Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

1 Into the Unknown: Moscow, 1941

When we sit down to write about past experience, we often force memory to be logical, but that goes against its nature. Memory is alive as moments, associations, ricochets, smells, and pain.

From my front-line diary:

He trudges on, out of luck, an old timer I will not forget.

Protected by a leaden sky lit up occasionally by a blinding enemy flare, the soldiers shamble on into the dank, inhospitable night towards the coming morning’s battle.

I cannot explain even to myself why, down all the years and again today, that question gives me no peace, and why the memory of it so jars me and moves me to tears.

‘Hey, sister! Got a smoke?’

They brought in a squealer, snatched from a forward lookout trench. He was perishing with the cold, swaddled in a woman’s woollen shawl, a forage cap perched on his head. On his feet were thin leather boots no match for the frost, inserted in an apology for overshoes woven from straw. The scout escorting him was very publicly prodding the German in the back with the barrel of his rifle, encouraging him to look lively. In his straw overshoes he could barely drag himself along the slippery, churned-up road. Onlookers –two or three soldiers and a similar number of villagers – brought up the rear, curious to see what was going to happen. They halted at headquarters and the scout, leaving the soldiers to guard his prisoner, went into the hut to report.

Everyone surrounded the German, nobody speaking. An ill-defined tension. From autumn until December the village had been occupied by Germans, but they had looked nothing like this one. The villagers glanced awkwardly, furtively at him.

‘War’s over for you, Fritz,’ remarked one battle-hardened soldier. ‘You’ll live, you scumbag.’

The German’s eyes peered dimly out of the slits between frost-covered eyelashes, as dull and inanimate as the eyes of a water-sprite. He was not a happy Fritz and nobody else was sure quite how to behave, but a young soldier who had never seen a German before could not contain himself and burst out laughing. The German had icicles coming out of his nose and even out of his mouth, above the frost-covered shawl. They looked like a beard. You could hardly feel too hostile towards someone who looked so comical; besides, it was flattering to see the enemy reduced to such a state.

‘You wouldn’t even make much of a scarecrow,’ the battle-hardened soldier said, and patted the German patronizingly on the shoulder. The young one joined in, tugging at one of the icicles for fun. It did not break off, and he, too, laid a mitt on the prisoner’s shoulder.

The German, realizing what a sight he was, covered in icicles, and that this might be the saving of him, that he might not after all be killed, stretched his hands out of the long sleeves of his greatcoat and raised them to reveal a pair of thick socks pulled absurdly over them. He was rewarded with approving laughter.

The scout returned to take him in. On the porch, the German hastily took off his sock-gloves and stuffed them in his greatcoat pockets, shed the straw overshoes, and went inside. He clicked his heels, stood to attention, and gasped with the heat. It was very warm in the hut. He noticed that the commanding officer, looking him over, could barely conceal a smile. Name? Unit? Rank? The frozen German soldier pulled the shawl away from his wooden lips and replied, hardly aware of what he was saying, gulping the heat in greedily and, suddenly fearful, started to claw at his face.

Remembering himself, he put his arms back down smartly at his sides. Icicles slid down his face, over the shawl and greatcoat, and clattered to the floor.

A seasoned soldier remembers an incident last year:

Roads. Engines labour and strain, wheels get stuck in deep ruts. Tanks, trucks on the move, horse-drawn artillery.

A column of infantry. A rucksack on someone’s back with a swaying, sooty billy-can attached. A face, young or old, ear flaps lowered and tied tightly under the chin. A horse quivering with the strain. A hut emerges suddenly out of the screen of snow. A peasant woman, a shawl pulled down to her eyes, watches us pass, her gaze intent, thoughtful. I feel such a heartrending sense of involvement with everything and everyone there, which, at that time, it would have been difficult, odd, impossible to put into words.

A fork in the road, and a girl from Yelnya disappearing inside her huge sheepskin coat, a rifle on her back, waving a flag with one hand while holding a hurricane lamp in the other. She stops the vehicles and meticulously checks their documentation and what they are carrying. She arranges a lift for a wounded soldier trying to get to the field hospital. Some drivers joke with her, others curse her roundly. They drive on.

It is snowing. Mist shrouds the fields and the road. There is gunfire nearby. The front line is overextended, the line of defence compromised. You imagine you see Germans. The girl stands at her checkpoint and all the roughness, the daring, the hopes, the elation and anguish of the war flow past her.

From the diary of Lieutenant Kurt Grumann of the 185th Infantry Regiment of 87th Division:

Sorting through my archive from the war, I came across this diary, and could not immediately think why I had kept it when I was ridding myself of so many materials, trying to retain only what was most important. As I browsed through the diary, though, I found it mentioned Rzhev and could see what had saved it.

Grumann’s diary begins with the German Army already at the gates of Moscow. The fate of the beleaguered capital was closely linked to the cruel drama of the long, self-sacrificing struggle of the defenders on its near approaches, the bridgehead of Rzhev. Rzhev was to play a big part in my own destiny.

Five months of terrible bloodshed were coming to an end. Marshal Zhukov considered November 1941 the most threatening and critical month for Moscow, when its fate was decided in battle. Grumann’s diary covers the way events then unfolded, when in December the apparently crushed Red Army went on the offensive and, for the first time in the war, the Germans suffered a devastating defeat. Grumann describes the confusion, the abandoned armaments, and chaos the like of which he had seen before only when French troops were in retreat. These honestly described scenes give us a rare opportunity to see the situation through enemy eyes at a time when victory seemed to be within the grasp of the Germans, but which ended in their precipitate withdrawal.

In early October I was still in Moscow. Columns of volunteers – students, workers, academics – streamed along Leningrad Highway (now Leningrad Prospekt) on their way to the front to defend Moscow. The Moscow Conservatory marched past, our famous musicians. Everybody was marching out to defend Moscow. On the other side of the highway the No. 12 trolleybus (which today still follows the same route) was bringing back the wounded from the front line to the trolleybus terminal on Volokolamsk Highway; that is how close the front line was. By now long-distance trains were departing from just three railway stations; from the others local trains travelled only to suburban stops. At Byelorussia Station, near my house, there were anti-tank stakes and ‘hedgehogs’, and barricades on the Garden Ring Road. Shop windows were bricked up, with gun slits left in them. Moscow was preparing for fighting in the streets.

When war comes, you defend your home. My duty was to keep watch from the roof of a high neighbouring building and put out incendiary bombs. I had a supply of sand, but had not yet been told what to do with it. There I was, however, alone, looking out over the city, part of the war effort.

There is an explosion as a bomb drops nearby. An anti-aircraft gun opens up from an adjacent roof, giving away our whereabouts. A blacked-out city, everything swallowed up in darkness, lit only by the snaking of tracer bullets. It is all so peculiar, so unfathomable, so monstrously beautiful and breathtaking.

In those early weeks of intensive mobilization, when the recruitment offices were working flat out, it was impossible, and would have been pointless, for a girl not liable for conscription and devoid of useful qualifications to push her way into the enlistment centre.

My friend Vika Malt and I were sent to work at No. 2 Moscow Clock Factory in a workshop that, under the mobilization plan, had been switched to producing cartridge cases. Vika and I had no intention, however, of sitting out the war in a factory and enrolled, while continuing our contribution to producing military supplies, on an intensive evening course in nursing.

It was a course of no fixed abode and shifted up and down deserted Malaya Bronnaya Street. Our fellow nomad was a cumbersome visual aid, a large skeleton whose ribs rattled but who stood on his own two firmly fixed feet, and who had an inventory tag with the number ‘4417’ attached to his pubic bone. He migrated with us to the food hall of a grocer’s shop, then to a school gymnasium, and even on to the stage of the Malaya Bronnaya Jewish Theatre, behind a partition: ‘Shhh! There’s a rehearsal going on!’ The theatre was preparing for the start of the season.

We received certificates testifying to our completion of an intensive nursing course, but then discovered nobody had any intention of sending us to the front: hospitals were being set up in the east of the country. Our thoughts, however, were only of going to the front line. I heard there was an urgent campaign to enlist students on military translation courses. Interpreters were in desperately short supply: this was not the First World War, when the officers themselves were fluent in the language of the enemy. The situation now was very different.

In those days there were no special schools teaching a foreign language, but almost all schools taught German at some level. How well it was taught, and what we thought of it, is conveyed by a verse that did the rounds in our school:

At the front, then, there was an acute shortage of interpreters, and it transpired that without them it was impossible to wage war at all competently. That eventually sank in, and, by order of General Headquarters, courses for military translators were hastily set up at the Army Faculty of Western Languages.

The entrance exam was laughable, and entirely appropriate to the level of our competence. Some of us, though, including me, had been learning the language since childhood, and I found my name on the lists of those who had passed. For the moment, however, I was on a waiting list because only boys were being enrolled; there was a rumour the interpreters would also be given parachute training.

Days passed. There was fighting on the approaches to Kalinin. Oryol had fallen. Finally, on 9 October, I went to ask when I would be able to join the course. ‘You haven’t taken the oath yet,’ the major said. ‘It’s for you to decide. You can see for yourself what the situation is. But if you haven’t changed your mind…’ He named a time and place for me to present myself the next day.

Packing did not take long. I had done a lot of laundry the day before but the sheets and pillowcases just would not dry in my cold apartment, so I left them hanging on lines in the kitchen. I packed an old blanket in my suitcase; it had long been serving as an underlay for ironing and was covered in scorch marks, but it was to accompany me everywhere for the duration of the war. I could hardly take a quilt.

What else I packed I do not remember, because I even forgot to take a towel. I was sure that, like the volunteers, we would be sent to the nearest sector of the front to defend Moscow. In the army, I was also sure, we would be issued everything we needed. The reality was different.

A steamer was moored waiting for us, and we sailed out along the Moscow–Volga canal. There was already fighting on the approaches to Moscow. It was 10 October and the journey was long and slow. Aggravation, unease, but also curiosity: might something happen to us? We were hungry, we had a sense of foreboding, and we did not know where we were being taken because that was a military secret. The steamer finally tied up at a little town called Stavropol-on-Volga.

Later, at the front at Rzhev, I was to translate a captured document dated October 1941:

From the diary of Lieutenant Kurt Grumann:

At the front I was instructed as an interpreter to ask officers taken prisoner what the Germans saw as the strengths of our army. They would mention the T-34, the stoicism of our soldiers, and Zhukov. I told Marshal Zhukov that when we met.

Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the Army, seeing the failure of the Blitzkrieg, considered the retreat from Moscow a catastrophe and a signal that the war had been lost. He and his generals demanded that their troops be withdrawn right back to the borders of the Reich. Hitler dismissed Brauchitsch and, himself already supreme commander-in-chief, appointed himself simultaneously commander-inchief of the Army.

The war continued. The German front commands requested warm clothing for the soldiers from the quartermaster-general. The latter had supposed that, as the lightning war would be over during the summer months, none would be needed.

Under the Barbarossa Plan, an attack on the USSR had been timed for 15 May 1941. If it had begun then, the Germans would have had a significant advantage with an additional month before the coming of winter, but the plan was disrupted by the campaign in Greece. Working on Josef Goebbels’ diaries in the Council of Ministers Archive, I came across an entry recording a very important discussion he had with Hitler on the eve of war against the USSR. Drawing up his plans for a Blitzkrieg to defeat Russia almost instantly, the Führer admitted, ‘The campaign in Greece has severely weakened us in terms of materiel, so this matter is dragging on somewhat. Fortunately, the weather has been fairly bad and the harvest has not yet ripened in Ukraine’ (16 June 1941).

In spring 1941 Hitler had declared war on Greece after it rejected an ultimatum from his Italian ally. An unequal struggle began between little Greece and the bloated military might of Nazi Germany, which by then had subjugated almost the whole of continental Europe. This heroic, steadfast, but tragically doomed struggle nevertheless tied up the German Army in a protracted war in the Balkans.

In the 1980s I found myself in Greece on Okhi Day, a national holiday celebrated on 28 October, when the Greeks said ‘Okhi’, ‘No’, to that enemy ultimatum. Greece’s very youngest citizens marched in holiday procession, very touching in their little white blouses, and each bearing a small Greek flag.

I felt very emotional as I reflected how profoundly Greece’s Okhi Day is relevant to us Russians: it was a day that influenced the entire course of the war.

This phrase is taken almost literally from Hitler’s directives, propounding his policy of using famine as another means of exterminating the Slavs in what he described as race war. This is the first mention in Grumann’s diary of the local people, and he notices them only to leave them to face death.

On that note the diary ends.

In the towns and villages around Moscow from which the Germans had fled, I kept seeing a poster reading, ‘Der Russe muβ sterben, damit wir leben.’ The Russian must die so we may live.

During the days in January of which a German lieutenant writes in his diary, we first graduates of the army translation course left Stavropol-on-Volga with two lieutenant’s pips on our collar tabs. A quiet, small provincial town, little more than a village, it shared its name with the much larger Stavropol in the North Caucasus. The translation course had been set up there in the proximity of General Staff Headquarters, which had moved from Moscow to Kuibyshev. From Stavropol to Kuibyshev was over 100 km down the Volga. There was no railway, no road, and when the Volga froze over we were cut off from the rest of the world until a sledge track along the river could be established.

In this nondescript town with its mysterious hills beyond the Volga, with flickering lights burning in its low, iced-up windows, in the faint swish of sledge runners fading away in fluffy snow, in this ultimate stillness there was none of the thunder of war. Even here, however, the war signalled its presence: refugees, ‘vacuees’, heart-rending scenes at the flea market where poverty met profiteering. In the canteen the new waitresses were all evacuated pregnant women, the town council having decreed that they should receive ‘humanitarian aid’ by being allowed to work at the only catering institution in town operated by the state.

We were cut off from Moscow. How were things going there? We were in a state of constant anxiety. One winter’s day an army division passed through the town, or rather, what remained of it. Down the main street, past the windows of the district land department where we were studying, they came from far away, from the war, Red Army men, limping, dragging their feet in boots and footcloths, frozen, exhausted.

In our lesson that day we were reciting paragraphs from the Wehrmacht’s charter, which had to be learnt by heart: ‘The aggressive spirit of the German infantry…’ Taking in the sight of those trudging past, we fell silent, crowded round the windows and, stricken, could not tear ourselves away. A broken division was being led from the front to somewhere deep in the Russian hinterland to be reconstituted. In the ranks there were flashes of white: an arm in a sling, frostbitten on the way, bandaged ears under a summer forage cap. Some were being hauled along on sledges.

Still they came, more and more of them, exhausted, frozen. The column seemed endless. Darkness fell. They would evidently be coming through all night. A chilling presentiment of defeat crept over us. And that was the moment we took the oath.

The head of the army faculty running our course, handsome Lieutenant General Nikolai Biyazi, had until recently been the Soviet military attaché in Italy. He arrived in a low, wide sleigh from a requisitioned sanatorium. Stepping gingerly in black felt boots he had yet to wear in, he entered the room at the district land office, where our first platoon was lined up ready to take the oath. He warmed his hands at the round stove in the middle of the room and said simply, ‘The future of our Motherland is at stake.’

We came forward one at a time and read out the text: ‘If I break this, my solemn oath, may I be subject to the severity of Soviet law and to the general hatred and contempt of the workers.’ We appended our signatures.

Our classes continue. Today’s lesson is on ‘The Organization of the German Army’, and is being conducted by a captain with a razor-sharp parting in his abundant auburn hair, a rather good-looking man of thirty or so.

We are not paying proper attention. We are in two places at once. Our soul has already winged away and only our body is present here and now, in this room at the land office which looks out to the main road, a snowy white street leading down to the Volga and, beyond that, to the front.

How many howitzers are there in a German artillery regiment, and how much ammunition do they have? What are the calibres of the Germans’ guns? What types of aircraft do they have? (The Henschel 126, the Junkers 88, the Messerschmitt 109.) It is all just too difficult to remember. When we get to the front no doubt we’ll sort all that out, but here and now we do not take it too seriously.

The lessons given by Auerbach, a civilian teacher, are livelier. We do roleplay. ‘You are the prisoner: I am the interpreter. I am the prisoner: you are the interpreter. Let’s talk serious interrogation.’

Civilian Comrade Auerbach is not like the other teachers, who are all captains with emphatically parted hair. He is rather small and wears a dark blue Boston suit you might not expect to see outside Moscow. It seems out of place among all the army tunics and grey greatcoats. He was born in Switzerland but has lived most of his life in Russia, and appears intensely committed to his work. Perhaps work is his homeland and he is cultivating its soil. Our course has just been set up and the teaching methodology is not yet set in stone, so he is his own master, free to do things his own way. He imparts useful knowledge to us.

In order to get used to the military cadence of the enemy’s language, we translate newly captured documents, dated December and sent up the Volga from General Headquarters.

That made us laugh. The enemy had been brought low. It cheered us to think that those swine were feeling cold and wrapping newspapers round their thighs. But on the other hand, there was something incongruous about the enemy feeling the cold, just like us, something perplexing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the first bombs had fallen on Moscow.

Now ration cards had been introduced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At a New Year party, which doubled as our farewell party and was arranged by our superiors for us at the fermented mare’s milk sanatorium, Lieutenant General Biyazi told us, ‘Your weapon in this war is the German language. You can be taught to shoot once you get to the front line.’

With that, we departed, hustled through the German language in a rushed two and a half months because there really was an urgent need for military interpreters at the front.

‘Genossen,’ said Auerbach, his voice today rather solemn, ‘This will be our last lesson.’ He paused and we waited patiently, trying not to fidget, not to breathe too loudly. Standing on tiptoe, he began suddenly to recite:

For a time we are confused, not understanding what is going on. ‘Das Ew’ge regt sich fort in allen.’ Goethe put that well. Auerbach stops, and then says in an uncharacteristically stern tone, ‘I would ask you, Genossen, to remember that the author of this poem was a German. When we win and fascism has finally been done away with in Germany, we shall have the right to tell ourselves that never, even during the years of war and brutality, did we cease to love this beautiful language.’

As far as we were concerned, our relations with the German language had not recovered from our experiences at school, but that was now beside the point. We were touched by the solemnity with which he addressed us. We were issued with hats with earflaps, and the girls finally had their canvas boots replaced with leather boots. So, now it really was time for us to leave. Farewell, Stavropol! We were the course’s first cohort.

We had not yet lived there for four months, despite our diplomas certifying we had graduated from a four-month course, rather than the two-and-a-half months we had actually studied. It seemed like a whole epoch, lived in a lyrical whirl of imminent departure.

‘Ey, hey! Mother Volga!’

We had before us a hundred versts [1 verst is approx. 1.07 km] of the ancient sledge track down the Volga to Kuibyshev. A taciturn old man in a sheepskin coat, with a wispy beard the wind blew to one side, was answerable for our safe arrival. He was accompanied by young lads to handle the collective farm horses.

We took our places in the sledges, buried our feet in straw, and moved off. Our groom, a boy of fifteen or so, ran alongside, never letting go of the reins. Following the front runner, our sledge turned, creaking and swaying, and friskily picked up speed across the empty market square, tossing up bits of straw and sending lumps of frozen horse dung flying over the snow. And then, downhill to the Volga following a broad, well-travelled path and catching up with the other sledges. Our driver jumped into the sledge, whipped up the horse and yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Hey! Mother Volga!’

And so began our nostalgic journey to war. More than thirty years ago I described that journey along the Volga. I am anxious now about repeating myself, but when, year after year, you are writing what, in truth, is the story of your life, you can hardly avoid (and does it matter?) repetition, if that is what you yourself need to achieve a new understanding of both life and yourself. I hope that in my case such rumination may be judged at least partly justifiable.

So, on we go. The horse pulling us along, the sledge swaying, the snow a light grey blanket. The white, frozen Volga slips past beneath us and its white, snowy banks have branches of scrub scrabbling out everywhere from under the snow. Beyond the sloping bank is a white expanse where earth meets sky, and when the bank falls away the infinitely receding white distance beckons enticingly. Suddenly a little house appears in the snow. Who can be living there? We speed on by, plucked now from our routine of German lessons, venturing into the unknown.

As I look back, I can say we had never before been so lighthearted and carefree, and never would be again. In the dusk the horses hauled themselves over to the bank and up to a village. We got out of the sledges and scrambled after them, sinking into the snow.

Dogs barked gruffly. Above the roofs the smoke stood in a motionless column. Now it was no longer snow underfoot but floorboards. The muggy, musty warmth of a hut, a baby crying, the sound of boots and bustle in the courtyard on the other side of the log cabin wall; grey eyes looking silently out from under a headscarf, patiently taking note of us, one by one, our whole posse; and a hand lit by a russet glow stirring red embers with a poker.

Frozen bread that had been thawed, a cauldron of steaming porridge, conversation in the evening with the master of the house beside a dented brass samovar. A night sleeping under greatcoats on a floor spread with straw.

‘Arise, Monsieur le Comte, you have great things to accomplish!’ Such was the wake-up call in our student hostel. It is supposedly how his servant would waken Saint-Simon. And again we take to the road. Low snow drifting. Blurred figures ahead. We catch up with them. Women wrapped in shawls are walking in single file a little to the side of us, on a footpath trodden in the snow. They are on their way to Kuibyshev to see for the last time their husbands, who have been taken for the war.

We continue in our sledges, and encounter another dark file of women. Women are on the move the whole length of the Volga: some will not have held back on abuse for their drunkard husbands; what names will they not have called them? But now they stumble, stooped and freezing, their felt boots sinking into the snow. They have no orders, no time by which they must arrive, no package sealed with wax, but carry a gift warmed by their bosom – some last farewell, some last token of love from home.

We, state officials with provisions and horses, we who are so necessary for the accomplishment of great things, go very quiet. Only one voice from among us sings uncertainly,

A snowstorm blows up. We run behind the sledges to get warm. Suddenly, out of the blizzard, a dog is sitting alert in the snow, its jaw silvered with grey hoarfrost. A man sees us and stops shovelling and throwing snow to one side. He is a strange man, appearing out of nowhere, in a long black coat. His face is not old. He looks educated. He peers at us quizzically, quietly, intelligently… Suddenly someone yells, ‘Move on!’ That is addressed to us. ‘Nothing to look at here!’ The barrel of a rifle shows from behind the shoulder of a sheepskin coat. Somewhere nearby there will be a watchtower. We guess uneasily that we are in the vicinity of a forced labour camp, and feel bad.

We look around. The whirling snow blanks out this vision. There is no sign now of the man in black, or the dog, or the barrel of a rifle. We relapse into the cheery inebriation of new recruits.

From Kuibyshev to Moscow. GHQ on Gogol Boulevard. Some thirty of us are assembled there. A pleasant looking major with a shock of blond hair comes out to us, a folder with dangling laces pressed against his thigh. He informs us that, by order of Comrade Stalin, an Airborne Forces Directorate is being set up to strike at the enemy behind the front line in the territory temporarily occupied. ‘Interpreters are needed and we have decided to pass you over to the AFD. Any questions?’

No one has any questions, but the major himself, after a pause, adds, ‘Right, so you will be transferred. Only if you are willing, of course. All in? Anyone out, speak up now.’

That is all there is to it, this charged moment. Two refuse. One girl says she cannot stand heights; and one boy asks to stay grounded. We are embarrassed for them, and that is the end of the matter.

As for the rest of us? The folder with the laces is taken up a floor, delivering our personal files to the AFD. None of us pose a problem, in fact everything is splendid. We have been found worthy.

On the first floor the new directorate is taking shape before our eyes. A lieutenant colonel is pulling a chair somewhere, a wastepaper basket is being moved, someone else is doing something else.

The next day we are all in the corridor, waiting. Except for the two dropouts, of course. We are trying to look smart, feeling tense. We are called in individually. Finally, as if from far away, I hear my own name. I go in and identify myself, as trained in Stavropol. In the depths of the room two lieutenant colonels are sitting opposite each other at a table, halfturned towards the door. Towards me.

‘Comrade technician-quartermaster second class, do you play sport?’

‘I used to play volleyball.’ (Our girls’ team won the grade eight championship for Krasnaya Presnya District, but I had later given up volleyball. I forget why.)

‘Good, good. And are you a good skier?’ ‘Not brilliant, but I’ll do my best.’ ‘Good.’

‘Yes, but actually how good is your skiing? How many kilometres could you manage?’ I wonder frantically what reply to give. Five? They’ll say that’s not enough. Thirty? They won’t believe me.

‘She’ll manage!’ says the first lieutenant colonel, giving me a smile. ‘She’ll do what needs to be done!’

I feel a sense of tremendous relief, as if I have already jumped and am now dangling from a parachute. I can see we have only been going through the motions and that the whole thing is not as serious as it seemed. Their questions, my answers are neither here nor there.

‘And how about walking? Have you got good, strong pins? Stamina?’ That is the second one asking.

‘Last year when we were hiking in Svanetia… I kept up fine.’ They nod – good, good – a little conspiratorially. Then the lieutenant colonels exchange a glance and narrow their eyes as if to warn me that the next question is less straightforward and I should be ready for it. ‘How would you feel about jumping out of a plane?’ I have my answer ready. ‘I suppose it’s, well, just another form of transport.’ They laugh loudly, encouragingly, stand up and shake my hand.

‘All in? Anyone out?’ ‘To be or not to be?’ There can be no hesitation. What you fear is not what is impending, what is coming after you leave this office. What you fear is messing up here, at this fateful moment, dropping out like those other two who were not up to it, the disgrace of letting down the others. You are all in this together.

The only thing that was truthful about that interview was that, on a tourist trip to Svanetia, I had indeed trekked along no worse than the rest. (We had donkeys to carry our rucksacks through the pass in the mountains.) All the rest was total nonsense. Skiing? So-so. Volleyball? I packed that in when I was fourteen. So why did I not just say so? But no, it was nothing to do with physical fitness, it was about a state of mind. How could you not play along with their brazenness? ‘She’ll do what needs to be done!’ As to whether someone might be scared to jump out of a plane, you might have had an idea if you had at least jumped from the tower in Gorky Park! But in any case if, when you were already airborne, you panicked at the last moment, you would be shoved out anyway, like it or not, into thin air.

I knew perfectly well the questions were a formality, and they were already answering affirmatively on our behalf. It was yesterday’s major who had been checking us out for resolve with his ‘All in? Anyone out?’ Today they were just beefing up parachute brigades with the requisite number of interpreters. And there was I with my half-baked answer, ready to respond to that tricky question – ‘I suppose it’s, well, just another means of transport’ – and rewarded with approving laughter. But why was I conniving with these lieutenant colonels whose job was to turn me into a tick in a box on a larger list of brigades being brought up to strength? Why, when I still had a choice, was I being drawn with so little resistance into the maw of war?

My dear friend Yury Dikov told me, ‘There always remains the desire, the attempt to clarify that about yourself, but you will never be able to reproduce exactly what it was that made you leap into the maw. There will always be more puzzles than you can find an answer to.’

It would seem we will never break through to the truth about ourselves even if we try for a lifetime.

The train was for Tula. Through the blackness of the night, without headlights, without warning signals, it hurtled on, hoping for the best, jolting over places where the track had been patched up. Mysterious stations, fleeting in the dark. Sudden stops in open, snowbound, January countryside.

I had the top shelf, the one for luggage. Neither the blissful hardness of the planks, nor hitting my head on the low ceiling while clumsily trying to change position, seemed to involve me in the slightest, any more than the fug from cheap tobacco, the rustling in the dim light down below, the occasional sob, the snoring, the laughter and swearing, the clinking of kettles.

The person occupying the top baggage shelf was not really me. Within the familiar shell of my muscles and joints, my incorporeal spirit was being borne towards its destination, a parachute unit. That probably sounds pretentious, but how else can I describe the peculiar sense of weightlessness and uncertainty of a body destined to parachute to earth with no knowledge of how to do so, behind enemy lines, moreover, where it will combat the enemy in a firefight without a clue about how to shoot.

Tula was as far as the train could take us. The five of us, three boys, myself and Lyudmila, spent the night in a house by the station, in the train crews’ recreation room. In this room lined with metal bunks, the washstand clattered early in the morning as the male railway workers and our paratroop lads queued up to wash, stripped to the waist and with towels over their shoulders.

In the dimly lit room their sculpted torsos and biceps seemed unbelievably strong. I was numbed by a sense of our physical inadequacy for the demands shortly to be made of us. But that was only for a moment. We moved on and everything again seemed bearable, no longer beyond our strength.

Our group of interpreters was to report to 8th Airborne Brigade under the command of Major General Levashov. The brigade was being formed as a matter of urgency, on Stalin’s orders, in newly liberated Kaluga. Also on Stalin’s orders, all freight for the brigade was to be forwarded by rail with absolutely top priority. The railway tracks, however, had been restored only on certain stretches. At crippled stations, halts and sidings, a hoarse commandant, besieged by soldiers and civilians, would glance at our orders and hastily push us on to the first train that arrived. We were on Kremlin business, we were urgently needed to accomplish great deeds. The train would move out to a barrage of furious abuse from soldiers and the wailing of hapless women left behind, burdened with their bundles, their churns and sacks.

Beyond Plekhanovo we came to a stop. Ryurikovo. From here we would be walking along the track. White, white, frozen vistas, sometimes obscured by the gloom of a blizzard but then, when the weather cleared, still there, unchanged. Snow-covered burnt-out huts, whole villages of them. Exposed chimneys of stoves like black obelisks plastered with layers of snow.

What lies ahead? The lack of fear is almost puzzling. The unprecedented nature of everything grips you and roils your stomach. You have set out and already there is no turning back. Already that vista, the snow, and those burnt-out remains like black, uprooted trees are doing something to you, drawing you into their world. Already you are committed to that far distance, as if you have already drowned and dissolved in its boundlessness. For some reason you feel a little sad, but also touched.

Only it is so cold. Today, as I write, I can check that with what our German lieutenant had to say:

Well, it is no easier for us. Admittedly, I have felt boots. In Stavropol, when I was issued a greatcoat, I sold my civilian coat and bought a pair of second-hand, mended felt boots at the bazaar with the money. Under my greatcoat I have a sleeveless flannelette pullover. My face suffers most, like the German’s, and there is the danger of frostbite in your hands. Is it really only a few days since we were sliding in our sledges down from the bank onto the Volga at Stavropol? ‘Ey, hey! Mother Volga!’ I can’t believe it.

We bypassed a blown-up bridge and got on to the Moscow–Tula–Kaluga highway. There was almost no traffic; trucks hooted occasionally as they passed. To either side of the highway were abandoned tanks and pieces of enemy hardware covered in snow. There had been a bloody battle on the highway a few days earlier. The all-conquering Second Panzer Army of General Guderian, the father of tank warfare and ideologist of Blitzkrieg who had never known defeat, had been tearing towards Moscow, before being stopped. And defeated.

GHQ sent a captured book by Guderian to us in Stavropol to learn specialized military terminology and the technical specifications of the enemy’s tanks. The book’s jubilant title, Achtung – Panzer! and the spirit in which it was written proclaimed that conquered lands would soon be squirming beneath the caterpillar tracks of his tanks.

‘Our hopes rest on Guderian’s tanks, which have punched through towards Moscow from the south-west,’ Lieutenant Kurt Grumann had written in late November. But Colonel General Guderian, who had crushed the rest of Europe beneath the tracks of his tanks, had met his first defeat. It had been here, so close to Moscow, the capital which he was in such a hurry to ‘punch through’ to. It was here, too, that he had taken the decision, on his own initiative, to retreat, which was unheard of! An enraged Hitler retaliated by dismissing him and leaving him to languish in disgrace for many months. He was rehabilitated only in 1943 when he was appointed inspector general of armoured troops to rebuild the shattered tank forces after the defeat at Stalingrad, and in 1944 he was appointed chief of staff of the German Army. But once again, in spring 1945, he was dismissed when a battle on the Oder, against my 3rd Shock Army and others, was lost. He was relieved of all duties by Hitler and sent off on ‘sick leave’. This mitigated his fate after the war when the Allies came to dealing with Hitler’s generals.

But all that was later. Right then, on that highway, moving over to the shoulder, you wanted to sweep the snow off a tank lying on its side and, just for a moment, so as not to freeze to it, touch its armour with your mittened hand. In far-off Stavropol we had so feared for Moscow, knowing that these tanks of Guderian’s were already on the approaches to the capital.

The cold kept us moving. We left the highway and turned onto a sledge track. Towards us came low sledges transporting the wounded, covered with straw to give them some warmth. A lanky soldier came running in their wake. He was wearing a short coat whose broad flaps slapped against his thighs as he ran by, pressing a bandaged hand to his chest. From beneath a grey helmet, exhausted child-like blue eyes looked out at us, but only for a moment, and then he was past and all we could see were his legs in their black wrappings, as stiff as the legs of a compass.

We walked on in silence, not talking, numb with cold. The entry in my diary about those hours of our journey is almost delirious. That is sometimes true of Kurt Grumann’s diary, too. I volunteer this unedited excerpt from my diary:

Evening. We arrived. There was no smoke anywhere. Only chimneys, no houses. How come? There was supposed to be a station somewhere, a proper station. Okay, no station, but there should be a commandant. We bumped into each other in the dark, wandered apart. There was a small hut. I felt a door and pushed it. It opened from the street outside straight into a room. A woman was leaning protectively over a table which had children on it.

‘Let no one in without firewood!’ she shouted. ‘It’s a woman,’ someone replied. She turned round. ‘Hello.’ I could barely move my lips and with wooden fingers could not pull the prickly scarf away from my face. ‘Let no one in without firewood! I’ve got sick children here!’

The window was curtained with German packaging material, hessian with a huge black swastika in the middle. It was the first time I had seen a swastika.

Later, having found the commandant, we say, ’We are looking for staff headquarters and have to report to Major General Levashov.’ ‘Yes, yes, sit down. He passed through only yesterday.’

The commandant gets us a place in a heated cattle truck which, we discover, belongs to staff headquarters and is the battalion’s command post. A Siberian division has arrived at the front. Lieutenant Kurt Grumann dated his ‘first acquaintance with Siberian divisions’ from November. For us, too, it is all new: the white half-length fur coats, the submachine guns and short skis. We sit by an iron stove in the middle of the wagon, supping hot buckwheat gruel with pork fat and listening to tales about Siberia and Siberian girls. For these lieutenants, as for Kurt Grumann, the war means separation from their sweethearts. Grumann wrote about that in his diary also.

The young battalion commander, the same age as us, is giving orders by telephone, and his voice is relayed by wires the length of the train. The clerk licks his pencil and writes pensively in a notebook headed History of the Battalion about their combat-readiness. I, too, when the stove has thawed me out, am moved to get out my diary and write about this headquarters on wheels, the hot gruel with fat, the soldier in his ankle boots and black leg wrappings running after the sledges, pressing his wounded arm to his chest, and about that huge black swastika.

Everything is in a state of readiness here in the wagon, and yet at the same time the atmosphere is straightforward, calm and hospitable, as if this were a scheduled train in peacetime rather than one heading to battle. Yet tomorrow these young lieutenants will perhaps be fighting the Germans.

At a junction we say goodbye and get out. Dark, unfathomable night. We walk for a while along the track and then, for the last stretch of our journey to Kaluga, travel in a train crammed with Red Army soldiers. For what remains of the night in our wagon, the bolt is being pulled back, the sliding door clattering, the cold blowing in until, in the opening, above the dark back of a soldier, a subdued light glimmers as morning approaches.

‘Don’t piss into the wind!’ someone shouts jocularly, and yet again I am troubled by a sense of woman’s less than perfect physiological adaptation to the vexing exigencies of army life. It is only for a moment. Chided by my soul, I speed incorporeally on.

Kaluga is a district centre and lies on the River Oka. It had been under occupation for two and a half months and suffered the usual fate of front-line towns. The last battles to retake it were particularly bitter. On 13 December our troops broke into the outskirts but were cut off and surrounded. There was desperate street fighting. On 30 December Kaluga was recaptured.

The entry in my diary reads:

What happened after that I noted shortly afterwards:

Recalling my sojourn under that table in Kaluga, I realized just how much idiocy there is in war. Working at GHQ, where they already had more than enough translators without me and seemed to have rather few captured documents to translate, began to rankle, and the thought that this might be how, day after day, my life would drag pointlessly on until the war ended, provoked me to rebellion. I went to the personnel department and asked to be sent to the front with ground troops. They brushed that aside, and my temporary situation showed every sign of becoming permanent, not least because at that very moment, by order of Stalin, all the directorates at General Headquarters were reclassified as main directorates. An order to this effect, in respect also of the Intelligence Directorate, was duly pinned up with a list of the established personnel. It included my name, as an interpreter; it was the last on the list, the only name below it being the signature of Stalin. Just then, however, a major arrived at GHQ from the front with instructions from General Lelyushenko not to come back without an interpreter. They could hardly refuse the general, who had covered himself in glory during the December offensive, and unloaded me on to him, evidently unaware that Lelyushenko could not stand women in the army.