaps remembering his own daughter. How many times he must have repeated to himself the words about “sacred vengeance” and in Rastenburg, he realized it was an abstraction and that the wound in his heart would not heal.

The joy of victory was again mixed with that sorrow which invariably arises when you see the war – neither in battle painting nor on a screen, but in touching distance: splintered houses, down feathers from bedding, refugees, bundles, unmilked cows, and someone's long, piercing scream that lingers in the ears for a long time.

Some cities and towns were shattered by artillery; in Kreuzburg, only the prison remained intact. Among the ruins of Wehlau I did not find a single German: they had all fled. Other cities survived. In Rastenburg, the residents were clearing the streets of furniture debris, broken carts. In Elbing, there were sixty thousand people– a third of the population remained.

East Prussia had long been considered the most reactionary part of Germany. There were few factories and few workers here. Prosperous peasants voted for Hindenburg and then unanimously shouted “Heil Hitler.” The landowners were true reactionaries. Any liberal concession seemed to be an insult to their ancestral honour. In the towns, there lived merchants, officials and lawyers, doctors, notaries, people of intellectual professions who were difficult to classify as the intelligentsia. The houses were clean, well-maintained, with a bourgeois cosiness, with deer antlers in the dining room, with embroidered maxims like “Order in the house - order in the state” or “Work hard to see sweet dreams”. In the kitchen, there were faience jars labelled “Salt,” “Pepper,” “Cumin,” “Coffee.” On the shelf, there were some books: the Bible, poems by Uhland, an occasional volume of Goethe, inherited from the past, and a dozen new editions – “Mein Kampf,” “Campaign in Poland,” “Racial Hygiene Basics,” “Our Faithful Prussia.” In the cities like Rastenburg, Lötzen, Tapiau, there were no public libraries. In Bartenstein, I was told that the museum building was undamaged. I alarmed the commandant, “Set up a guard immediately.” I went to the museum and felt uneasy: besides stuffed animals, there were very monotonous exhibits: a huge portrait of Hindenburg, a map of military operations in 1914, trophies – the shoulder straps of a Russian officer, a photograph of destroyed Warsaw, portraits of local benefactresses.

Our soldiers were surveying the surroundings. One of them, I remember, smirked, “In such a den, one could live.” Another cursed, “Bastards, they lived well, why did they come for us?” He pointed at the embroidered Ukrainian towels in the festive kitchen. “Look, even these are ours!”

I was having dinner with General G.I. Anisimov, commander of the corps, in Elbing when a lieutenant rushed in, “May I report?” The lieutenant said that thirty or forty people had been found in one of the basements. They refused to come out shouting that they were Swiss and demanding to be left alone. The misunderstanding was quickly cleared up. Someone brought a man to the general. The former was dressed in a suit soiled with coal and unshaven for a long time. He introduced himself as Karl Brendenberg, Vice Consul of Switzerland. Quite a few Swiss turned out to be living in Elbing, they had settled here as cheese-making specialists. The general ordered that the hungry vice consul be fed and given something to drink, and then all the Swiss citizens should be taken out of the basement. I was surprised that the charter of immunity presented by the neutral cheese-maker was written in Russian and issued by the Swiss government in autumn 1944. The vice consul explained, “They foresaw events in Bern.” And smiling slightly, he added, “In Bern, but not in Elbing...”

The General Vicar complained to me that under Hitler the Germans had lost their faith (two pastors also spoke about this). It seemed to me that they had simply changed the object of their worship. The infallibility of the Pope no longer interested Catholics but they believed fervently in the infallibility of the Führer. The Red Army's invasion of East Prussia caught its inhabitants off guard: they believed not only in Hitler but also in his assistants and Gauleiter Erich Koch wrote in early January, “The Russians will never break through into the depths of East Prussia — over four months we have dug trenches and ditches totalling 22,875 kilometres.”

The figure was reassuring. In Liebstadt, I found an unfinished Certificate of Aryan Origin - on January 12th, a certain Scheller, intending to marry, filled out a questionnaire about his ancestors but did not manage to submit the certificate for one of his grandfathers: on January 26th, Soviet tanks entered Liebstadt.

In 1944, I often asked myself: what would happen when the Red Army entered Germany? After all, Hitler had managed to convince not just individual fanatics but millions of his compatriots that they were a chosen nation, that plutocrats and communists, having united, were depriving talented and hardworking Germans of living space, and that a great mission laid upon Germany to establish a new order in Europe. I remembered some conversations with prisoners of war, diaries that were striking not only in their cruelty but also in their cult of force, death, a mixture of vulgar Nietzscheanism and resurrected superstitions. I expected the population to meet the Red Army with desperate resistance. I saw inscriptions everywhere made on the eve of our troops' arrival, curses, and calls to fight, “Rastenburg will always be German!”, “Elbing will not surrender!”, “Residents of Tapiau remember Hindenburg. Death to Russians!” I read a leaflet that mentioned the traditions of the Werwolf for some reason; I asked a captain who was engaged in propaganda among the enemy troops and therefore knew German well what Werwolf meant. He replied, “A general's surname, I think he fought in Libya...” I decided to check, looked into an explanatory dictionary and read, “In ancient Germanic sagas, the Werwolf possesses supernatural power, it is clad in a wolf's skin, which lives in oak forests and attacks people destroying all living things.” In Rastenburg, I found a school notebook where a boy had written, “I swear to be a Werwolf and kill Russians!” But in the same Rastenburg, not only teenagers or old people, but also residents of military age who were stuck there behaved like model children. The Hitlerites had produced small daggers with the inscription on the blade, “Everything for Germany.” The instructions said these daggers would help German patriots fight the red invaders. I took such a dagger; it served me as a can opener. I never heard anything about stabbed Red Army soldiers. It was all just talk, Goebbels' fantasy, sinister fascist romanticism. Of course, among the civilian population there were not only harmless old men and boys, there were wolves too but unlike the mythical Werwolves, they preferred to dress sheep's clothing temporarily and diligently followed any order from the Soviet commandant.

I visited dozens of cities, spoke to various people: doctors, notaries, teachers, peasants, innkeepers, tailors, shopkeepers, turners, brewers, jewellers, agronomists, pastors, even a specialist in family trees creating. I sought answers from a Catholic vicar, a professor at the University of Marburg, elderly people, and schoolchildren. I wanted to understand their attitude towards the idea of a “herrenvolk”, the dream of conquering India, Hitler's personality, and the ovens of Auschwitz. Everywhere I heard the same thing, “We had nothing to do with it…” One said he had never been interested in politics, the war was a disaster, it was only the SS that supported Hitler. Another claimed he had voted for the Social Democrats in the last election in 1933. The third swore he was related to his brother-in-law, who was a communist and participated in an underground organization in Hanover.

Near Elbing, in the village of Hohenwald, a German raised his fist, greeting the “Mr. Commissar”, “Rot Front!” In his house, our soldiers found an album of amateur photographs: Russians being hanged, a sign with large lettering next to the gallows, “I wanted to set fire to the sawmill, The Partisans' henchman”; Jewish women with stars on their chests are waiting to be shot in a wagon. The discovery did not silence the pseudo-member of “Rotfront”. He kept talking about his fight against the Nazis, “An unknown Sturmabteilung member left these photos. He might have visited my brother. My brother was very naive, they killed him on the Eastern Front, and I fought in Holland, France, Italy – I have not been to Russia. Believe me: deep inside, I'm a communist…”

Of course, among the hundreds of people I spoke with, there were some who seemed to be sincere but I could not tell the difference between them - they all repeated the same thing. I would respond with a polite smile. Perhaps the sincerest one was an elderly German I met on the road to Preußisch Eylau, who was returning from the west. He said, “Herr Stalin hat gesiegt, ich gehe nach Hause” (“Mr. Stalin has won, I'm going home”).

The people I talked to initially claimed they knew nothing about Auschwitz, the “torchbearers,” the burned villages, the mass extermination of the Jews; but then, after realizing that they personally were not in danger, they admitted that soldiers on leave had told many stories and condemned Hitler, the SS, and the Gestapo.

The Third Reich, which had recently seemed to be unshakeable, collapsed instantly, and everything (for a while) went into hiding, crawling into cracks - the simplified Nietzscheanism, the talk of German superiority, of Germany's historical mission. All I saw was a desire to save their possessions and the habit of punctually obeying orders. Everyone greeted me respectfully, trying to smile. In the Masurian Lake District, my car got stuck; Germans appeared from nowhere, pulled the car out, and eagerly explained the best way to proceed. In Elbing, there was still shooting but a correct, portly burgher took the initiative to bring a folding ladder and move the hands on a large clock forward by two hours, “It is keeping good time now, it's twelve past three Moscow time…”

A frontline officer was appointed as the city commandant, and of course, he was not specifically trained for that kind of position. They pasted a stereotypical announcement with rules. One of our commandants said laughing, “I haven't even read what it says but they've studied it from the first letter to the last - what's allowed and what's not. In under an hour, they started coming: one was asking if he could climb onto the roof and repair a hole, another was asking where to take a Russian worker – she was lying ill, the third was snitching on a neighbour...”

In Elbing, I witnessed an extraordinary sight—thousands of German men and women, elderly people, and small children were desperately waiting to get into the prison. I approached one of them, the most peaceful-looking of the crowd, and asked, “Why are you standing here in the cold? Show me the city. You must know which neighbourhoods are still dangerous…” At first, he complained—he had lost his place in the line and explained that the prison was now the safest place. The Russians were sure to put guards there, and he could wait out the chaos in peace. He only calmed down when I promised to bring him to the prison in the evening. He was a tram conductor. I did not ask him about Hitler—I already knew what he would say. He told me his house had burned down, and he had barely escaped with nothing but the jacket on his back. It was a cold day. As we walked past a clothing store, coats, raincoats, and suits lay scattered on the street. I told him to take a coat for himself. He recoiled in fear, “What are you saying, Herr Commissar? These are Russian trophies…” I offered him to issue a written permit. After thinking it over, he asked, “Do you have an official stamp, Herr Commissar? Without a stamp, it’s not a genuine document. No one will take it on trust.”

In Rastenburg, my guide was a boy named Vasya whom the Germans had taken from Grodno. He told me he had worked in a wealthy German’s house, forced to wear an identification tag on his chest, everyone shouted at him. Now he was walking beside me and passing Germans greeted him politely, “Good afternoon, Herr Vasya!”

Later, the West German press wrote frequently about “Russian atrocities” trying to explain the submissive behaviour of locals as fear. To be honest, I personally was afraid that after everything the invaders had done to our country the Red Army soldiers would seek revenge. In dozens of articles, I repeated that we must not—and indeed could not—seek retribution. We were Soviet people, not fascists. Many times, I saw our frowned but silent soldiers walking past refugees. Patrols protected civilians. Of course, there were incidents of violence and looting—every army has its criminals, thugs, and drunks—but our command fought against such crimes. The people’s servility was not a result of Russian soldiers’ tyranny but of their own confusion: their dream had collapsed, discipline had crumbled, and those who had been accustomed to marching in step got scattered like a herd of frightened sheep.

I rejoiced at our victory, at the war’s nearing end. Yet, it was unbearable to look around. I do not know what unsettled me more—either the ruins of cities, or the snowfall of down feathers on the roads, or the humiliation and submissiveness of people. It was in those days that I realized the bond of shared guilt, linking the ruthless SS officers with the gentle Frau Müller of Rastenburg, who had never killed anyone—she had merely acquired cheap labour, a maid named Nastya from the Russian City of Oryol.

Looking at the smiles of the burghers of Rastenburg or Elbing, I did not feel gloating. Disgust mingled with pity within me and it sometimes poisoned the great happiness I felt seeing our soldiers who had fought their way from the Volga to the mouth of the Vistula. I rested while talking with the liberated people, with Soviet girls, with citizens and soldiers of countries enslaved by Hitler. In Bartenstein, I happened to witness a rare meeting: among the liberated Soviet women a soldier, originally from Smolensk, ran into his sister with two children of eleven and nine years old. Until recently, this woman had been digging the trenches Erich Koch boasted about. She could not utter a single word but cried, “Vasya!... Vasenka!...” And the older boy admired the two medals on Uncle Vasya's chest.

Was there anyone I did not meet! Among the liberated, there were people of different countries and professions: French prisoners of war, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Englishmen, several Americans, a student from Athens, Dutch actors, a Czech professor, an Australian farmer, Polish girls, some priests, the crew of a Norwegian sailing ship. Everyone was shouting, joking, and having no idea how to express their joy.

The French had obtained German bicycles and were riding east. They wanted to get home as soon as possible. Among them, there was always someone who cooked well, and, after slaughtering a ram, they would arrange a feast, invite our soldiers, sing, joke, and amuse even the imperturbable Englishmen.

In captivity, everyone had learned to speak a little German. A Belgian was telling a Czech what he had experienced, while the Yugoslavs and Englishmen were discussing what to do with Germany now. It was much easier to reach an agreement here than at the Yalta or Potsdam Conference: people understood each other.

In Elbing, in the barracks where prisoners of war were held, I saw their rules printed in ten languages. In the Masurian Lake District, the French had to cut down forests and build military fortifications. On the von Dinghof estate, there were French, Russian, and Polish workers—one hundred and five souls in total. A railway worker from Dnepropetrovsk, Chulovsky, made friends with a Moroccan and taught him a little Russian.

In the small backwater town of Bartenstein, each family with three children was assigned a labourer—a Russian or a Polish woman. One farmer’s wife told me she lived frugally; she had only a Ukrainian woman and an Italian man to work for her. She paid sixty marks to the Arbeitsamt for them. Today everyone knows this but back then it shocked me: they had revived the slavery of the ancient world. The only difference is that now Euripides has given way to Baldur von Schirach and Auschwitz has replaced the Acropolis.

A French military doctor told me that not far from their camp there was another one where Soviet prisoners of war were held. A typhus epidemic broke out. The Nazi doctor said, “There’s no point treating them—they’ll die anyway...” Every day the dead were buried. “I saw,” the Frenchman said, “how they buried the living along with the corpses... I can’t remember it without horror.”

In Bartenstein, our sappers found a notebook in a kitchen—it was a Russian girl diary. I took it with me. The entries were simple, which made them all the more powerful:

“September 26. Took advantage of her absence and tuned the radio to Moscow. Kharkov is ours! I was crying with joy all day. I kept telling myself, 'You fool, we’re winning,' yet I couldn’t stop crying. I thought of Petya. Where is he now? Is he alive? Maybe he’s forgotten me? It doesn’t matter, as long as he’s alive! I know I won’t live to see freedom, but now I am certain—we will win...”

“November 11. My birthday. I remembered how Tanya and Ninochka used to come over. We drank tea with cakes and discussed books. Tanya always praised her ‘I.’ Did I ever think I would end up carrying out her chamber pots and putting up with her ridicule?...”

I do not know the girl's name, I do not know if she lived to see freedom, and what happened to her afterward, but I could not help admiring the people who truly liberated human souls, whereas it was unbearably sad to think of those who perished in the Kiev encirclement, near Rzhev and Stalingrad.

I spent the night in Gutstadt and was to leave in the morning. The division commander urged me to stay for lunch. He said I absolutely had to see the ancient monastery. I gave in. Instead of a monastery, I saw the ruins: the monastery had been shelled. A pile of books lay on the ground: the small ones, those in leather or parchment bindings, the kind I had seen in other cities: prayer books, Psalters, Bibles, works of the Church Fathers. I was about to leave when - I do not know why - I bent down and picked up a small book. I was stunned it was the first collected edition of Ronsard’s poems published in Paris in 1579! Volume two, three, four – poems by one of Ronsard’s friends, Remy Belleau. A volume of Lucian’s works translated in French. (I later gave Lucian to diplomat Y. Z. Surits, but I kept the Ronsard and Belleau.) On the first page was a note: so-and-so bought it there, paid so much. In the 16th century, monks who were overly fond of women and wine were sent to remote monasteries, to the fringes of the Catholic world. Naturally, a man who enjoyed Ronsard's poetry and Lucian's satires was not an ascetic. Probably, when the errant monk died in forgotten Gutstadt, his books ended up in the monastery library – the Germans did not understand what these books were; no one looked at them, and they were miraculously preserved.

In the car, I opened the Ronsard volume and was stunned again – I opened it to the very poem from which I had taken excerpts for “The Fall of Paris” – the lines read by Jeannette to Dessers:

Even death acknowledges your dominion.

The earth cannot withstand love,

Together we shall see the ship of oblivion

And the Elysian Fields…

It was all so incongruous: the ruins, tanks, field hospital, and Ronsard, love, the Elysian Fields – not the Parisian but the other ones that Pushkin wrote of, “And Edmond will not abandon Jenny even in the heavens…”

Two weeks later, having returned to Moscow, I told Y.I. Paletskis about the Swiss vice-consul in Vilnius. We laughed repeating to each other, “Now it will soon be over!…”

Then I drove through the destroyed Minsk. A familiar road – burned villages, the City of Borisov. The tannery where the Nazis killed people… The snow still mercifully covered the burned, scarred land, rusty wire, empty shell casings, some bones.

I suddenly wondered: here is victory, so why is sadness mixed with joy? That had not happened before. Apparently, the nearness of the end makes me reflect. I remembered the Ronsard volumes. In 1940 in Paris I wrote:

So many times in years of woeful pressure

Amid war roar and scantiness of nature

I read the poems by Ronsard again.

The short poem ended like that:

How simple it all is and at bad time!

My darling, even breathing is a crime…

In my memory, the recent five years since that spring rose up – losses, longing, hopes. It seems that the time is approaching when it will be possible to breathe, when all those I love will sleep without worry about the fragile thread of human life. Perhaps other things will become attainable too – joy, snowdrops, art? I was no longer thinking about either Rastenburg or Elbing – I was thinking about life.

1961-1965