Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

6 Things Lyuba is too Young to Remember

You want to understand what it felt like being in Hitler’s last headquarters in the underground complex of the Reich Chancellery at the time of the fall of Berlin.

If I had not had behind me a long history of following the front line to Hitler’s Chancellery, I would have felt deprived. The assault and defeat of Berlin cannot be understood properly outside the context of the war as a whole and of everything we experienced. I travelled from Moscow with the army, and cherish the memory of that. The first I saw of the front was in February 1942 at Rzhev, and I feel that Rzhev was really the city where I began to have a destiny. It was here I first encountered war. A crippled, burned land, misery and selflessness, cruelty and compassion; soldiers with the great simplicity of their courage; village women bearing the terrible burden of caring for children in the front line of fire. The astonishing magnanimity and self-sacrifice of people, when the turning of the tide of war was still so far away, filled my heart with pain and will remain with me forever. The historic events I was involved in during the last days of the war in Berlin might have been expected to overshadow all those other frontline impressions for me, but my most moving experience was those days of lowering skies in the environs of Rzhev.

Rzhev has a special place in the immense map of the war. Not only was the city occupied for seventeen months, but for almost all that time there was unrelenting, bitter fighting there, on the approaches to Moscow. In their orders, the Germans called Rzhev ‘the springboard for a decisive second leap to Moscow’. The Rzhev salient, which German orders referred to as ‘a dagger pointed at Moscow’, was a real threat to the capital. When the situation turned against the Germans, Hitler’s order said that to surrender Rzhev would be to open the road to Berlin to the Russians.

Rzhev, tormented by occupation, brutality, hunger, bombardment and bombing, a city the opposing armies battled for relentlessly, saw some of the bloodiest fighting in the war. The tragedy of Rzhev confronted us starkly when we re-entered it in 1943.

You talked one time about the changing ‘soul’ of the war.

When you say ‘soul’, you immediately hint at something elusive, and what I was referring to was the deep, spiritual aspect of war as it revealed itself at different stages. Rzhev, standing at a junction of railways and major highways, at a crossroads in the war and in people’s destinies, illustrated that dramatically. The dedication of the army and the whole nation at that point, when it was not yet being rewarded with victory, was especially eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of that tragic time.

The year 1943 was a turning point in the war. Our army was fighting its way to the west, and coming across everything that the war had swallowed up during the period of defeats: our prisoners, the occupation. We were clearly not prepared for what we found. During that time of retreat, our army had left an unarmed and defenceless population to the mercy of the enemy. We should have been the ones with the sense of guilt, but instead, as we liberated those lands, the returning liberators came not with any consciousness of their guilt towards the population but as if to judge them. As if people who had lived perhaps two, perhaps three years under German occupation had not needed somehow to feed themselves, to keep their children from starving to death, and had therefore no option but to do a certain amount of work, perhaps performing compulsory labour with German assault rifles pointing at them, clearing the roads of snow, for example. Yet in spite of that, it seemed that everyone was guilty of something, singled out for something of that kind, and under suspicion.

Our military doctrine disregarded the concept of the prisoner of war. No matter how hopeless your situation might have been, to be taken prisoner was officially considered treasonable, even if a doomed million-strong army had fought to the last after being surrounded. War has not only heroes but also martyrs, and these were our prisoners of war. Our people felt sorry for them. They could see how brutally the Germans treated them, how they perished in captivity. When prisoners were being herded back behind enemy lines, women would take bread or a potato from their children and risk their lives (because the Germans would open fire on them) to go out to the road and try to pass something to eat to the prisoners.

Our soldiers and commanders, liberated from captivity, were subjected to the humiliation of blatant distrust and abuse and found themselves once more behind barbed wire. I have heard many of them say they found that worse than German captivity, because there their tormentors were at least the enemy. And who can claim this did not contribute to so many supposedly ‘displaced persons’ being Soviet soldiers who had not committed any crimes towards their homeland, but feared persecution if they returned.

The mistrust and inhuman treatment of those who had suffered the torments of captivity and living under German occupation damaged not only those victims, but undermined and warped people’s innate sense of justice and compassion. The pressure was so great that it suppressed natural morality and could come to be regarded as something self-evident: ‘Well, I wasn’t behind enemy lines, so I am pure; but you were, so you are tainted.’ People began to be divided into the pure and the impure.

I wrote and spoke out about this issue many years ago, but only recently read in a newspaper that in 1954, when Marshal Zhukov became minister of defence, he set up and chaired a special commission that proposed a change in the law, so that there would be no discrimination against former prisoners of war, general compensation, and removal from the personal questionnaire ex-soldiers had to fill in of the question asking if they had been a prisoner. The Party leaders of the USSR, with Khrushchev at their head, rejected the proposal. Right up until the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, the stigma of people who had suffered in this way was, criminally, retained.

How many years have passed, and still there is more to be said about the war…

You are right. It is difficult to convey the truth about the war, and anyone who succeeds is fortunate. How many decades have passed and now here we are, we and our descendants, alive at the same time, and everyone’s life is fragile and finite. But never has a whole succession of generations warned so directly, with such awareness, ‘We are about to pass on…’ These are the people who fought in the war and, facing their inevitable end, each of them feels all the more acutely that they are part of a great epic. Anyone who aspires to tell the tale of what they experienced is conscious that, if it is not done now, then when will it be? There is an extreme anxiety to do what has to be done while there is still time, not to leave this life with things unsaid. But it is not easy to convey the truth about the war.

Why should that be so?

What I mean is the hard-won truth of a work of literature. A good intention to write the truth is no guarantee that it will be achieved. Truth about character, the portrait of a period, of its events, is broader, more significant and more all-encompassing than the facts alone. Truth calls for hard work involving the soul and talent. Sometimes it needs to come through inspiration, because it is an act of grace. So, it is fortunate if you are able to comprehend, assimilate and give that artistic expression. Artistic truth cannot be dependent on the current climate or expedient, and its influence comes from everything that goes into it: the nobility and pain, talent, intelligence, courage, and the limpid and mournful poetry of life. From its mistakes, too. That is when the truth can speak to us readers, enlighten and elevate us. And it develops the talent of the writer, too – it is creatively contagious, and that is why all through your life you pursue the bluebird.

Just now, rereading your conversation with Zhukov, I was struck by his words, ‘I trust your conscience as a writer.’ I was brought up short: not ‘your account as an eyewitness’, not ‘you as a researcher of the archives’, but ‘your conscience as a writer’. That chimes with what you say about getting to a truth that is more profound than a conscientious, direct relation of the facts: to an artistic truth.

I think what he most likely meant was the moral responsibility of the person writing.

He had already suffered during his years in disfavour from all sorts of writers; what would have made him think he could trust the profession as such? No, he was referring to your own, personal talent. The military leader who led us to victory was the first to recognize your secret, your gift of trustworthiness.

What sort of a gift is that? It’s more of a burden.

Because you carry it as a responsibility. But Berlin, May 1945 is not only a documentary account of the death and identification of Hitler. Look at the subtle brushstrokes and details which, perhaps, nobody else would have spotted, with which you paint the portrait of those days? Modern historians draw on you to reconstruct them.

And your Rzhev, a cycle of novellas and stories giving a unique evocation of the people’s war! Everything seems to be happening right here and now, before our eyes, even though I had not been born at that time.

It is a kind of alternative memory, not memoirs but a constant presence of past experience in me. Even now, many decades later, it sometimes prods me very forcefully. The pre-war years, the war and everything that came after it have not just been swallowed up in the mire of life. Landmarks. They are not equal in how long they lasted or how significant they were, they differ in their spirit, their meaning, their content and what they teach us; some of them are interrelated while others diverge or merge, but there is an interaction, a debate going on as we strive to find our bearings in reality. It is a great shame that human life is so short – from a distance and in the depths some things are more clearly visible.

The sense of affliction is precious, it enlightens us. What it anchors in memory is sometimes not the great, momentous events. It makes its own unaccountable selections. That is probably true for all of us.

But does affliction not turn to hatred of those who have caused it?

It does. And how! I was asked on Swedish television, ‘How have you been able to overcome hatred for Germans, knowing only too well at first hand all the evil their army perpetrated on the territory of your homeland?’

What did you say?

My answer was never going to be anything conventional. An army interpreter is in a peculiar position in the avalanche of war. I had not only to know about what was happening to the enemy behind the front line that divided us, to recognize telltale signs of what they might be planning and how they were preparing to implement it, to make sense of intercepted orders, letters and diaries, but also to be in direct contact with Germans at the very moment catastrophe struck them, when one of them had just been seized in battle, or kidnapped by our scouts from a lookout post – when he was a ‘squealer’. Whether he was dumbstruck with shock, dejected, or stoical and trying to suppress his dismay – he was always vulnerable and unhappy.

The enemy in captivity. I found that contact a hard, trying experience. With rare exceptions it was difficult to feel that the person presently in front of you was a Nazi. Ejected from the sinister community he had shortly before belonged to, he did not conform to the notion the word ‘Nazi’ conjured up for us. But nobody could understand what he was saying, and the language barrier cut him off from the possibility of being seen as anything other than ‘the enemy’.

Between the German prisoner and his opponents, in whose power he now found himself, I was a kind of connective tissue. His eyes followed me anxiously; I could see he was frightened. The hatred I felt for the armed enemy bringing death, brutal violence and devastation, receded. A sense of acute pity interceded for this prisoner – a victim of the Nazis’ lunatic war.

The gift of compassion. Without it there would probably be no gift of trustworthiness.

I am not sure I would call the feeling compassion. I called it involvement.

That is a very important word for you. Tell me what involvement is?

I participated in a multi-part documentary, The World at War, made by Thames Television. I saw several of the episodes and wrote about them.

And then there was one about the occupation of Holland by the Nazi army. On the screen is a close-up of a man who was in the Resistance. When he was still just a very young lad, he heard the Jews were being deported from Amsterdam and went to the station.

‘But I had seen that!’ he said emphatically. ‘I had seen it.’ And, he said, if he had seen it he was involved in it. He felt complicit, and became actively involved in the Resistance.

So, what about me? God only knows the things I have seen. Perhaps if I wrote about that I would get the horror out of my system. But what would that leave?