Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

7 Things We Should Never Forget

Now, with the passing of so many years, it is difficult for me to get a clear understanding myself of why, when the war came crashing down upon us, I decided to go to the front. I had not been brainwashed, I did not read the newspapers, I had no dreams of heroism. I had no illusions on that score, but probably something had been building up in me. Spain, of course; Spain was a landmark. For the first time in our lives, and the last time before the war, the Spanish Civil War united us in solidarity with the Western intelligentsia who were prepared to stand up against fascism. The environment in which I spent my youth also readied me for signing up, despite the fact that in practical terms I was totally unqualified: I was not sporty and have never learned to shoot, having bunked off military training classes. There was a sort of shooting gallery in the basement of our institute and, in the spirit of the times, some girls visited it. They were really keen to do a parachute jump and get the badge: I was too scared even to try jumping off the parachute tower in Gorky Park. The practical side of the military training was, as it were, one thing, while a readiness to go to war was something separate, and seems to have been what mattered most. Whether I would actually be any use there was something I never asked myself. A desire to play a part in our common destiny was something I think many people who signed up felt.

But did you not at first work in an arms factory?

In No. 2 Clock Factory, which was immediately switched, under the mobilization plan, to manufacturing cartridge cases. My job at the lathe was to chisel the burr off the blanks. ‘Lathe Operator, Class 3’ is how I was described in my work record book. There is nothing following that: after the war I was out of luck as a job-seeker, at least as an employee.

Point Five in my CV (‘Nationality: Jewish’), told against me.

You write that at the beginning of the war it was difficult for a girl not liable for military service, let alone one with no relevant peacetime skills, to get to the front. In the end, though, you did train as a military translator and interpreter and went off to the war. I simply can’t imagine what it must have been like for you, a young girl, under conditions that would have been hard for a man. Svetlana Alexiyevich has written about ‘the unwomanly face of war’. Do you think she is right?

The face of war is unwomanly, I agree, but neither is it manly. The face of war is just the face of war. Can one really find any point of comparison between war and ordinary human life? The way people behave in the circumstances of war are out of the ordinary, unimaginable, as a result of the dictates and the demands it makes on a person’s physical and mental endurance. In fact, at the front people tended never to fall ill, and even chronic ailments often retreated and ceased to be troublesome. In my own experience, I caught a slight cold during the winter in Stavropol-on-Volga while I was wearing a summer forage cap, canvas boots that were no good for keeping your feet warm, and staying in an unheated room; but for just over three years after that, when I was continuously at the front, I was never ill at all, although the circumstances and conditions I was working in would have seemed guaranteed to make you ill. But that was only by peacetime standards.

Of course, life at the front is particularly difficult for a woman with her natural differences from men, and there is no need to go into further detail about that. Women can also be subjected to sexual harassment, although most of the time relations were on a comradely level. The Germans had no women right at the front: no typists, no nurses, no female cooks or laundressess. Not one. Only at a very remote airfield might you happen to find a female German telephonist.

The army at Rzhev in which I began my service was commanded by General Lelyushenko. ‘The Soldier General’, he was called out of earshot, always at the front line, with one foot in a jeep and the other on the ground. He could not abide women in the army, and for some reason called them ‘flatheads’ and bawled out a divisional commander he heard was keeping a woman. ‘Catching flatheads, are we?’ Everybody quailed before that reproach. At that very trying period in the war, moral standards in Lelyushenko’s army were markedly strict. But that only meant that emotions, which in any case no one was expected to show, were even more furtive. In war, when any hour might prove your last, feelings were intense and not even an army commander could abolish them.

After the war, when our army had reunions, Colonel Kozyryonok, the military prosecutor, told me there had not been a single military crime committed in our army by a young woman. They were significantly more reliable than men. The Germans might be on the outskirts of a village, but the telephone operator would not leave her post until given the order. The prosecutor was less complimentary about men. ‘If men could have got away from the front by becoming pregnant,’ he said laughingly, ‘we would have had an epidemic of desertion on those grounds.’ One girl was, in fact, court martialled for desertion after she ran away to another unit to which her boyfriend had been transferred.

Her time to love coincided with the war, and no doubt she was judged without pity, bearing the full brunt of martial law. All that sort of thing was hair-raising.

In war a man can dedicate himself wholeheartedly to warfare, but a woman continues to live to a much greater degree with her emotions. I think a woman living at the front is always in conflict with war (even if she doesn’t know it) and that it violates her emotions.

Is there such a thing as a woman’s view of war? What does it reveal?

I wouldn’t presume to say whether there is a women’s view that reveals something new, because that is what I write about. Someone less involved could probably be more objective. It might be simpler to talk about the general attitude of women towards war. Nowadays they are unanimously against it. Women do not accept war in any guise: it brings death and violence and they oppose it. As far as the Second World War is concerned, there is no evidence of a specifically women’s view of it in the literature.

We might well ask women who were young girls then, rushing headlong to the front without a clue as to what might be awaiting them, why, having found out and faced mortal danger, why when they were wounded and lying in hospital, they could not wait to get back to the front line, despite having every opportunity to stay in relative safety. Why today is it far more difficult to find a woman who will decry her years at the front and say her youth was ruined, than to find one who will say those were the best years of her life? Why? If we take their answers we will be get a sense of women’s views about what we rightly call the Patriotic War.

Did anything at the front remind you of the fact that you were Jewish?

On the very first night I arrived there, I found that our army was trapped in a pocket. From periodical reports we gathered the neck was widening at one moment, but contracting the next and might at any moment be closed completely. At the time I reached the front our neighbouring 39th Army was totally surrounded. Facing the risk of being taken prisoner, you could hardly forget the answer to Point Five. I did not yet have any comrades I could turn to; I was an unknown quantity to those I needed to escape with. Everything was rather wobbly. When I was eventually issued my own TT pistol I felt a whole lot more secure.

You were not taught to shoot on the course for translators…

That’s right. General Biyazi who was in charge of the course assured us we would be taught to shoot at the front, but that did not happen. I was given a loaded pistol and shown what to press. I had no expectation of going into battle, but at least I would be able to deal with myself.

What about the people you came into contact with. Did it matter that you were Jewish?

That did not affect me at all. What got you accepted was something different. They needed an interpreter, and now it turned out the interpreter was a woman. I was the only woman among a lot of men and it was awkward for them, too. They couldn’t swear in front of a woman, which meant they could hardly speak. I was deployed in an army that had retreated all the way from the USSR border. These people had been through a lot together, and then along comes some Muscovite, some student. They needed to be very tolerant. I was not one of them.

I had a Bible in my backpack, which I had seen for the first time in my life in the possession of my friend. Her mother worked in the Party publishing house and among her anti-religious armaments was a Bible published, for some reason, by the Seventh-Day Adventists. At the end of the course we went to General Staff Headquarters in Moscow to be assigned and I spent a couple of nights with Vika Malt. Noticing I was interested, Vika gave me the book with the thoroughly atheistic inscription, ‘Good luck, Lena. Vikukha.’ At the front I sat down one day to read the Bible still, of course, a bit disorientated. We had a major from the Border Guards assigned to us for a time. He had a pleasing, open expression. Someone pointed me out to him. ‘She reads the Bible.’ ‘And why not?’ he said. ‘A very fine work of literature.’ That took the heat out of the incident.

At the front I made notes, not systematically though, in fits and starts. That was looked askance at, too, at first, because keeping a diary or making notes was not allowed. I was well aware people would get curious and peep into it, so I wrote in the notebook, ‘Comrade Captain Borisov, are you not ashamed to be reading someone else’s diary?’ One day when I opened it, I found scrawled in large letters, ‘Should I be?’ I still have that notebook, complete with its obtrusive comment. After that I was left in peace, accepted, and in any case they appreciated my interpreting. I found I could do the job well. As time passed the attitude towards me became friendly.

You said once that, working as an interpreter, you found being a woman had its advantages.

I think in some ways it had. One prisoner told me that meeting a woman in such circumstances seemed like a good omen, a sign of mercy. The prisoners asked for help: one told me his wife had ‘a child on its way’ and asked me to let her know through the Red Cross that he was alive and in captivity; he did not know we were unconnected with the Red Cross. If I was on my own with a prisoner, which was usually the case, it was less like an interrogation than a conversation. And I had successes. Sometimes it was remembered I ought to have security and a soldier was assigned. On one occasion an officer who had come down to the dugout heard the guard snoring and grabbed a sheath knife lying on the table in front of me.

‘What’s this knife doing there?’ he asked.

‘It’s for sharpening my pencil.’

Did you find it difficult to play the role of interrogator?

I was helped in a way by a pilot who had been shot down and who had been strafing women. I asked him why he had been firing at them when he could see they were just women working in the fields. The plane had been flying very low, directly above them.

And he replied, ‘Ich habe meinen Spass daran.’

He did it just for fun. That made me shudder. It was the first time I had encountered a real Nazi, an enemy.

I felt sorry for the first prisoners. That was upsetting. The middle-aged German, the same age as my father, who was trying to remember the Russian word for melon and was feeling cold in the shed and asked for a blanket. Or handsome Thiel, with his university education. They were bewildered and feeling wretched. It is probably impossible to convey the feeling, to reproduce it artificially. What comes closest is perhaps the notes I jotted down in my notebook. I included them later in my book, Near Approaches.

On the course for military translators, skipping the firing practice and anything military, we did in an odd, unconventional way, as if from the wrong end, get drawn into the war, immediately coming into contact with the enemy, his German language, his pass and record book – the Soldbuch – his regulations and commands, his personal letters (how those Germans tormented us with their letters!), his intricate Gothic script, his military terms we found it so difficult to learn. And to enable us to master the language as such, children’s reading books and stilted dialogues: ‘Wo warst du, Otto?’ ‘Where have you been, Otto?’ ‘Oh Karl, I had a lovely boat trip on the lake.’ And Heine: ‘Mein Liebchen, was willst du mehr?’ And our role-play interrogations, when we took it in turns to be the German prisoner and then the Soviet commander interrogating him.

And then, when we were about to go off to the front, charged up, if very hastily, with the German language, I felt my heart contract with fear that, when I met an actual prisoner, I might suddenly have to witness him being subjected to cruelty and violence.

On my first morning at the front, in a lull between two frenzied bombings, I came out of a peasant hut to see a sleigh being drawn along the street bearing a wounded prisoner. I followed it, fascinated, and it soon stopped. I caught up when the driver had just got off and was thinking something over. I drew myself up and asked loudly, ‘Are you taking him to be shot?’ assuming that must be the case. The elderly, moustachioed driver scowled at me over his shoulder and said rattily, ‘We don’t shoot prisoners,’ and went off behind the hut to relieve himself.

Then I excitedly asked the German lying in the sledge where he came from, and heard his listless response, ‘Oh, whatever next!’ The wounded man was not in the mood for polite conversation. I walked back, grateful to the old driver for the lesson he had taught me with his contemptuous scowl. At the time, I wrote down in my notebook, ‘This war will be won by those who show magnanimity,’ hoping that we would be those winners.

However, our strong and, for the time being successful, adversary had long ago rejected the concept of greatness of heart. What mattered was only strength and brutality. The world was increasingly divided into the conquerors and the conquered, with no gradations in between. What place did that leave for greatness of heart? Increasingly what was being inculcated, and accepted, was that against victorious strength and brutality we should pitch our own strength, hardware, and brutality.

The army in which you found yourself had retreated all the way from the frontier and become charged with hatred of the enemy, but you too saw a lot of dreadful, inhuman sights, and your experiences were soon the equal of theirs.

The Rzhev concentration camp was monstrous. The living and the dead were lying side by side on the ground. The Germans derided their prisoners: they would bring frozen potatoes and scatter them on the ground; the halfdead prisoners would crawl to get them, and the guards would lash them with whips. In the middle of the camp a gallows operated tirelessly.

Advancing westward, we walked over trenches full of bodies. Trenches. In addition to the large, well-known concentration camps, there were so many local camps. In the camps the bodies were dumped in pits and had a light covering of soil thrown over them, and when our armies were advancing, the Germans started digging them up and burning the bodies to cover their tracks. They rarely had time to finish the job.

Burned villages. There were dedicated arsonists, ‘torchers’ in the German units. Hitler’s order for scorched earth when they retreated, that was Nazism in action. Destruction of the land, destruction of the people. When we entered a village there was no longer a village, just embers and ashes. Out of a ravine, or some dugout they had put together, an old, exhausted man would emerge, women, a child barely alive. Yes, that made you feel hatred.

But I can say, looking back now after so many years, my humane feelings were not eradicated. It was hard, but something I had brought from my childhood, that had grown stronger when I was a young student, my – and I am not going to shrink from using the word – my internationalism, stayed with me. In the institute where I studied there was not and could not have been any discrimination along racial or national lines, and after many years, when we reminisced about one of our fellow students, we often could not remember what his or her nationality had been. There was then, there really was, an amazing sense of national fraternity and unity, and it is unforgivable that it has been perverted and destroyed. It will be a long time yet before we recover from the consequences of that.

Your youth was identified with the amazing, unique Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History that existed for seven years and was closed down at the outbreak of war and merged with Moscow State University. You have written wonderfully evocative words about it, which echo in the heart of anyone who has been touched by the sense of community in colleges and special schools or even dreamed of it.

I was looking to explain to myself what it was about the institute that remains so indelibly alive in all of us who studied there: a generation cut across and crippled by the war, that endured such terrible losses and upheavals.

What was it about IPLH? Just pronouncing those initials aloud is a signal, they radiate something. Unacquainted people, when they discover they both came from IPLH, immediately feel they have something in common. Is it because that is where we spent our youth? Of course, but that is not the whole story. Or perhaps the IPLH legend is just an illusion, albeit a longlasting one. But if it is, then it is one of those about which a clever English writer said that an illusion is one of the most important facts of life.

It seems to me that IPLH is a code yet to be decoded. IPLH was something new, somebody’s secret plan and intention, something that for a brief moment seemed to be possible, a brief twinkling of light in that succession of brutal years. And something more: IPLH was the spirit of a time whose very passing was history. We could feel that, and it fostered a passion for life in us.

The phenomenon that was the 1930s was a surge of covertly accumulated culture, but already a reckoning was near, the executioners were biding their time. IPLH was part of that brief break in the clouds, and of the mayhem that was to come. This was a coming together of students with great potential, broad interests and aspirations: future philosophers, major literary specialists, critics, historians, literary translators, journalists, experts on world culture, folklorists, linguists, publishers and editors who did so much for our country’s culture in those difficult times. For those alumni of IPLH who became writers, the war was tremendously important, as it was for me.

At that time IPLH brought together the thirst of students for knowledge in the humanities with an ardent desire on the part of its amazingly distinguished professors and dazzling young academics to impart it to them.

It would be a mistake to suppose all those who graduated from IPLH were like-minded people. No, for me some were close to my values while others were not; but when we marked the fortieth anniversary of the day the Germany attacked the USSR, the reunion of graduates of IPLH was held in a state of joyful emotion; we were glad in all sincerity to see each other, without raking over old grudges, and deeply moved. We assembled by the old familiar building in Rostokino Street and filled Lecture Theatre 15. Neither in what was said, nor in the atmosphere of the reunion were there any reproaches or embittered reminders of misdeeds dating back to the bad old days. It was a friendly, sincere, open-hearted occasion.

And how was that possible? The answer is probably contained in the code, but perhaps it was also because this generation had not had an easy life. It was weighed down with the ballast of blunders and hopes, darkness and insights; it was seduced, persecuted and, who can say, perhaps redeemed.

Even before the war you were conscious of the spirit of the times. Misha Molochko spoke about the mission of your generation and the coming war against fascism. What effect did the USSR’s pact with Hitler have on you?

Immediately after the signing of the pact we were very disturbed and upset by it. Perhaps we even felt humiliated. The IPLH students from then on invariably referred to the Germans as ‘our implacable friends’.

That year I met a girl in the street who had been a fellow student of my elder brother and now worked as a translator in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. She told me in confidence that translators who were Jewish were no longer being sent abroad on assignments and were beginning to be fired from the Commissariat. I thought to myself that seemed to be taking fraternization with the Germans too far, and in any case, why were we choosing to lose face and trying to curry favour with the Nazis?

A few years ago, when a journalist asked when I thought the Stalinist state had adopted a policy of anti-semitism, and persecution and repression of other peoples of the USSR, I suddenly remembered that conversation in the street so many years before, and I replied, ‘Since the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. They had only to start…’

At the institute, the board with its name in Russian and French was taken down and replaced with one in Russian and German. I remember an episode when the general discontent in the institute did surface. As part of the cultural events accompanying the pact and the exchanging of art, an old German film was dug out and delivered to IPLH. Word went round that the reel was very interesting and had been banned until recently. Lecture Theatre 15 was full to the rafters. A white screen had been erected over the stage. The reel had no sound so an accompanist was needed and a student, Lev Bezymensky, was identified as suitable and dragged up to the stage. To start with, he dutifully accompanied the images on the screen with neutral melodies, but suddenly took off, and when Siegfried mounted his horse, the piano belted out the Cossack, ‘Lads, Saddle up the Horses!’ After that there was no holding Lev, scene after scene! Brünnhilde’s appearance on a cliff high above the Rhine was accompanied by ‘To the Cliff Came Loveliest Katyusha.’ How the audience responded! They fell about laughing, guffawing, giving vent to their pent-up emotions.

On one occasion, after the fall of France, I saw seven or eight portly, respectable, self-satisfied Germans at the circus talking loudly and animatedly among themselves during the interval. I remember the wave of animosity that swept over me.

But the German language I loved. I was drawn to it, and was fortunate enough to have lessons for a year with a wonderful teacher, formerly the governess of Pyotr Stolypin’s children. From her I heard: ‘Sie haben eine Gabe für die deutsche Sprache.’ You have a gift for German. That was unforgettable. Alas, she died in the spring of that year, but I did not drop German. I enrolled in parallel with my school lessons on an extramural course at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. I joined a circle conducted by the widow of Karl Liebknecht.

And earlier than that, before I was even at school, my grandfather would recite Heine to me by heart.

You wrote about your grandfather and this German teacher in Punctuation Marks, a novella about the 1930s. Today, talking to you about the book you are finishing, I am getting ever deeper insight into all you have written, into your memory, learning something about my own ancestors and the spirit of those times. So, for you young people destined to fight this war, the threat of hostilities did not seem to have receded after the pact was signed?

Perhaps to some extent it receded in time, but we were well aware war was inevitable. It was obvious. Already in Mein Kampf Hitler had written that he was not just interested in restoring Germany to its 1914 borders, but in conquering lands to the east. Russia must cease to exist and be repopulated by Germans. The fate of its population would depend on the extent to which slaves were required to cultivate these lands. After Russia, if his plan was successful, there would be no holding him. All of Europe was to be under the heel of Germany.

Why did the war start so catastrophically for us?

If we are going to talk about the beginning of the war, we have to go back to 1937–8 and Stalin’s terror. It is difficult to believe the extent to which the Red Army was vandalized. Of five marshals, three were liquidated. Almost without exception the commanders of armies, divisions, and even regiments were shot. When the trials began in Moscow, Hitler and Goebbels, who were constantly listening to radio reports, at first decided Stalin was murdering Jews, and were only puzzled that Litvinov had not yet been done away with.

‘Crisis in Russia and constant arrests. Now Stalin is going after the Red Army,’ Goebbels wrote on 3 February 1937. ‘The killings in Russia have the whole world agog. There is talk of an extremely serious crisis of Bolshevism. Voroshilov has issued an order to the army, singing the same old song about Trotskyites. Does anybody still believe all that? Russia is very longsuffering’ (5 June 1937). Finally Goebbels – Goebbels of all people! – comes to a conclusion he will repeat many times: ‘Stalin is mentally ill’ (10 July), he is destroying his own army!

How could Goebbels not rejoice at the news? ‘Since Stalin is himself shooting his generals, we will not have to.’ (This is in the entry for 15 March 1940, when Goebbels already had his eye on war.)

Shortly before the war, the newsreels showed footage of the last manoeuvres conducted by Tukhachevsky. They showed a tank–air assault for the first time. It makes an impressive spectacle, and was observed by military attachés and other foreign experts, among whom was General Guderian. After Tukhachevsky’s arrest, his theory, introducing new methods of warfare, was labelled as ‘wrecking’ and banned. Tank corps were disbanded and the tanks dispersed to army groupings. As the war developed, mechanized and tank corps and tank armies had to be reconstituted. The generals of the Wehrmacht, meanwhile, were assiduously adopting new methods, not a few of which had been demonstrated during Tukhachevsky’s exercises.

Stalin’s support enabled Germany to ratchet up its aggression in the West, but boomeranged back on the USSR. Hitler exploited the neutrality of the USSR to assault the Western countries with all his military might. He did not, however, place much reliance on the long-term stability of that neutrality and, just three months after concluding the non-aggression pact with Russia, announced to his generals on 23 November 1939, ‘We shall be able to attack Russia only after we are free in the West.’ With Russia obsessively on his mind, he was eager to achieve his goals in the West.

On 10 May 1940 Hitler moved against France. 136 German divisions were opposed to 135 French, British and Belgian divisions. Although the latter had the same number of tanks as the Germans, together with the powerful defences of the Maginot Line and the Belgian forts, the German Army with its dive bombers, massed introduction of tanks into battles, with its parachuting of troops, brought an entirely new dimension to its offensive which stunned and crushed the enemy. After six weeks, France surrendered.

The surrounded British troops, barely able to resist the onslaught of the German tank armies, especially of Guderian’s tanks, held Dunkirk and evacuated from the coast across the Channel to England, evading destruction. This was a proud and tragic time when the British showed their fortitude, but what do we Russians know about it? Shamefully little or nothing at all. What do we know about Britain which, deprived of its defeated allies, stood fast and alone in the war against Nazism?

Goebbels, like Hitler, underestimated the resilience of the British and their refusal to acknowledge the defeat they had suffered. The next phase was to be Hitler’s ‘Operation Sea Lion’, the invasion of the British Isles, but then the Führer took a decision not even his closest colleagues expected. The plan to invade the British Isles was abandoned and the immediate military priority became the drive to the east, an attack on Soviet Russia.

Why did Hitler decide to attack us before he had finished the war with Britain?

The war we unwisely embarked on against Finland flaunted very convincingly the weakness of the Soviet army after Stalin’s depredations. I heard the view that these events were directly connected expressed by Marshal Zhukov.

I even think now that the war might have been avoided and history could have taken a very different turn. After invading Russia on 22 June 1941, Hitler told Goebbels it had not been an easy decision to make, and perhaps it was just as well, he said, that the German intelligence service had not given him an accurate picture, because otherwise he might not have dared to do it. And if Stalin had not so trashed the Red Army? If it had not acquitted itself so dismally in the Finnish campaign?

Stalin set the army up. In reality we were defeated. The whole of 1941 was one long defeat. During that first phase of the war more than 3 million Russians were taken prisoner, and that is only according to German data. Those are the ones who were brought to the Nazi camps and put on lists of names, but how many never got that far, killed by the cold, by starvation, by Nazi brutality, executed. That is an enormous number of losses, despite the most amazing self-sacrifice. It is like an unbelievable force of nature, something very humbling.

I was very sensitive to the life of the people during the war. I had so much contact with the population and ordinary soldiers. Just the way they lived their lives was therapeutic. It helped to straighten everything out after the depravity of the later 1930s.

We really were liberators, of the whole world, when we arrived in Poland, and further on when people were coming out of the concentration camps to us: Jews herded there from other countries to be exterminated, the last few who had survived; and the French prisoners of war, and the British, the slave labourers, from every imaginable country, like that Belgian. I realized then that I was taking part not only in Russia’s Patriotic War, but in a Second World War.

Many years later, Martin Smith, a British film-maker, sought me out in Moscow and I gave a long interview for the World at War documentary series. This was for the last episode, and I talked about the discovery and identification of Hitler’s body. Six months or so later, I found myself in London. We landed just as Princess Anne was getting married to her horse-riding companion. In the hotel lobby, while we were registering, the newlyweds and those accompanying them escaped from the television cameras into the palace and, at some moment when I was distracted, getting my key from the receptionist at the desk, something completely different appeared on the screen, which riveted my attention. It was a black-andwhite chronicle of the war. Dunkirk, tragic shots…

This was another episode from the World at War series. In the summer it premiered simultaneously in seven countries, and every week, on Tuesdays, the episodes were shown in Britain. A week later, in the evening when the next two episodes were being shown, the streets of London were empty.

The war at sea. A real chronicle of the war. I had barely heard anything about all this, but now, to be actually seeing it…

At my request, the organizers of our trip contacted Thames Television, and we were immediately invited to the studio. We were a whole group of journalists. A beautiful woman in a velvet jacket, light, vivacious, Martin Smith’s assistant (he himself, she explained, was currently with his wife, who was giving birth) – read out a message on his behalf: ‘We welcome…’ I heard my name.

She invited us all up to the stage. We stood there with our glasses filled with wine, toasted our friendly meeting in the studio, and were photographed. The film for which I had been interviewed was not yet ready, so we were shown the ‘Dutch episode’.

A large part of the film consisted of black-and-white newsreel shots. Only three scenes were close-ups, in succession. They had been shot on colour film, which was not available during the war. They were from the present. The first speaker had been the mayor of Amsterdam at the time the Germans invaded. He was summoned by the occupiers’ Burgomeister who asked, ‘Do you have Jews in the municipality?’ He replied, ‘No, we have no Jews here.’ ‘In doing that I was guilty of my first betrayal,’ he says, looking intently at the black-and-white past, or rather, inside himself. ‘I allowed myself to accept their differentiation of human beings.’

Then on the screen there is a simple Jewish woman, with a big, expressive face. When she was being taken to the ghetto with her two children, a baby and a three-year-old, and her sick brother, the German who came for them was crying. ‘I never saw another German soldier cry.’ She could have kept quiet about that. She had lived through just too much monstrous brutality: her baby and brother died in the ghetto, but it was clear how important it was to her to mention that soldier. Perhaps there had only been one, but one there had been.

The newsreel scenes took us through the city of those times; something important was changing, brewing. The last straw was the deportation of the Jews. Again, a third, last close–up: an ordinary sort of man, unremarkable, burly, almost portly, with a short haircut. ‘I went to the station. A freight train was already there. They were brought, under guard. Armed German soldiers with assault rifles and dogs surrounded them. What could I do on my own, without a gun? But I saw it,’ he says angrily, with a shudder, clenching his fists. ‘I saw it.’

I think we mentioned him in our first conversation. What mattered very much to me was that he could have looked at that and not seen it. But he did see it, and what he felt was that, if he had seen it, he was complicit in it, and guilty of it and responsible for it. And at that he, eighteen years old at the time, became actively involved in the Resistance.

The film does not show, and there is probably no footage of it in the documentary film archive, a general strike by the Dutch dockers in protest at the deportation of their Jewish fellow citizens. The film does not show the statue of a docker, erected after the war in the square into which the Jews were herded. Neither does it show the monument to the leaders of this strike who were shot by the Germans. It electrified the country and the Dutch Resistance dates from that time. The director addressed not only the facts, but more the profound personal morality in individual people in those historical circumstances. When the lights came on, the very various members of the audience were red-eyed. Those people spoke so sincerely from the screen, as if at confession, as if talking to their own souls. What responsibility they feel for the time to which they belong, and for the mark they personally have left on it.

Personal responsibility for the time to which you belong. That is what you call involvement. And finally, after having been kept separate for so many years from your contemporaries, your fellows in the fight against Nazism, you saw them for the first time then, in London, on the screen in a television studio, and were deeply moved. This is another ‘meeting on the Elbe’, and profoundly touching.

After watching the film, as we left the television studio, we were each given a copy of the photo showing us on stage with our glasses of wine. Outside, in the studio’s showcase window, under a bright banner heading reading, ‘Our guests today…’ was the same photograph, greatly enlarged. So we ourselves entered the life of the city. It was not at all the London we had pictured from Dickens, shrouded in fog, prim, with gentlemen in top hats. This was a multi-cultural city with a picturesque mixture of races; it was both a financial centre and the home of hippies and miniskirts.

We were staying on bustling, commercial Oxford Street. Here, in the dense, diverse flow of people, modish, colourful gypsy skirts mingled with more formal attire, or suddenly you might see a long fur coat on a young man, or a man’s formal shirt revealing a bare young chest. There might appear a walking advertisement, like a round poster-covered pillar that had come to life, in which some hapless fellow had been squeezed headlong; or a hereditary professional beggar in a Scottish kilt, playing the bagpipes; or a posse of students suddenly pouring out of a bus and miming on a street corner a scene depicting the atrocities perpetrated by the Pinochet regime in Chile and appealing for protest.

Then a group of willowy Krishna devotees, in gauze robes completely unsuited to the season, with rings in their noses and partly shaven heads might fill the street with melodic chanting, moving along in line and leaping in the air to the accompaniment of a tin-whistle band.

Gazing wide-eyed at this colourful theatre of city life, I could not get out of my head that other, black-and-white, newsreel of a London on which German bombs were falling, which faced invasion by Hitler’s troops, and was covered in barricades, ready to fight and die on them.

The London Underground at night. For a full six years, just like in Moscow at the beginning of the war, little children were sleeping on the tracks. Anxious adults, the invariable accordion, and in the morning, on the pavement next to offices destroyed by air raids during the night, here and there a table and stools carried out, a secretary tapping away at her typewriter under a banner reading, ‘Still here. Still alive.’

Through a street strewn with the rubble of bombed buildings, the royal family pick their way to Madame Tussaud’s museum of waxworks, which has been damaged during the night’s bombing. Again the air raid sirens wailing, the three little pigs singing ‘We’re not afraid of the big, bad wolf!’ in a popular cartoon that was screened in the USSR, before the war came to us, too.

Churchill perched on a barricade, his great bulk looming above its top tier. His voice is heard: ‘If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say…’

On the screen we see Dunkirk. Defeat. British ships, besieged by fleeing soldiers, overloaded, listing, casting off. Soldiers too late to get on board swim desperately, furiously out from the coast after them. On the shore behind them there are only dead bodies, but the ships sail further and further out to sea.

An Englishman sitting by the television screen finishes the sentence before Churchill:

‘…this was their finest hour.’ It is a very famous speech.

‘…will still say,’ Churchill concludes resolutely, ‘this was their finest hour.’

The ships sail further away, to the coast of England, and there is no catching up with them. On the abandoned shore the wind rakes sand until the bodies of the fallen are motionless mounds. In the sea, soldiers drown.

Yes, that was Britain’s heroic, tragic, finest hour. I was filled with admiration as I saw for the first time the dignity and fortitude with which Britain, standing alone, confronted Nazi Germany, when almost the whole of continental Europe was under occupation or, in alliance with the Germans, had been dragged into the war, and imminent invasion by Germany was a real threat which receded only with Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941.

I had a glimpse, if only through the lens of a film camera, of what lay beyond the lands our soldiers liberated. And I saw so clearly, and with such deep emotion, something I thought I already knew, and did, only in a more abstract way than I had realized: the Red Army saved the world. Our Patriotic War was the central event of the Second World War, and it rescued the Western countries with their self-sacrificing Resistance movements and this great island.

That means we rescued London and Big Ben, the British Museum, the graveyard for much-loved faithful pet dogs, Hyde Park with its Rotten Row trampled by horses’ hooves, the concert halls, the famous pubs, department stores and scattering of market stalls, Westminster Abbey and the slab under your feet enjoining you to ‘Remember Winston Churchill.’ (He is not buried under that stone but in the modest graveyard of his ancestral estate, as he himself willed.) Yes, we saved London, with all its problems, modern, bursting with life, with its own destiny and all its culture.

I took all that very much to heart and have never forgotten it. That too is part of the sense of involvement.

In Distant Thunder you can feel this sense of involvement, the joyfulness of the liberators, but in Berlin, May 1945, after the victory salvos, after the rejoicing, there is immediately a sense of the bitterness of victory. What was that? Where did it come from?

Bitterness is inseparable from victory. Victory brings to the surface our mourning for the dead, our sorrow at all we have been through. It engenders a tremendous sense of answerability for the future. And then, there is the need to return to civilian life, which seems already to have moved so far away from us. That bitterness brought enlightenment, but it could also bring despondency and crush people.

While I was in Poznań, I complained I was stuck there just as my army was marching through Germany and the assault on Berlin was nearing. In fact, though, fate had done me a favour. Already in Poznań, I heard someone phoning from a neighbouring division to ask what to do about two soldiers who had raped a German woman. Colonel Latyshev’s response was immediate and uncompromising: they must be shot in front of the ranks. This was in conformity with our peacetime laws, which prescribed the death penalty for gang rape. That was the only possibility, completely unambiguous. A stop had to be put to unacceptable behaviour. Stuck in Poznań, however, the colonel was behind the times. As the Red Army advanced through Germany, rape was being condoned.

When a million-strong army came from its own land that had been violated by war on to the territory of its hated enemy (‘Take a good look: this is fucking Germany’), it was probably inevitable that there would be atrocities, but in those circumstances the failure to punish turned effectively into incitement.

Do you think it could have been stopped? Or was it impossible to contain such a charge of hatred and vengefulness?

I appeared in a film about those events and I said: yes, German women suffered for what their men had done; but when individual acts were not punished, all hell broke loose. Where attempts were made to stop it, they were successful. It was within the power of the Red Army command to prevent it.

The character this took on during the time I was in Poznań I heard about from German women themselves. For me, rape is the worst crime of all. It robs women not only of their future but also of their past: memories of love and intimacy can come to seem repulsive. What happened was a genocide of love.

I felt this as a wound. I loved our fighting army in all its anguish and will never repudiate that feeling. It was an army that made unbelievable sacrifices and liberated Europe. The rapes were the army defiling itself.

But, all the same, victory must have felt sweet.

It did. Our victory was a tremendous achievement. But Stalin’s toast on the occasion of the victory, which we heard over the radio, left a permanently bitter taste. He failed to acknowledge, fulsomely, the courage, self-sacrifice and valour shown by our citizens: he praised only the endurance they had shown in the war. And even that mealy-mouthed praise he gave exclusively to the Russian people, isolating it and raising it up above the other nationalities of the USSR. People hung on every word uttered by The Leader, and that was how this toast was interpreted: Hosannah to the Russian People! The consequences were only too predictable in a country like ours. That precious sense of unity, of solidarity in a war to defend our Motherland without thinking twice about our race or nationality, was destroyed. Something mendacious was imposed: Big Brother Russia, relative to whom all the other nationalities and republics were junior. And that was as much as we got in place of that all-important sense and belief that we were all compatriots. It was bad news for everyone, including the Russians. What built up from that time has expressed itself in our days as an undisguised, sometimes highly aggressive, urge towards separatism, which is a threat to Russia.

You write that the situation was already changing in the postwar months while you were still in Germany, but nevertheless there was still some hope, an expectation of certain freedoms. Were those hopes completely dashed when you got back home?

After demobilization I returned home to Moscow in October 1945. I wrote a story not that long ago, Hearth and Home, about how difficult it was going back to this new old life I had lost touch with. Here I will only say that I so wanted, so much needed to hear a human voice addressing the living and the dead, addressing everything we had been through in the war. Instead the newspapers and radio only went back to banging on about targets Stalin had set for the output of pig iron and steel, the new five-year plan, and how people were no more than the cogs to fulfil it.

The very next Victory Day holiday, 9 May, Stalin turned into an ordinary working day, which is what it remained until the twentieth anniversary of victory when, with Stalin no longer around, it again became a day of major celebration.

Even the little signs of special respect for those who had been awarded medals were revoked, like free travel on public transport and other minor privileges. In short, in the minds of all those who had contributed to victory, what they had brought to the tragic battle for the country’s survival was belittled. The victory belonged to the state, not to the peoples of the USSR.

The big question was, where is Hitler? He was the personification of Nazism and if, after all the horrors of the war he had caused, he was alive and kicking, as Soviet propaganda claimed, what kind of victory was it anyway? It spread apathy among the population.

It is unquestionable that the discovery of Hitler’s body was an important historical fact, knowledge owed to our people and to history. Stalin, who had first set up our country for defeat by the enemy at the beginning of the war, Stalin, who concealed the truth about Hitler and turned his death into a state secret, cheated our people of their victory.

You mention in Berlin, May 1945 that Major Bystrov very much wanted the discovery of Hitler’s body made public and charged you with writing about it. Did he try to share the secret with anyone else?

When Bystrov and I were interrogating Käthe Heusermann once more before leaving Buch, Bystrov allowed the Pravda correspondent to sit in on the questioning. Martyn Merzhanov and the writer Boris Gorbatov had been reporting from Berlin on the storming of the Reichstag. Merzhanov sat there, and although Bystrov warned me not to translate, he did, of course, realize what was being discussed. Later, back in Moscow, he invited me to his home and introduced me to Klimenko, who was also visiting him. Merzhanov told me he had written to the Central Committee asking for authorization to publish a story about the identification of Hitler in Pravda, based on what he had gathered while present at our interrogation. Georgiy Alexandrov, Secretary of the Central Committee for Propaganda, told him, ‘The Politburo were agog reading your report,’ but Stalin noted on it, ‘Is this making him out to be a hero?’, meaning Hitler and the fact that he had stayed in Berlin to the end.

Many years later, Martyn Merzhanov, with whom I had maintained friendly relations, phoned and asked, ‘Yelena, can you help me? I’m going through my Berlin notebooks and I’ve got a note, “Tell Boris! Hitler’s teeth are with Kagan.” Who was Kagan?’

Well, yes, who was Kagan? After all this time nobody else would be likely to know.

Lyuba, Kagan was me! And all the reports and documents, of course, are signed with my name. When I began to get into print, Rzhev was the memory closest to my heart. My first stories were about that, and as there has been a conspiracy of silence about it in the history of the Patriotic War and it had been left without a voice, I took ‘Rzhevskaya’ as my pen name, and that has been my name for the past forty-five years.

The first stories I wrote were about the war around Rzhev. Quick verbal sketches in my notebook, scraps of dialogue, reflections while we were on the move, later proved, to a greater or lesser degree, to be the raw material, or the prompt, for stories. It happened that the tone of the writing in a notebook somehow evolved of its own accord. I still sometimes glance in one, something jumps out, opens up to me. Even a soldier’s naughty word, caught and written down in a notebook, is terribly affecting.

The person conducting my seminar at the Gorky Literary Institute approved of my writing and advised me to get it published. I worked up a cycle of stories, ‘At Rzhev’, and took it to a magazine. They gave it back to me: ‘Your stories are sad. They are about everyday details of war which are probably not really worth describing. People are tired of the war.’ And that was the end for me of writing about the war for a long time. I was not aware of how deeply this topic was embedded in me. I felt I had written as well as I could.

You returned to Moscow bearing the burden of feeling you had a duty to history and already knowing you had the vocation of a writer, but you were really very young by today’s standards – just twenty-five. You had yet to graduate from the Literary Institute, to find your own voice, and on top of all that to resolve some difficult issues of where to live and how to earn a living.

Lyuba, I won’t go into all the ups and downs of the twenty years that passed before the first publication of Berlin, when I managed to tell the whole truth about the death of Hitler and the discovery of his body, and to back up my eyewitness account with documents. That is for another book, which I intend to write. I want to write about it with all the details of life at that time in reminiscences that will be a continuation of Hearth and Home. It was a long, difficult journey.

Yes, I had a mission to make public the secret of the century, that we had found Hitler’s body. The way it turned out, none of the people caught up in those historic events was present at every stage of them except me, because you cannot get by without an interpreter. And none of the other participants had ever taken up the pen, or had any intention of doing so. People pinned their hopes on me to write about it because after I was demobilized I would be going to study at the Literary Institute. I myself had no intention of leaving these things hidden away, and my silence weighed heavily on me, but these facts had been classified a state secret and the price for disclosing them would have been seven to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Quite a long time. I had to watch history being distorted without saying anything, confiding only in close friends.

In 1948 the arrests started again. They affected people close to us. The sense of vulnerability was aggravated by my sense of having no rights and being unable to get a job on account of Point Five. Nothing – four years of active service in the army, medals – was considered in your favour. And worse was to come.

Do you remember, Lyuba, that visual aid, the skeleton with inventory number 4417 who migrated together with the Russian Red Cross’ evening course up and down Malaya Bronnaya, turning up one moment in the food hall of a grocer’s shop and the next on the stage of the Jewish Theatre? Next to us evening students, two elderly ladies were talking loudly to each other on the stage and clicking away on their abacuses. Backstage the sceneshifters were moving things around. The theatre was preparing for the start of the season.

At the start of the war, in summer 1941?

Yes. But some quite different memories are also associated with that stage for me: taking our farewell of Solomon Mikhoels.[1] One dark, dank night in January 1948, I was waiting with my husband, Isaak Kramov, among a silent, dejected crowd who did not believe the story about a ‘road accident’. We were waiting for the coffin to be brought. It did not appear.

When I was very little, I lived on Tverskoy Boulevard in a building facing Malaya Bronnaya Street, and this nook of Moscow, with the colourful posters of the Jewish Theatre and the boulevard, bordered on my domain. That terrible evening it was tainted for me forever by something ominous and repulsive. In the towns and villages abandoned by the retreating Germans I remember the tragic face of Mikhoels in the role of King Lear, the duplicated photographs slapped on fences, stuck on wires, as the image of the Jew who must be exterminated. Now it had happened.

The following day the coffin was placed on the stage of the Jewish Theatre. We said goodbye to Mikhoels, along with a stream of people who walked past the coffin, crushed by our loss and this appalling sign of trouble brewing, from which there was no escape.

How could you live and write in a time like that?

You cannot live in constant fear: it just doesn’t happen. The contact between people, and love and friendship were more intense. We were close friends with some wonderful people. Despite all the hardships of daily life, we had such a creative atmosphere at home.

I was afraid of forgetting things about those events in Berlin, of letting them slip if I put everything off, so I began to write shortly after returning to Moscow, drawing on some entries in the notebook from that time. After Stalin’s death, in 1954, I took the manuscript to Znamya, which specializes in prose about the army. Because of the subject matter, the manuscript was sent for permission to publish to the Foreign Ministry. It was returned with their resolution: ‘At your discretion’: that is, they were not banning it. The editor, Vadim Kozhevnikov, was, however, highly circumspect in matters of discretion. He said to the editorial staff who were rooting for the manuscript, ‘This has never been written about before. Why should we be the first? And anyway, who is she?’ I was just someone off the street.

The manuscript was, nevertheless, published in Znamya (No. 2, 1955). It contained all the details of the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels, the discovery of Goebbels’ charred remains and those of his six children, murdered by their parents. They also kept in the testimony about the documents found in Hitler’s bunker and the main find: the diaries of Goebbels. There was the story of the removal and burning of Hitler’s body, and his burial there and then in the Reich Chancellery garden in a crater. In fact, everything except that we had found Hitler in that crater and identified him.

In other words, they left it hanging in the air whether this was fact or speculation. How did you manage to get round that ban?

That happened in 1961, in my book Spring in a Greatcoat, and in a fairly roundabout manner. After the war, I was drawn to impressions of life in peacetime. I wrote novellas that were far removed from my own biography, about life without the war, although interlayered with it.

The Soviet Writer publishing house was intending to publish a book consisting of two of my novellas, which I had already largely been paid for. It didn’t come off. Of course, I was very upset, but it was not the first or last time that a setback, providing it was not fatal, turned out to be all for the good. The publishing house had not forgotten the fee already paid and, two years later, suggested I should update the book. The writers Isaak Kramov and Boris Slutsky suggested I should slip in the Rzhev stories. So it was that in 1961 a book was published, titled Spring in a Greatcoat and containing stories about the war which had been lying around for fifteen years. They were warmly received, and that encouraged me to return to writing prose about the war. In addition, however, the book included my uncensored documentary account of how we found Hitler’s body. I put back in everything that had been taken out by Znamya: that is, everything about finding and identifying Hitler. Happily the censors paid no attention to the additions, because basically the text had already been published. And that is how, for the first time, the fact was made known that the Red Army had found Hitler’s body, although I had no documents to back that up, except for the one copy Ivan Klimenko had sent me.

Having that publication behind me was very helpful when I was trying to get permission to work in the Council of Ministers Archive. The Writers’ Union supported my application. I appealed to publishing houses and the Communist Party Central Committee, referring to the fact that I had been a participant in these events, that I was a writer who had already written about them, and that I now needed documentation for more in-depth and reliable work. For a long time it all seemed hopeless. The answer was always the same: ‘There is no access to these materials and no exceptions are likely to be made.’ But on the crest of the wave of national pride as the twentieth anniversary of victory approached, a miracle occurred and the doors of the secret archive opened before me. It was September 1964, and I got to work in the archive for twenty days.

At that time I did not know the name of the archive. During my conversation with Zhukov, he speculated that it was the Council of Ministers Archive, and he was right. Now that the documents are beginning to be published and the secrecy relaxed, we finally know which archive it was.

For me, the encounter with these documents was overwhelming. The intention had clearly been to leave them to moulder, silently covering up the mystery, and now it was my job to bring them out into the light, come hell or high water.

Here were our notes, documents, reports; and German orders, dispatches, letters, diaries, the folders I had worked through in the Reich Chancellery. There was much, too, that I now held in my hand for the first time. I plunged into the work, and made many amazing discoveries. For example, the testimony of Lieutenant General Rattenhuber, written under interrogation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs at General Staff Headquarters in Moscow; the testimony of Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Günsche; or a document revealing Hitler’s last plan, his gamble on a split between the Allies.

All the documents I did already know were also unique: the document about the discovery of Hitler’s body, the materials about our identification of it, and so on. In Western newspapers they were writing, and some information about it reached us, that the world still did not know the truth about Hitler’s fate. A shiver ran down my spine: ‘But I do, and I have the ability to describe it.’ It was all in my hands.

For twenty days I worked in the archive, and in just four months, with alacrity untypical of me, I wrote Berlin, May 1945. I was very conscious that I needed to get it finished in time for publication in the anniversary May 1965 issue of Znamya, which meant I needed to submit it in March. The publication in Znamya, under the title ‘Berlin Pages’, was followed by my book Berlin, May 1945. All the official items, documents, reports, diaries and letters reprinted in the book, both from the Soviet side and from the German, were being published for the first time.

What sort of reception did the book get?

A completed book, for as long as it has life, plays a role in its author’s destiny and can bestow unexpected gifts on him or her. It brought me my meeting with Marshal Zhukov. It caused a sensation in the USSR and internationally. In our country twelve editions of Berlin have appeared, the latest only in 2006, and in total over 1,500,000 copies have been sold. It has been translated and published in over twenty countries and serialized in newspapers in Poland, Finland, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Hungary; in Italy four issues of the magazine Tempo had my portrait on the cover.

The historians took an interest. Most notably, Lev Bezymensky corresponded with and interviewed the participants of the history I described, worked on the topic, and in 1968 published his book The End of a Legend.

When your book was being published, was there any niggling from censors about the documents?

Mostly over Goebbels. In the diary he allows himself unflattering remarks about the Soviet people, and gets the date of the Germans crossing the Dnieper wrong – he says it was on the second day of the war, but our historians say we held out longer than that. In the first days after the attack on the USSR Goebbels in his diary is a bit ‘put out’, as I expressed it, because the British sank the Bismarck.

Goebbels’ diary is of recurring interest for you. It was only in the mid-1990s that you put it behind you by writing Goebbels: A Portrait Based on the Diary.

Even in the hectic days in the bunker, in the feverish sorting through of documents that might give us a clue to the main issue of where Hitler was, it was obvious to me that this was probably our most important find, only there was just no time to spend even an hour or two reading it, because it plainly had no relevance to tracking down Hitler. It dealt only with the years before the war and the first weeks of the invasion of the USSR. At that moment we had more pressing concerns. Then front headquarters went off the notion of translating the diaries.

I was even afraid that they might have been lost, but when I encountered the last notebook in the archive I was persuaded that they were safe in our archives. As I said, my publishing of extracts from this last notebook alerted German historians to the whereabouts of these volumes of the diary, and eventually, in the late 1980s, the Munich Institute for Contemporary History published the handwritten diaries of Goebbels in four volumes. More than half of that publication was the notebooks we discovered back then in Goebbels’ office in the Führerbunker.

The institute invited me to conduct a seminar and presented me with these four thick volumes. I was writing a novella at the time and did not suppose I would be immersing myself in studying them. It seemed that all this was an old story and it was time to say goodbye to it, even though I was bound to it by personal involvement and by things that remained unsaid.

However, circumstances in the world, and especially in our country, encouraged and obliged me to return to them. I was amazed how Goebbels exposes his real self in the diaries. It would hardly be possible to describe the kind of politician Nazism brought to prominence more graphically than he did himself: a fanatic and mountebank, careerist and criminal, one of those wretched individuals to whose will the German people surrendered themselves, condemning themselves to the insanity of war.

The diary dissipates the mystical haze which those who write about Nazism periodically try to envelop it in and reveals it as a criminal political conspiracy. Something that seemed impossible happened to Germany: ridiculous individuals seized power.

The diary enables us to trace the alterations in Goebbels’ personality, to picture more clearly the genesis of Nazism with its cult of violence, its cult of the Führer, Hitler’s fatal seductiveness and how totally destructive he was for everyone.

In this difficult and laborious work on the portrait of Goebbels, in which you helped with the translation, I was very aware of the need to stress to the reader the danger of pernicious phenomena which, with the connivance of the state, encourage the proliferation of nationalistic forces in our country, forces that threaten Russia with self-destruction.

You know, when you and I were working on Goebbels’ diaries, I was not fully aware of how topical they were, the pressing need for the didactic pathos of your book. It seemed all that was already a thing of the past and could never happen again. I was wrong.

Goebbels and the discovery of Hitler’s remains are documentary topics to which you returned from a sense of responsibility to history. You personally are drawn more to the first period of the war, the time of a self-sacrificing people’s war and of Rzhev, to which you became so attached. You wrote your novellas, February, Winding Roads and Raking the Embers about that, and your collection of stories, Near Approaches, an unexpectedly modern montage of fragments. You once let slip something. You said, ‘I have never really returned from the war.’ What you experienced has never let you go. You went off to the war as a young student, Lena Kagan, and came back as the writer, Yelena Rzhevskaya. Rzhev was your destiny, both in the war and in your writing. I see nothing coincidental in that. In one of his conversations with you, Yury Dikov called Rzhev ‘the conscience of the war’. That is so akin to the pain that motivates you.

As I have said, I started out in 1946 with stories about Rzhev. Then I wrote about life in peacetime, roaming far from my own experiences into literary fiction. But what I had lived through would not let go. The last time I wrote about material quite detached from my life was when I submitted a story to Novy mir in 1961.

Since then what I have written has been not so much autobiographical as based on my own experiences. That was not what I first set out to do, but I found that my life was so full of impressions (as probably everybody’s is) that it squeezed out the adventitious, the borrowings, and that it was better to transfigure experience into prose unfettered by biography.

From a distance the war seemed to become more allusive, more visual. For many years I was pigeon-holed as writing what we call ‘war literature’. That is not entirely accurate because I do not write about pitched battles; I write about the world in wartime, about life in wartime.

In some ways it is harder and in others easier to write about the war. It is harder because much about war is monotonous, starting with people’s clothing. But it is easier because the plot is self-propelling. The war itself is the plot.

But you write wonderful prose about life before the war in Punctuation Marks; and about returning from the war. And you have promised to continue your novella, Hearth and Home. You looked even further back, into the history of your family and your ancestors in the cycle Byways of Memory. It is so enchanting, about how life is precious in itself, and there is no need for a plot.

Well, now I have been trying these last years to write about what affects me, what I have taken to heart, what stirs, enchants or torments me, to write without inhibition, without thinking about plot and character, and certainly not about whether something belongs to one genre or another. That is actually closest to autobiography, not necessarily in terms of facts although, if they do creep in, then in the context of everything associated with them that nourishes the soul, and memory, and emotion.

Perhaps, though, plot is a presumption, even a deception. Life itself in all its interrelatedness is the plot. Language is the self-propelling force behind prose.

I feel I should thank fate for my presence in all the unbelievable happenings of my many decades, and for being able to take advantage of the fortunate opportunity of wandering back through my life, looking more closely at some things, thinking them through, loving them more or repudiating them. Yet as I do that, I do not have the feeling of being transported back to the past, but of staying firmly in the here and now. The present is only an extension of our past, without which it would be completely surreal.