Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

2 The Paths of War: Russia, 1942–3

Thank God there was a blizzard, concealing us from aircraft, but the field we had to cross seemed endless. The distant grey dots of huts disappeared in the darkness even as we were moving towards them. By now, though, they must be nearby, those havens, not burned down, remote beacons among the hummocks of snow.

We finally reached the village street in Voskresenskoye and immediately were caught up in a commotion. There were voices. ‘We need an interpreter!’

I imagine there were other calls, but that was the one I heard.

Seventeen Germans! Seventeen prisoners! Seventeen Fritzes under the command of a senior lieutenant had surrendered. The news swept down the street together with the snow.

Someone, scattering light to right and left with a torch, cleaving the slanting flurries of snow with the flaps of his billowing camouflage smock, was heading towards us, substantial and authoritative. He confronted us point blank: ‘We need an interpreter!’

My escort rushed over. ‘Comrade Regimental Commissar!’ He saluted, and reported my availability as if he had just captured me personally and was delivering me with perfect timing. ‘This way!’ That was addressed to me by the regimental commissar, who flashed his torch in my direction.

The snow stops, the wind now levelling out the crunching banks of snow. We come to an outhouse. The sentry steps aside. The light from the regimental commissar’s torch glides over the snow and suddenly, in the wide open doors of the outhouse, picks out alien, foreign, freezing soldiers huddled in a heap on rotten straw, clad in greatcoats, helmets and forage caps, and thin boots.

‘Ask who’s in charge.’ That I can manage. That I have learned. I say painstakingly, ‘Who is the senior person here?’ Stirring, swarming, consternation.

‘I am.’ A man comes to the open door, his greatcoat covered in wisps of straw.

‘Identify yourself! Rank? Name?’

‘Lance Corporal…’

He has been left in charge because the commanding officer, the senior lieutenant, has already been taken away. ‘He’s been taken for interrogation, to the chief of staff,’ the sentry reports.

‘This way!’ the regimental commissar strode off briskly to wherever we were to go. We followed, I and the German, stooped, his arms listlessly by his sides. We crunched across the snow, both of us cold, but he desperately cold.

A vehicle serving as an office, its bodywork covered with plywood. Felled spruce firs were leaned up against it for camouflage and in there, behind the plywood, like in a proper building, was a blazing hot stove. It was blissfully warm inside.

I pulled off a striped woollen scarf and put it in my greatcoat pocket. The German, stooping even more, sat down as indicated by the regimental commissar on the edge of a trestle bed. He was not young, forty or more, and had a haggard, greenish face. I would have been embarrassed to look at him too closely, and in any case had other things on my mind. I was trembling as if about to take an exam.

Did I have a pencil and paper? Only a German–Russian dictionary in my satchel, otherwise nothing. My rucksack had been left in a village on the far side of that field. Commissar Bachurin put a pencil on the table and tore a couple of sheets out of a notebook. ‘Let’s make a start! Ask him his name, age, where he comes from. And so on.’

I knew these questions in German by heart and, feeling a surge of confidence, turned to the German. The oil lamp on the table illuminated him clearly, and as I pronounced the question I saw his wrinkled, green-tinged face and his ears tucked under a cloth forage cap. It was the worn-out face of a working man whose best years are behind him. All that, however, was of secondary importance. If there was one virtue I was desperately hoping to find in the captive German facing me, it was clear diction and nothing remotely resembling a Bavarian accent. ‘Bitte, sprechen Sie langsam und deutlich,’ I said. Speak slowly and clearly.

‘Write!’ the regimental commissar instructed me. I elicited the prisoner’s first name and surname. He was born in 1896, so was seven years younger than my father. He pronounced numbers rather oddly, ‘ayn, tsvay, dray’, although I could guess what he meant.

The burden of anxiety that I would be unable to ask him questions or understand his answers gradually lifted. There remained, however, the burden of being in contact with him, with his ordinary little eyes and irredeemably foreign, disagreeable greatcoat. There sat Karl Steiger – I think that was his name – haggard, middle-aged, wearing his enemy greatcoat and representing something frightful and baffling: a prisoner. We were sitting close together, peacefully, but seeing each other through the inexorable distancing effect of our enmity.

‘Mällen,’ Steiger enunciated with some effort. I had never heard that word before. What could it mean? ‘Mällen,’ the prisoner repeated, showing black teeth when he smiled. ‘Raschen Mällen.’

During the First World War he and his family – who were living in Lithuania – had been interned deep in the Russian heartland, in Central Asia. ‘Mällen’ was evidently a word he was recalling from that time.

‘Melon,’ Commissar Bachurin responded unsmilingly. ‘Melon. Very good.’ ‘Jawohl!’ the prisoner agreed. ‘Mällen ist gut, sehr gut!’ ‘And war?’ the commissar asked pointedly.

‘Mällen,’ the prisoner persisted, evidently seeing his one word of Russian as a bridge between us. ‘Mällen ist gut.’ He lifted one foot, exhibiting a battered boot with a short, misshapen top. ‘War…’ Confidingly, smiling again, he said, ‘Please give me a blanket. In the shed it is so terribly cold. Brr!’ he added expressively, so that he should be understood by the regimental commissar without the need for translation. The commissar did not respond positively. ‘Ask him whether a Russian who gets captured also asks for a blanket?’

I translated and the conversation was over. Bachurin stood up. I and the German also stood up and waited for him to put his coat on. He went down the steps attached to the vehicle, folding the camouflage smock over his arm. I followed. The sentry saluted. The guard got out of the driver’s cab and stood next to the German.

‘Go to that hut,’ Bachurin instructed me. ‘Ask for Kondratiev, the cryptographer. He has German documents. Proceed to translate them immediately.’

In the hut the commissar had directed me to everyone was sound asleep on the floor. That struck me as odd. Wasn’t this the front line? Had I imagined that soldiers at the front stayed awake for nights on end? The truth was that, having only just arrived, I would not have minded lying down somewhere myself, but the commissar had ordered me to start translating a backlog of captured documents no one had even sorted through. The only person awake in the hut, the duty telephonist, opened a filing cabinet and took out the documents. In great agitation, I sat down by a lamp, anticipating that I was about to discover something of great importance. It was, however, only instructions on how to deal with lubricating oil at low temperatures, and I had translated something almost identical at GHQ. The other papers were of no greater significance. The cryptographer, Lieutenant Kondratiev, was a clever, ironical and independent-minded young man, something I appreciated only later. He gathered up all the papers and nodded at a chest. It was small, but something to sleep on nevertheless. Pulling off my felt boots, I thought about the Germans in that shed. ‘Please give me a blanket. In the shed it is so terribly cold.’ Oh God, how awful. ‘You’re not allowed to take your footwear off at night,’ the duty officer told the rookie scornfully.

I put my feet back in my boots. Fitting on top of the chest, no matter how I contorted my legs, proved even more difficult in felt boots. My legs hung over the edge, my greatcoat fell off, my hat and the bag with my dictionary, serving as a pillow, slipped from under my head.

In general, I never slept more soundly anywhere than at the front, no matter what the situation and in any position: on a bare trestle bed, on a bench, on the floor, propped up on my fists with my elbows resting on a table, standing, standing propped up by a wall. It did not matter how, just as long as I could sleep. That first night, however, it took me some time.

The phone rang and I heard the duty officer say briskly, ‘Stay alert. Yes, sir!’ Seeing I was not yet sleeping, when he had hung up he grinned at me and said, ‘Who was going to take her boots off? German tanks have broken through at Nozhkino-Kokoshkino. That’s 4 km from here.’ Having learned a few things about German tanks in Stavropol, I anxiously calculated that they could appear at any moment, but everyone carried on sleeping. Shortly afterwards, I fell asleep myself.

In the morning the village was bombed mercilessly. The Germans had worked out that our army headquarters was located here, although the command post had already moved to the forest. With only brief pauses, they were circling above the village all day.

The ghastly shrieking of planes circling lower and lower, their shadows speeding over the snow: the unendurable whistling of a released bomb eats into your spine. Then the roar as it explodes. Above us, whether we are dead or alive, a snowy tornado whirls. Suddenly, very close, there comes the harsh rattling of a machine gun. More fountains. We, dark, motionless marks on the snow, wait, quaking. How easy it would be, right here, right now, to cease to be. Then, at last, he is leaving, wagging his tail with its black German cross.

And we are still alive! We rush onwards, somersaulting in the snow, throwing back our heads to gaze up into the sky and its unbounded openness. Sky and snow, and ahead of us the black edge of the forest beyond the snow-covered field. Safety! Just get there, hide out until dark. But before we can reach the forest God knows how much more snow we have to wade through, perhaps almost a kilometre. In the air, from afar, still weak, but… a droning. The droning of an aircraft!

Those who are strong and further ahead, closer to the forest, may get there in time but we will not. We are not going to make it. We turn off on to a hardened, icy strip of snow towards a shed we see not too far away. When we reach it, the commander of the anti-aircraft gunners, a roundfaced, placid, neat man appears on its icy threshold. He tells us the political instructor has been killed; he had just finished handing out parcels to the soldiers.

‘His stomach was turned inside out. We are sad!’ he said and went back to his post at the gun.

Until the end of that day we were shifting around, trying to dodge the bombing. The places we found! Vegetable plots in someone’s snow-covered trenches, potato clamps, a dugout occupied by a family whose hut had burned down. It was the kind of day that might have been described in official German reports in language along the lines of, ‘Engaged in fighting of local significance. Air power used for targeted bombing to harass enemy forces.’

My own forces were well and truly harassed by the time it started snowing, darkness fell, and it was finally possible to get back home.

The prisoners were being led through the village towards us. They were not marching but straggling, bent over against the cold. I stopped to see whether yesterday’s Karl Steiger was among them, a man who knew the Russian for ‘melon’ and wanted a blanket. In the darkness all the Germans looked alike. I managed only to count them. There were seventeen, so he must have been. They were being taken off somewhere. Well, good luck to them. No business of mine.

When it was dark, all those with whom I had shared my first day at the front being bombed were taken out of the village and into the forest where they would be safer. I was not.

Holding a sooty cooking pot at a distance in order not to mark my greatcoat, and clutching the German papers I had been given, I entered the hut to which I had been ordered to report. The first thing I saw was my rucksack, tied with the twisted blue cord from my mother’s curtain, which had evidently been delivered from the village where our truck got stuck yesterday as we were on our way here with our escort. I introduced myself.

‘Excellent!’ said a hefty, red-haired man, a captain by the name of Kasko, who was sitting on a wooden bench by a desk and, with the aid of a thick book which served as a ruler, drawing a table on a sheet of paper. ‘Where did you disappear to for twenty-four hours?’ ‘I was translating this,’ I said, waving my pathetic bundle of papers.

‘We’re really suffering from a shortage of translators.’ That was rather pleasing to hear. Evidently great things had just been waiting for me to come and accomplish them. ‘Get your ID ready for me to inspect.’

For some reason this is always the way: you are getting along fine, feeling relaxed, when someone suddenly demands, ‘ID!’ and you practically choke. Cooking pot down on the floor, hasty delving into the field case at my side, and all it is about is your travel orders, your food ration entitlement, and your graduation certificate from the army translation course.

‘What a shower! They didn’t even ask to see your food ration entitlement? They fed you anyway?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘They feed just anyone. Have they no shame?’ He pushed my documents to the end of the table and invited me to take off my greatcoat and sit down. ‘We’ll get round to you in a moment.’ It was at least warm in here and I was perfectly happy to wait.

Kasko carried on busily plotting his table. The edge of the book he was using as a ruler was uneven, and he would sit down, then get up, move the oil lamp around on the table examining his work and, when he found a less than straight line, erase it and return to his drawing.

It was already night but he was evidently still not ready for the couriers. They arrived nevertheless, and came in one by one, dusted with snow, frozen stiff, from various sectors of the front. They sat down at the table, lit up a cigarette avidly, talked excitedly about how the fighting had gone, who had prevailed over whom and, out of the chaos of battle, the incoherence of war, emerged the names of those who had died. Some had gone over the top, crawling out into the snow to suppress a firing point and never returning; some had been covering the withdrawal of a raiding patrol; or been cut down by enemy fire, a hail of bullets, raking fire, crossfire…

Captain Kasko heard the couriers out amiably enough, then stood up from behind the table. He was a big man, his ginger hair cropped short up the back of his head. He stretched, shifted from one foot to the other in his felt boots, and in a far from nocturnal, indeed brusque morning tone, slapped one hand upwards against the other and barked, ‘Details of location (slap), time (another slap). Proof of death?’

The person reporting was not, however, a professional messenger of death and could not fit the tale he had to tell to the three points demanded. He had made his way through the icy cold, the snow, the darkness to bring to this place his last farewell to the dead and to register their heroism for posterity. He became even more heated. There was only one person listening to him: me, and even I was less than reliable. I was dog tired, halfasleep, and had swimming around in my head, ‘ID!’ ‘Proof of death!’ and suddenly, ‘We are sad!’

‘Bed down here to sleep tonight,’ the captain said, indicating the wooden bench he was sitting on. So my first day at the front was not yet over. Was this how I had imagined it back there on the army translation course? ‘Air attack!’ ‘Don’t give your position away!’ ‘Get down!’ There had been only the rap of these commands, and fear, and nothing heroic. Perhaps there was something different, right up at the front where the couriers were coming from, not just the freezing cold and death. Perhaps there death could not be fitted into such dull headings as ‘at his post’, ‘while on a military mission’. The messengers, however, went back, and the dead were left in the hands of Captain Kasko. If only this ginger-mopped Charon would get his butt off that bench and move to the stool, but it did not occur to him to let me sleep in the place he had indicated; he was too busy casting spells over his chart, preparing his report, his summary for this day of war.

‘Right then,’ said Captain Kasko. ‘Now for some information about you.’ He took a blank sheet of paper and dipped his pen in the spill-proof inkwell. ‘So, born in Byelorussia, nationality Jewish, resident of Moscow, student.’ He then informed me, ‘In the morning you are being sent to Captain Borisov in an intelligence section group.’

He clattered about, pushing stools out of the way, gathering up his papers, moved the lamp to the stove, seized the desk and, pressing it to his stomach, humped it over to the wall.

He undid a cape groundsheet, took out his bedding and spread it on the table in a neat, housewifely manner, showing not the slightest concern about German tanks and bombs and, turning down the wick in the lamp, lay down and slept the sleep of the just.

The night passed. Before dawn I was again in the plywood-faced vehicle I had visited with the commissar and the prisoner. We were on the move to a new destination, but where we were or what sights we might be driving past there was no telling from inside this plywood hut on wheels. They set me down at the entrance to the village. ‘Look for a hut opposite the well; that’s where the intelligence unit is, and get to work.’

I walked along, keeping to the huts on the side they had indicated. There the houses were intact, but opposite several in a row had been destroyed. Through a gaping hole I could see a stove, but anything that had been destroyed by a bomb or a shell was either covered with snow or had been dismantled for firewood. A cat darted out and stood waiting, motionless, hungry, her eye glinting peevishly. She vanished through the gap, leaving her dainty, despairing pawprints in the snow.

A Red Army soldier was bowling along in an empty sleigh. In the distance a soldier with a rifle was walking to and fro outside a log hut. There was no one else, no sign of villagers. The village seemed extinct.

The well – my landmark – was very visible, with the long arm of the well sweep upraised. Opposite was a house with three windows. I turned the latch and the door opened. Little did I know as I went in how firmly that house would remain lodged in my memory and my heart.

I climbed stairs to the landing, where there were two doors: one leading to a covered courtyard and the other, to the right and insulated, leading into the hut itself. I discovered that later, but back then I just pushed one open at random and found myself in a smoky kitchen full of children. It was so unexpected that I was completely thrown and did not know what to do when Nyurka, the five-year-old ataman of this nursery, came dancing over to greet me with a German ramrod in her hands.

The extinct village in the crossfire of the battle for Moscow was decidedly alive.

The German was sitting in a corner by the table. The children shied away to a different corner and stared at him. It was impossible to compare him with those seventeen phantoms writhing with cold in that barn. He was handsome and young, and somehow fresh.

‘What is your name?’ I asked woodenly as I sat down on the edge of the bench.

‘Hans. Hans Thiel.’

The baby in a wicker basket whimpered and the eldest boy, barefoot and wearing a cap that had slid over his ears, began furiously rocking the cradle. The rod from which it was suspended swayed and creaked above us.

What else should I ask him? The blue light of his Aryan eyes was dazzling and I looked around for something else to focus on, deciding on the wall clock above the table. Green kittens frolicked on its dial, the hands indicated twenty-four minutes to ten, and a rusty padlock on a chain stood in for the clock’s weight.

‘Hans Thiel, do you have a profession or are you a professional soldier?’

‘I was training to become a naturalist.’

‘And what exactly were you intending to study?’ That was really the best I could do, and I could not shake off a strange feeling that I had known this German for ages.

The baby was still crying, and her brother bent over her, clutching the edges of the basket: ‘Shush, Shurka, that’s enough!’ He began singing in a thin, girlish voice, nodding his head up and down in the big cap. ‘There now, Shurushochki, shush Shurushochki!’

‘The topic of my dissertation,’ the senior lieutenant said loudly over the crying and the lullaby, ‘was Papilio.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘Or more precisely, the butterfly’s proboscis.’ Oh, a butterfly. Der Schmetterling. The very sound was musical. ‘Der Schmetterling’.

What is happening? I am six and my brother is a little older. We are lying under the bed waiting for our German teacher, Luiza Ivanovna. Her skirt rustles and smells of liquorice. ‘Guten Tag.’ We stay silent, pretending not to be there. She does not poke around the room, does not pull us out from under the bed, but sits down at the table, opens her extraordinary book published in Berlin and reads aloud, enticing us into the open like the Pied Piper.

Greta, Hans and Peter are three German children. They are keeping a diary, each for one week at a time. In Luiza Ivanovna’s voice they tell how they caught butterflies, and how frightened they were by a grass snake. They like brooks, and sunsets, and surprises on Christmas Eve.

A calf stirred itself and tried to get up. It stood for a moment on wobbly outspread legs before collapsing back on to the straw. A little barefoot boy with no trousers on, probably about two years old, peed on the floor. Captain Borisov returned from the communications point and commenced the interrogation. Lieutenant Thiel replied succinctly, making no attempt to be evasive.

The lady of the house arrived back wearing a dark sheepskin, and gasped, ‘Oh, my God, a German!’ She stood dumbfounded at the door. The German stood up, very straight, in a double-breasted greatcoat buttoned up high to a black cloth collar. The dark face of St Nicholas the Wonderworker peered from an icon in the corner behind his blond head. The clear, regular face of the German, in contrast, looked so much like one in a glossy picture in Fifty-Two Weeks, that old picture book in which sensible, storybook children lived long, long before two world wars in their musical German childhood. Schmet–ter–ling.

The woman moved away from the door. Senior Lieutenant Thiel turned abruptly in the doorway, stood motionlessly to attention, and threw back his bare, handsome head in an act of formal leave-taking. ‘Weirdo,’ said his hostess, but without malice. He strode through the doorway, past the home-made millstones in the passage, and down the steps with Savelov close on his heels, holding a rifle.

Zaimishche village. The Finns had already visited. Our hostess, Matryona Nilovna, told us they were even more vicious than the Germans. She had hidden their life-giving cow and five children in the forest from the Germans and waited for them to be gone. God alone knows how they survived and did not freeze to death. Now she had us in her house. Would we be staying long ‘or will you be running off again?’ she asked despondently. Her face was dark with soot from the stove and all her worries. About her husband she knew ‘nothing you can count on’; he had disappeared somewhere without trace in the war. She would sit down for a moment on the bench, her hands heavy in her lap until it was time to lift Shurka from her cradle and breastfeed her; or get to work washing at the trough; or perhaps it would be ‘time to feed the cow’.

We, the army, were in the guest half of the hut, and the entire family was in the kitchen. It was crowded there. In a cradle suspended over straw Shurka was lying on rags. Kostya, the eldest son, wearing his father’s cap over his ears, would lean his elbows on the table, talk to our guard and, without looking, rock the cradle with his bare foot. He was in charge of everything. Genka, a bit younger, rushed around all day and would stray away from the house. Nyurka fidgeted with her twisted German ramrod. Two-year-old Minka, barefoot, with a hole torn in his pants, felt the cold and periodically peed on the floor, tried to get the ramrod off Nyurka, and whined. ‘Shush!’ said his mother and, to Nyurka, ‘Don’t be mean, let him play with the chain.’ A loud bang, very close. Nyurka jumped and whimpered. ‘Shush, little one. The good Lord will protect us,’ Matryona Nilovna reminded her quietly.

The sound of those homemade millstones grinding came from the passage from early morning – Kostya was already hard at work. A knock on the kitchen window frame was the collective farm team leader calling Matryona Nilovna to come and clear the roads of snow. The pole holding up the cradle creaked. Minka waddled over, barefoot, dully took Shurka’s foot in his mouth and started sucking. Nyurka chose a log from the pile by the stove, deftly tucked it up in a shawl and nursed it like a doll.

She, the ataman, has been told not to bring the neighbour’s little girl in any more, one of the children I had found here when I first arrived. Now it is prisoners who are brought in, to the kitchen, for interrogation, and after a day or two I am trusted to talk to them alone. My questions and the answers of the German are lost in that quiet ‘There now, Shurushochki, shush Shurushochki!’ as Kostya rocks Shurka, and in the kerfuffle caused by the calf trying to stand up in its enclosure on its weak legs.

The calf annoys Captain Borisov, and as he passes through the kitchen he wrinkles his nose to indicate he can hardly breathe because of it. He has a thing about clean air, as if he thinks we were made to live life, not to wage war.

Zaimishche has changed hands more than once. Matryona Nilovna’s house has remained unscathed up till now, but will it survive under fire from planes and shelling from heavy artillery? Her supplies, if they have not been stolen, are running low, and when they come to an end there will be no way to replenish them. She has to see to everything: what to feed the children on, how to keep them safe. In war there is no heavier burden at the front line than that of a mother, especially if she has many children. She is expected also to do her bit for the war effort, as that knock at the window, reminding her to come and clear the roads of snow for the army, testifies. Even so, she shares the last of her flaxseed cakes with us army people.

Next to her, I feel the chaos of war all the more keenly, and the poignant fragility of life itself. The innate resilience with which Matryona Nilovna protects it in these inhuman conditions, her simple-heartedness and gracious acceptance of her fate, affect me greatly.

Although I told her I had volunteered for the front, that did not register with her. She sees me as caught in military servitude, and pities me. That is not at all how I see myself, although at first it was not easy to be the only woman among men. They, too, were, as people might say nowadays, weirded out after becoming so used to an all-male environment. It inhibited them when they felt like letting off steam, when they wanted to turn the air blue and simply could not say what they really meant. At that time it was not done to swear in the presence of the opposite sex. One night, supposing I must already be asleep behind the partition wall, which had an opening draped with a cape groundsheet, they embarked on some salacious discussion. In the end I could stand it no longer, got up and went out to them. ‘Why did you do that?’ Matryona asked me from the stove. ‘I’m tired of listening to their foul language.’ ‘But they need to talk like that, to get things off their chest,’ she said matter-of-factly. She taught me to put up with it.

It did not happen again. They showed considerable tact, although it was clearly a strain. They treated me well, although we did not see eye to eye about everything. These men had retreated all the way from the USSR border, they had taken a lot from the Germans, become a real team, and now along comes someone new who does not know the score, feels sorry for the prisoners, and tries to divide Germans into those on the other side of the front line, who are enemies, and those on this side of it, in captivity, who are victims. It was indisputable, however, that an intelligence outfit with no translator would be blind, so they put up with me. What did disturb them was that I was periodically writing things in my notebook. Keeping a diary or any kind of record was for us, unlike the Germans, strictly prohibited. I guessed they would look in my diary, so I wrote in it in large letters, ‘Comrade Captain Borisov, are you not ashamed to read other people’s diaries?’ One day, when I opened it, I saw underneath my question, also in large letters, ‘Should I be?’ There it stands in my diary, which has survived to this day. They got used to me, though, and to the fact that in my field case I carried, not only a German–Russian dictionary, but also a thick notebook.

My last entry in Zaimishche:

We get shaken about in the back of the truck after leaving the village limit of Zaimishche as the truck strains to climb a slope over snow compacted by wheels. We have hardly come any distance, but already the routine that was beginning to make sense of our life in Zaimishche has been broken and fallen away. There are six of us in the back of the truck, including Senior Lieutenant Thiel. Our group is holding on to him for now. He is deemed useful.

Two weeks ago our troops were ordered to complete the encirclement of the German Ninth Army but considerable enemy forces were moved towards Limestone Mountain and, from the north, blocked our breakthrough, in the process cutting off units of the army adjacent to us. The Germans are now furiously taking revenge. I translated an intercepted order from Hitler, which instructed that it was to be ‘communicated immediately to all units’.

The army next to us had been surrounded. Only a few troops had managed to break out. The army fought on in an encirclement about which there is not a word in the History of the Second World War, the official line being that there were no encirclements after 1941. This army, that perished or was taken prisoner in the forests of Rzhev, gave the lie to that line so no one mentioned it subsequently. Through to our sector, in random groups or individually, came soldiers traumatized by the suffering they had endured. They were very few. In our sector the fighting continued.

Our truck was following behind Commissar Bachurin’s Molotov saloon car. The sky darkened and it began to snow. That was all to the good; it made everything safer. From time to time we would get stuck. Soldiers passed by, their greatcoats rubbing the side of our truck. ‘Hey, would you believe that?’ They had noticed our Fritz and looked over as they passed, the steam of their breath hanging by the side of the truck. ‘What a scarecrow. Only fit to keep sparrows off the hemp.’

We drove into the village of Lyskovo in accordance with orders, on the first day of our ‘march’. We went into a log hut, where an oil lamp was flickering in the kitchen. The old woman who lived in the hut was stoking the stove. ‘Saints preserve us!’ she gasped at the sight of the German. She was old, poor and unkempt. ‘Why would you bring him in here?’ ‘Not up to us,’ Savelov said and, having worked out how to communicate without the need for an interpreter, gave Thiel’s shoulder a shove to move him away from the door. ‘Shift!’

Savelov propped his rifle up in a corner of the kitchen, hunched squarely over the table, spread out his elbows and ate. The old woman took her bowl of porridge off behind the stove, came back and walked over to the bench where the German was sitting. She leaned over to check whether he was really eating. ‘Eat, since you’re being fed, you parasite, while you’re alive. Hunger hollows out the soul.’ ‘You mean, they’ve got a soul?’ Savelov enquired with his mouth full. ‘Well, no,’ the old woman nodded. ‘Maybe they haven’t, you’re right.’

Captain Borisov came back from Commissar Bachurin and, passing through the kitchen, remarked, ‘Mind you remember which bowl that German ate from.’ It was true, no one was squeamish about sharing plates with someone else, but no one would want to drink out of a mug the Fritz had used.

I went through to the living room and pulled off my felt boots. Even if the chief of staff had forbidden taking them off at night, we did anyway. I put them by the bed and lay down, loosened my belt, pulled my greatcoat over myself, and was about to fall sleep when I heard Thiel sounding alarmed. What was going on? I went back to the kitchen.

The old lady was sitting quietly opposite the German in her tatty jacket, her arms folded, peering at him. She had pulled in her scrawny shoulders and was rocking to and fro, sighing and sniffling. Thiel, anxious, repeated his question straight to her face: ‘Mütterchen, was ist los? Fräulein Lieutenant, please be so kind, what is this woman saying?’ ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ the old woman lamented. ‘Oh, holy Mother of God.’ She went behind the stove, brought out her bowl of millet porridge that had long ago gone cold, put it on the table and moved it towards the German. ‘Here, take it, eat this,’ and, crumpling her fingers up against her mouth, she began to cry.

‘Listen,’ Thiel said, ‘Why is this old woman crying?’ ‘I have no idea.’ What was I to make of her? Heaven knows what she was thinking as she looked at our prisoner. Perhaps someone in her family was a prisoner too.

He ate a little. ‘If you may,’ he said in some agitation, running a hand over that wavy hair with the parting, then, manfully, continued, ‘If it is permissible, I would prefer to know the truth. Am I to be shot?’ ‘What are you doing, auntie. Here you are crying because you’re sorry for the German and you’ve scared him to death.’

The old woman sobbed, and blew her nose on the end of her headscarf. ‘It’s not him. No–o. I feel sorry for his ma. She gave birth to him. She nursed and raised him, such a young prince, and sent him out into the world, only to be a scourge to other people and himself.’

A dark column of people is coming our way along a country track at an angle to our main road. These are our soldiers who broke out of the encirclement. Some, using their rifles as crutches, hobble on frostbitten feet; others are supporting an exhausted comrade. They are escaping along a corridor our army has hewn out for them. Their sparse numbers soon pass. Is that all of them? Why so few? Have they been cut down by gunfire? Have they died of cold in the forest? Are there other tracks they are stumbling along?

‘Fräulein, bitte.’ Something in our German is irreparably broken. ‘What was the name of that village where we stayed the night before yesterday? I would like to remember that village. That old Russian mother…’

Artillery fire, the rattle of machine guns, and shooting too. The incessant din of battle. The wounded are being brought towards us in ambulances, in the back of trucks carpeted with straw, on sledges. Our truck moves aside to let them pass and we look silently on.

The cold is merciless. We shelter from the wind in a shed and, from somewhere back when all this began I recollect a beseeching smile, black teeth: ‘Please give me a blanket. In the shed it is so terribly cold.’ Get lost. It is unbearably cold for us as well, even if I do have a blanket, the one I brought from home.

The door of the shed creaks open and even colder air billows in. A crowd of unfamiliar soldiers enters. They switch on a torch. ‘Oh, shit!’ They have spotted the German. ‘Give ’im a sniff of your rifle butt,’ someone says lazily. Then, more ominously, vindictively, ‘Pull ’im out into the snow.’ ‘Get ’is legs!’

‘Stop it!’ I shout shakily, jumping up. A torch probes me at close range. ‘There’s a lieutenant here, my fellow boyars.’ Someone else swears in the dark. ‘What you being so nice to a German for? You’d do better being nice to us lads…’

Now they’re joking. They calm down, settle in. Savelov does not wake up. Thiel, our German, is restive, probably with fear. I hear him sit up. ‘Verflucht! Damn!’ I mutter. Damn Germans, damn the war and all the violence, damn this cold.

Everything that came after that was just war, only here, perhaps, so close to the capital, it was bloodier and more brutal. The endless battle for Moscow. It was a long war and I was in the thick of it. Zaimishche was the last glimmer of light, of human warmth. Mutilated, scorched earth, cruelty and pity, dark chasms and a soaring of the spirit. War embraced so much that was contradictory, conflicting, and primal.

Somewhere, lost in the abyss of bygone centuries, is this city’s beginning – Rzhevka, Rzhova, Rzhev-Volodimerov; some passing mention of it in a Novgorod statute on pavements dating from 1010. Was that an omen? Everything is still obscure, and the territory that now lies beneath the city and district of Rzhev was disputed, it is surmised, and fought over by the feudal princes, but more often it was conquered by Novgorod. Whether that was really so remains uncertain – hypotheses, speculation, arguments between researchers: to this day the outlines of the territory seem blurred.

But then the chronicle does unambiguously note that the city was besieged during a war between Prince Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich and the Prince of Toropets in 1216. That is incontrovertible evidence of the existence of a city, the progenitor of modern Rzhev. Those are the circumstances in which history succeeds in retrieving Rzhev from the depths of centuries past. A siege! And in the ever-rolling stream of time – stop! An event has piqued the curiosity of history and makes us aware of the founding of this city!

Right now Rzhev, captured by the Germans and besieged by our troops, is the focus of everyone’s attention and history, we imagine, will not overlook it. This is, after all, the price to be paid.

The Germans had driven the villagers away but not had time to set fire to the village. They were expelled without warning. There had been a German baling machine at work here but they took it with them. All that remained was the compressed bales of hay they had been preparing to send back to Germany.

We are in a shed and those bales are serving as our table and chairs. There are two of us: me and the prisoner, a strapping young German. I ask him the usual questions: where are the firing points, where does one unit’s sector end and another’s begin, about the bringing in of fresh troops and such like. As always, though, although I know it is beside the point, I ask about more than that: for example, why he came here?

He suddenly stands up, blocking the doorway so that it becomes almost dark in the shed. With solemn dutifulness he intones that this has been commanded by the Führer. ‘Russia must be defeated so that we can destroy our main enemy, England.’

I suddenly feel how, at moments like this, reality and fantasy fuse. I will never forget the smell of the hay, the neat yellow bales, the macabre combination of bloody slaughter and brisk, economical business efficiency; the deserted street and delicate sky, and the trial of being in such close contact with this captive enemy, his black silhouette in the doorway of a shed where the two of us are bound together in such a diabolically unnatural relationship.

In my head I hear the tinkling tune of one of their army songs: ‘With war we sail to Engel-land, and speed out to the East.’

A top secret German document dated 20 April 1942: Programme of the Chief Commissioner for Utilization of the Labour Force (circulated by our front headquarters for information):

I turn on the radio during the night to hear the emotionless voice of a female announcer intoning: ‘Bloo-dy bat-tle in south. Stop. Our Mo-ther-land in danger. Stop. I repeat. Our Mo-ther-land in danger. Stop.’

This extract from the newspapers is right now being received by the partisans’ radio operators in the forests. The mechanical, colourless radio voice mercilessly hammers nails into your heart: ‘The fate of our coun-try is be-ing deci-ded in bat-tles in the south. Stop. I repeat, the fate…’

Outside the tent there is stillness, the scraping sound of tree branches, the challenges of sentries.

The door of the dugout is torn off its hinges and no longer fits into the door frame. It has been knocked off its bearings and so have I, a bit. There is such a ringing in my ears that I am unsure what is going on around me. If I fall asleep, I hear someone breathing in my ears. I drank vodka and suddenly felt warm. What next?

War whirls you round and grinds you down, and frees you from everything. All that is indestructible is the hearts of the village women.

Between two juggernauts, two belligerent armies, people are crushed. Civilians not at war but in the war.

The old saying goes, ‘God is not in power, but in truth,’ and all the truth is on our side: it was they who invaded and trampled on everything. Truth alone, however, will not deter or overcome them. Or is God, perhaps, now on the side of power?

To start with, the whole calamity of the war was blamed on Hitler, the evildoer, the mass murderer, the accursed Herod. He alone had caused all the misery. As the war has gone on, though, and spread, the German soldiers, their death-dealing army, their tanks and motorcycles, their swastikabearing planes, their seizure of our lands, the brutality, everything and everyone German that now fills our hearts with hatred has become united with Hitler, has become Hitler. He is now the collective image of the Nazis.

An order issued in Yelnya: ‘All Jews, of both sexes, are to wear a six-pointed star of David on their right and left sleeves.’

Another ‘reminder’ for the German soldier:

You have only to become the slightest bit detached from your routine, walking by yourself along a road, or given a lift by a truck driver or on a cart, to be suddenly aware of how unusual everything is, how new, and you try to write something down. Being shaken about means much of it is almost illegible, the letters jumping all over the place, the words piling up on each other. Afterwards you can hardly decipher it.

The Germans are banging on again about ‘The Führer’s invincible line’. They mean our poor, suffering Rzhev.

He was sitting hunched on a tree stump with his arms around his rifle, completely exhausted.

‘Time to stop roosting,’ his comrade prompted him, getting up.

They staggered off to the front line.

We have been forced to become warlike,’ the girl sniper tells me. She is wearing a quilted jumpsuit. When she is going out on ambush she also wears a white sheepskin jacket and white camouflage smock with a hood. She lies in the snow with her sights trained on a German bunker they have found, or think they have found, just waiting for one of the enemy to stick his head out. She lies there all the daylight hours, with unbelievable female patience. With all due respect, I cannot help feeling her work is more like hunting than warfare.

She studied at an economic planning college and sounds bookish when she speaks, tense but truthful. She worries that she may get too cold, lying there in the snow, and then find herself unable to have children.

War opens wounds, it injects something into your soul that was not there before it… Everything is ‘seen from the viewpoint of war’, ‘from the standpoint of war’. It takes over everything. What else is there besides its cruel dictates. Even the ability to feel pity can be remade into something more attuned to war. I am no better, no wiser, no more contemptible or purer than war. I, too, belong to it.

An evil-smelling aspen grove swimming in autumn mist; the invasive, inky smell of wet boughs beginning to sprout. The squelch of marsh mud beneath boots. The pealing thunder of battle. In this grove are several Germans we have already interrogated, no longer squealers, just prisoners, but we cannot spare anyone to escort them to the rear: everyone fit for combat is fighting, so for now we have to keep these prisoners within our headquarters compound. They have made themselves a lean-to and sleep in that, then spend the day outside awaiting whatever fate has in store for them. In the light of dawn, when everything is spectral in that dank aspen grove, the moment I emerge from the bunker the Germans, waiting and raring to go, start their comedy jazz routine. These ghostly, chilled Germans alongside their lean-to, their jazz antics to greet me in the morning, making fun of themselves and me, their efforts to attract my attention, to incline fate more kindly towards them, and simply to warm themselves up: that too is something that will stay with me now and give me no peace.

The prisoner was brought to headquarters blindfolded in accordance with the regulations, although this was the first time I had seen them observed. The new commander of our army interrogated him personally, with me interpreting.

The questioning left us none the wiser: the prisoner had arrived in this sector two days previously and knew nothing about anything. Suddenly, right at the end, he dropped in passing the fact that yesterday they had been ordered to hand in their second blanket to the baggage train, keeping just one for themselves. From my experience as an interpreter I recognized that this was of major significance: soldiers usually surrendered surplus items to the baggage train immediately before a move, so it was true: the Germans were preparing to retreat before the ring of encirclement closed around Rzhev.

In the bunker of the divisional chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Rodionov. The regimental commander’s courier brought a first report from Rzhev. I asked permission to copy it into my diary: ‘We are clearing the city of snipers. The Regimental Headquarters is located at 128 Kalinin Street.’

A second courier: ‘1,000 wagons of captured goods. The population has been driven into the church. It has been boarded up and mines laid round it.’

How poignant, solemn and simple these moments are. We are in Rzhev. 3 March 1943.

The bullet-riddled water tower sticks up bizarrely over everything. Black ruins of buildings blanketed in snow. That is all there is. Can this be what remains of Rzhev?

It is getting dark. An armoured train steams down the track.

This time there were no great battles, no tank engagements. The enemy surrendered the city without a fight, withdrew, using rearguard units to cover the main forces’ retreat. But what of it, when the seventeen months it has taken to get back here into Rzhev, every metre we advanced or even just managed to hold, has been paid for by the crucifixion of the Red Army?

But now I am writing in my diary, ‘I am in Rzhev’ and, having written it, I am awestruck. I have been advancing towards this turning point for years, losing one after another of those with whom I should have been sharing these emotions and the sense of responsibility imposed by this return to Rzhev.

Seventeen peaceful years after the end of the war in 1945 I returned to Rzhev, following the same route I had taken to the front in February 1942, freezing in the back of a truck with my warrant of assignment. It had been a dog-legged route via recently liberated Kalinin, because the direct road to Rzhev at that time was the front line.

This time when I reached Kalinin I went to visit the local history museum. There was a special exhibition on ‘The Patriotic War of 1812’, the war with Napoleon, because that year we were separated from it by a full 150 years. About ‘The Second Patriotic War’, also known as ‘The Second World War’, there was nothing, and by the time they get round to mounting an exhibition on it in connection with some suitably round number of elapsed years, the memory will have faded away, the would-be exhibits will be buried in the earth, and it will be just as dull, official and devoid of human reality as the exhibition presented here for a 150th anniversary.

Where are our banners riddled with bullet holes, discoloured by the rain, shredded by the wind? Our soot-covered mess tins, cape groundsheets, and soldiers’ foot wrappings a verst long? Where are our 1891-vintage rifles, the local kilometre-to-the-centimetre maps, the morse code telegraph keys, the dried bread you softened in a puddle? Where are the dog tags that identified dead soldiers?

In a small volunteer-run museum in a small, remote town in this province I saw a pair of straw overshoes. That was just one detail of the enemy’s dayto- day life, but what a lot it tells us. I have a small museum of my own, more precisely, an archive. It preserves my wartime diary entries, written on the move; later sketches written from memory; stories of local people that I noted down; letters, diaries and documents.

After I adopted the name of this city as my pen name, and after publishing some writing, I started to receive letters from correspondents I had never met, telling me about the far-off days of their childhood in Rzhev, or when they were fighting in the battles for the city, or about what went on while Rzhev was under occupation. I received over forty letters about that from a man who had been a boy at the time of the war. The city museum, the staff at the local newspaper and radio station, and workers at the ‘tourism headquarters’ sent me materials donated to them by people who did not want the wartime voices, events and fate of the city to be forgotten.

So I continue to tell the story whose main character is the shambles of a war I too lived through, and now find myself the archivist of my own archive.

A. S. Andrievskaya:

When they descended on us they first ate, they feasted, so well groomed, playing their mouth organs, having a fine time: they had opened the gateway to Moscow!

But then next there was the commandant’s office, taking a census of the population. The firing squads appeared, the gallows. We went to the slaughter-house for bones and offal we would have fed to the pigs before that. We went out to the villages to barter it. The Germans confiscated things, sent them away back to their homes. They dug up the pits where townspeople had tried to hide at least some of their property.

In the summer and spring we ate goosefoot and nettles, dug out the tubers of frozen potatoes left over from the autumn of ’41. The number of people left in the city went down and down, dying of starvation and typhus they were. And then the real calamity began when they started taking people and sending them west. Trainloads of us. They took us under guard to Rzhev station, issued us one loaf of bread with sawdust per family, put us in goods wagons, locked them and took us off to who knows where. It was dark in the wagons, people, shouting and groaning, crying…

Faina Krochak:

The Germans are not all the same sort. There was some humanity. And one or two of our own troops, there’s no denying, were just brutes. Take Lena, my daughter, she was twelve then, had a fever; she was dying. I went to Chachkino to see the doctor. Fifteen kilograms of grain he wanted before he would even look at her. Anyway, in the city they had a clinic at the school. The German doctor came, and he said, ‘She needs to go to hospital at once.’

‘They took me on a sledge,’ Lena adds. ‘He came with us. A German orderly carried me. He came to see me after the operation and bandaged me up.’

The worst thing was the hunger. And also, out of all the other things, the sorting. On Commune Street, opposite the commandant’s office. Masses of people. The Germans forced everyone to go there, they shot people who did not go to the sorting. That was the most horrible of all the things that happened. People clinging to each other, wailing, crying. They tore a mother away from her sick child. They were deporting people.

The Germans, when they first came piling into the city, strutted around like they owned the place. One German came in to us with an interpreter and went to see Masha, who was in charge:

‘Tell me, will you, where the Jews are here.’

‘Never had any Jews here,’ Masha told them, quick as a flash.

‘Well, Communists then?’

‘They’ve all run away.’

On the school gate, people saw a teacher hanging. Hanged by the Germans. They said he was a Communist. Even before that they’d seized other Communists. Paraded them through the town and shot them by the Volga, on the far bank and on ours. For three days they wouldn’t let anyone take the bodies.

Every day the headman for our district came round. ‘Any Jews here, Communists?’

‘Why, do you think we’re breeding them?’

Two men were sawing in the street, Jews. ‘No more sawing for you,’ the headman told them. He betrayed them, and the same night they were taken away.

He came to see us again. ‘Faina, where were you yesterday?’

‘At home.’

‘I came round yesterday with the gendarmes and you weren’t in. I’ve registered you.’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

‘Me, I’m the Russian people. Who are you then?’

He took me to the police station. The mayor of the city, what they call the Burgomeister, Kuzmin, says, ‘Why aren’t you wearing an armband?’

‘What armband, for heaven’s sake?’

‘It’s obvious from your accent what armband.’

I wasn’t afraid of their bullets. I was afraid they might bury me alive. But he let me go.

All the time they were driving residents from that side of the Volga to this one, to get everyone in one place. And after that they started deporting people.

Lena’s legs were all swollen. She had something growing on her face from the starvation.

Along comes the headman with the gendarme. The gendarme has this shiny badge on his chest, spurs clattering. ‘Well, young ladies are you ready?’ asks the headman.

‘We’ve no intention of being ready,’ Taisiya Strunina tells him. She was living with us at the time.

I started crying. ‘Are you a father?’ That’s what I said to the German. ‘I pulled back the blanket and showed her legs. ‘How can I go?’ He shook his head and left.

‘We’ll shoot her. You don’t have to worry.’ That was the headman. ‘And you will come with us.’

How many more days we had like that.

Lena:

The Germans came charging in. About ten in the morning on 1 March. Beside themselves, they were. Retreating. Surrendering the city. Scouring the place to find anyone who was hiding. The last ones. They herded us into the church. Our windows had the curtains closed. They smashed the glass with their rifle butts. They didn’t care if people were sick, or dead. They were crazy. I couldn’t stand. They put me on a sledge, tied me on with sackcloth.

Anna Grigorievna Kuzmina:

They packed the church full of people. It was cold. All the windows in the church were broken. I gave my husband one of my shawls. ‘A granny with a beard,’ the children in the church laughed. And then we heard, they were boarding the doors up from the outside.

Faina Krochak:

‘Give us water! Give us water! ‘A sentry threw a snowball in the window. Everybody wanted to suck it.

The gendarmes came twice, looking for some woman. They said, ‘Tomorrow it’s the end.’

Anna Grigorievna Kuzmina:

There were explosions, explosions everywhere. The people in the church groaned, screamed. Some people embraced. ‘It’s time to say goodbye! It’s time to say goodbye!’

It became very, very quiet. For three hours, it must have been. We look out the windows and see people in white smocks. With red stars.

This was resurrection. We hugged and kissed each other. Tears and weeping. A solemn moment. We had risen from the dead. It was a resurrection.

And then one old woman, whose name I don’t know, said, ‘Russians! Real Russians! They’re outside… their greatcoats are frozen hard as boards. Their boots are covered in ice. Everything on them is covered in ice. Can you believe it?’

The last people in Rzhev were supposed to suffer a cruel martyrdom in that church, for not abandoning their city. Their saviours appeared in white smocks, wearing a red star, in frozen greatcoats.

I received a letter, together with a bouquet of white roses, from Otto Spranger, a person in Munich I did not know. Here is how he explains what prompted him to write to me.

He saw a documentary film by Renata Stegmüller and Raimund Koplin about three women whose destinies were bound up with the war: a Norwegian woman; the famous Italian writer, Luce d’Eramo; and me.

As soon as the footage of Rzhev appeared on the screen, I was electrified. I realized that the Russian woman featured in the film had been a participant in the confrontation at Rzhev, had obviously chosen her pen name with reference to that city and, like a flash of lightning I remembered a close relative who, under particular circumstances, had also received a name in connection with Rzhev. With embarrassment I learnt that at that time Yelena Rzhevskaya was involved in the struggle against my uncle, Colonel Hans Beckmann, my mother’s elder brother: Beckmann von Rzhev, as he was called by his fellow officers.

As a seven-year-old boy, my correspondent had heard the news in his home that Uncle Hans had been awarded the Knight’s Cross, a very high award, for successfully repulsing a massive offensive by Soviet troops attempting to retake Rzhev.

He also recalled that in April 1945 his parents read in the newspaper that their brother Hans, by now no longer a colonel but a lieutenant general, had been awarded an even higher honour, the Order of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, and his mother said ruefully, ‘That means he will soon be hanged!’ Otto Spranger thinks there was an element of condemnation in his mother’s comment about her brother: why serve in such a way as to be awarded military laurels at a time when everyone knew the war had been lost?

Uncle Hans did not have long to enjoy his military successes: as the war was ending he was arrested by Czech partisans, and on the very last day of the war, 9 May, found himself a prisoner of the Russians.

For a long time the family had no news of him, but in 1947 or so, one of his soldiers who had been released brought the news that Lieutenant General Hans Beckmann had been sentenced by a Soviet court as a war criminal to twenty-five years in forced labour camps. The sentence related to a charge that the population of Rzhev had been herded into the church for deportation to Germany.

This was a blow for our whole family. How was that possible? Was it imaginable that a member of a decent, educated family that was no supporter of Nazism could have violated human rights, international law and the moral laws of humane waging of war? I remember very exactly that my mother said at the time her brother had nothing to do with deportation, that was dealt with by the occupying commandant. We cursed Soviet, Stalinist, vengeful, terrorist justice.

There was no prospect of seeing Uncle Hans in twenty-five years’ time: he was already over fifty, but then a diplomatic initiative by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was successful and German prisoners of war were released. In 1955 General Beckmann returned to Germany and lived for a time with the family of my correspondent. Beckmann’s relatives treated him with kid gloves. As soon as the conversation turned to anything painful, tears would come to his eyes. Eventually, when it had become possible to talk to him about the trial and the sentence, he said he had been slandered by false witnesses.

Hans Beckmann moved with his wife to an old university town where his daughter and her family lived. He celebrated his seventieth birthday there, and died a year later. Someone in the Spranger family continued, however, to enquire into the circumstances of his career during the war.

I once asked my mother: ‘What did Uncle Hans say about the Kristallnacht pogrom?’ My mother replied that he said at the time, ‘I think this is a complete disgrace.’ I asked her, ‘Uncle Hans, as a senior army officer and an educated man, must surely have understood what a completely criminal regime was at the helm. Why did not he resign from the Wehrmacht, which was there to fight for that regime? Perhaps that is why he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour, and not only because he was falsely accused. Perhaps that is another way of looking at it.

The jogging of Otto Spranger’s memory and conscience after seeing the film led him to the military archives in Potsdam. He found a document signed by Colonel General Walter Model, commander of the Ninth Army, which said, ‘Colonel Beckmann was not at that time in command of his regiment but had been appointed commander of the Rzhev garrison. By his resolute action on 17 August 1942 he managed to avoid surrendering the city.’

Accordingly, deportation of the population was carried out with the full knowledge of Colonel Beckmann, and perhaps on his orders. Otto Spranger visited his uncle’s grave.

I told Uncle Hans I would go to Rzhev. I wished the trip to be a sign of penitence and hoped it would lay the foundation for reconciliation with the people of Rzhev. At his grave I expressed all my troubling thoughts because, as a Christian, I know that he has life after death. I know he is not against my intention and has no objections to it. I believe that he also does not object today, dear Mme Rzhevskaya, that I am sending you, as someone who took part in the Russian resistance to Nazi aggression, this letter and a bouquet of flowers to ask forgiveness for the guilt of my uncle who, like thousands of other top German officers, incurred it by following the orders of his supreme commander-in-chief, the Führer of the regime, even after that regime’s criminal deeds in Germany had been known for some time, especially to the ‘educated elite’, to which my family was always so proud to belong.

I have asked that, together with this letter, you should receive white roses. They were the symbol of the renowned student resistance movement in Munich which called itself The White Rose.

I received the letter and flowers in 1996.

By the time Rzhev was retaken I was the only translator at our army headquarters. Another had gone home to Siberia to have a baby. The need for translation, however, increased. There was a mountain of German bureaucratic documentation: papers of the municipal administration, the city commandant’s office, residents’ personal certificates. Much of it was not strictly relevant to military priorities.

When we had moved on much further to the west, Stalin visited Rzhev. This was his only excursion in the direction of the front. The house where he slept is still standing. He summoned General Yeremenko there and took the decision to celebrate victorious battles with artillery cannonades.

Those whole seventeen months of battles for Rzhev, all that cost in terms of mental anguish and blood, all the orderliness and chaos of war and its daily routines were in pursuit of one great goal: to drive the enemy out of our land, and for us that meant retaking Rzhev. We were in a hurry to get back into the crucified city we had forced the enemy to surrender.

The war is an inexhaustible topic. No matter how much I have written about it, I cannot free myself of the feeling that there are important things yet to be said, things not yet fully revealed. Rzhev today and Rzhev back then are still very much a part of my life; I am tied to the city by painful memories that trouble me still in a way very similar to love.

More than twenty years were to pass before I set out to find Zaimishche again. It was very odd: neither on the map of the district, nor in the district executive Party committee was there any mention of Zaimishche, either among the ninety-two villages in the district that the war had wiped from the face of the earth, or among those still in existence. I set out on a quest to find it. A young lad who delivered movies round the villages drove me. His name was Sasha and he was keen to help. The two of us travelled the country roads, driving into villages, collecting films in metal cans that had been projected and leaving new ones, and each time asking people about Zaimishche.

Everybody still remembered everything. Nothing had yet been trampled underfoot by tourists or those groups of young admirers of our military glory, and everything was mixed up together: the mossy headstone of Count Seslavin, a hero of the First World War, and the legend of Dunka, the local Robin Hood, a woman who robbed rich citizens of Tver on the highways, and the River Dunka, which had invariably featured in our daily situation reports during the war. It was the front line between us and the Germans, where, it seems the valiant female ataman had finally been caught by the prince’s guards. Here the dead are still waiting for the living to bury them. Sasha related what his mother had told him: she and some other women had been going to scythe remote meadows. Suddenly, in an overgrown trench, they saw a soldier sitting wearing his greatcoat and helmet. The women were stunned. They wept and rushed to him, but the moment they touched him he crumbled to dust.

There were still landmines buried everywhere. Where a village had been burned down there was now a forest, creeping towards the boundary fence of other villages in decline. We finally drove into Zaimishche. The village street was noticeably shorter. I later discovered there had been seventy houses, but now only twenty-five remained. I remembered the village as it was in winter, and now, in autumn, it seemed unrecognizable. But it was still alive. The log huts stood in a row: one in good order, with a new roof of black roofing felt; another leaning to one side; another again newly refurbished and full of life. I remembered the well sweep in front of the house but the well had changed. It had had to be altered three years previously because the sweep was in the way when the village finally got electricity (something else I only found out later).

I got out of the car and asked two schoolgirls going by with their school bags if they could tell me where Matryona Nilovna lived. They thought hard, and then it dawned on one: Auntie Matryosha? She pointed out her house to me.

I pushed the gate, as people here call the outer door of a hut, and went in on tenterhooks. In the passage, lit by a tiny window, a few steps higher up on the platform where Kostya, the eldest son, used to grind grain between the millstones, stood an iron bed. Leaning over it, taking something off the bed, was a woman. She straightened up and turned round at the sound of the door opening.

I asked if Matryona Nilovna live here. She replied, ‘Yes.’

I took a step up on the mat covering the stairs.

‘Is that you…?’

‘Me,’ she said, peering down at me.

‘We were billeted here with you during the war.’

‘Are you Lena?’ she asked. I felt my heart leap. I gasped with emotion.

‘Why did you not come back?’ she asked in such a slow, calm way. ‘You promised.’ I could not say a word. I just silently hugged her.

‘Come on in. I’ll put the samovar on.’

I followed her in, half blinded by tears, and stubbed my toe in the kitchen on the ring on the hatch down to the cellar. When the bombs were falling I had passed the younger children down there to her (the boys, Kostya and Genka, had rushed out into the street), and climbed down myself to join them. Soldiers running past shouted to us that this was a deadly place to stay, but there was nowhere else to take cover. And, as if the veil of time had been drawn back, I again saw a calf in the enclosure, exactly like the one that had so annoyed Captain Borisov.

Looking at me, Matryona Nilovna shook her head. In all those years her face had not lost that trustful expression. She was not at all taken aback that I had reappeared: I had promised, and had just taken rather a long time to keep my promise. She said sadly, ‘Out working there in the field you do wonder, is she still alive? She did promise…’ Lord, what did we not promise all sorts of people if we came through the war alive.

A short fellow came in, and looked at me in amazement. ‘You never got to meet her,’ Matryona Nilovna said regretfully. And how could he have, missing at the front and in captivity? ‘Nothing you can count on,’ Matryona Nilovna used to say when asked what she knew of her husband’s whereabouts. Thinking how he should react to my appearance, he began shaving, looking me over, this stranger. I felt awkward. After all, I meant nothing to him.

Sasha, waiting outside by the car, hearing what was embarrassing me and that I did not know what to do, said firmly, ‘In your place, I would stay.’ And that being so, he did not deny me one last favour, turned the car round, and we bumped off over the potholes to the next village. There a show trial was being held at the clubhouse, and during the proceedings the sale of vodka was prohibited. One or two men were hanging around on the porch of the village store, visibly wilting as they waited for the resumption of business. The assistant, learning why we needed vodka, sympathized with my predicament and, laden with purchases, we made our way back out past the parched would-be drinkers.

Vasiliy Mikhailovich, as Matryona’s husband was called, brightened up considerably at the sight of our party preparations. ‘One for the road!’ he urged Sasha, who was in a hurry to be on his way. Vasiliy had a drink with him and went off to check whether the flax was to be raised. Sasha took his farewells.

In the kitchen nothing had changed, only now a bare electric light bulb was hanging from the ceiling on its flex, and on the slanting shelf over the table, next to St Nicholas the Wonderworker, there was a small box and the football was being broadcast on the radio.

Little Shurka had not lived long after we left. In the autumn the fighting was again moving towards Zaimishche and everyone was hastily evacuated. ‘We kicked up a fuss and did not want any of their evacuation. Then an officer said, “We just have to wait and see what comes next. We don’t know for sure whether we’ll lick them or maybe they’ll lick us.” Well, then we stopped yelling. That wasn’t going to help, we had to get out, from what he said. We packed our things. Left. Stopped where they told us to. No gate on the house. The officers safe in their bunker. Everything was wide open and it was such a cold day. She fell sick. The children had run off somewhere. I swore at them for leaving Shurka. But what could we do for her? Where could we take her? There was no hospital.’

I remembered her in that cradle, her hungry crying, her toothless, old woman’s smile that went straight to your heart, her quick little legs, pounding the damp straw. And Kostya’s ‘There now, Shurushochki, shush Shurushochki!’

Matryona Nilovna asked about my family. ‘You said after the war you’d come back here for a holiday.’ Did I really say that, about coming for a holiday? But if that was what she remembered, then, fool that I was, I must have said it. ‘And do you remember Jesus saving your life?’ I did not understand what she was talking about.

By now the village women had come to see what was going on. ‘Look, I’ve got a visitor!’ Matryona could scarcely conceal her sense of triumph. Vasiliy Mikhailovich returned. Two young men came in, ‘Look at them now!’ Matryona said. They were her sons, Genka, now Genya, and Shura. A girl of around thirteen came rushing home from school after hearing that someone had come to visit. This was Valya. ‘After Valya I had a little boy, stillborn, and that was that. I was an old woman.’

Everyone began sitting round the table, the women shuffling about hesitantly at the door. Matryona, after a suitable pause, called to them, ‘Come on in, uninvited guests. We’ll spare you a glass, one, and if we get drunk, maybe two.’ Unhurriedly, primly, they came in and sat down. They drank, and became lost in their own thoughts: ‘If it had been shorter, the war, at least one of my sons might have come back, even wounded… But I have no one.’

‘You just grabbed your kiddies under your arm and headed for Mikitka’s vegetable plot and into the little ditch he’d dug. We had such a fright! We sat there all night. And he kept flying around. And then, away over on Yegorka’s, he dropped the bomb. What a fright…’ says Matryona. ‘They’re coming, do you hear? They’re coming, hear that creaking. Oh, are they really Russians? It’s Russians coming. Stop whining, Nyurka, I say. Oh, what’s going on over there. The Germans are on the run. Oh, daughter. Light the pegaska the German anti-aircraft gunners left.’ ‘Germans? It’s how it is. They took them off to fight a war, so fight they did. It’s not for us to judge.’

Vasiliy Mikhailovich filled the glasses and added his voice to the conversation, all about today’s farming worries. The women couldn’t wait to tell their stories about how it had been in the past. ‘It was time for the sowing, we had no horses, nothing. Just the women on their own. We hitched five of us to the harrow.’ ‘Well, now we’re getting a life again. Especially anyone whose got some men.’ ‘Just as long as we don’t have another war. Now, God have mercy on us if we have to.’ And then Matryona’s voice, tenderly: ‘And I was wondering, who can that be? The schoolmistress? Now I’ll recognize her anywhere.’ That was about me.

I kept quiet. I could not contain my emotion. The war really had passed through the door of this house. Just about everybody had been billeted here: Finns, Germans (more than once), the German anti-aircraft gunners with their ‘pegaskas’, as Matryona called their lamps, and we Russians, repeatedly being driven from the village, then retaking it. In a large picture frame on the wall, among the family photos, are some girls in hats with earflaps and forage caps who stayed here after us. There is no photo of me: I did not have one with me. But now I find that all along I have been hovering here, those long years during which she was seeing children laid in their graves, giving birth to others, then seeing the children she already had grown up, bidding them farewell as they moved far away.

‘She sent me dried bread with a soldier once,’ she kept repeating, and to me, ‘Do you remember?’ To my shame, I had not the wits to say I did. Of course I would have, at the first opportunity, as soon as I found someone coming this way, only I did not remember doing it. ‘And I wanted to pour him some milk to take back to you,’ she said, suddenly deflated. ‘But he said, no way! “She has plenty to eat! She’s well fed!”’ That memory about the bread was so important to her, so treasured; to this day I cannot forgive myself for not immediately confirming it.

Vasiliy Mikhailovich went out and returned with a lantern, having done the rounds of the houses. He was the night watchman. Everybody went home. Vasiliy and the boys settled down to sleep; they would all be up in the morning and off to harvest the potatoes. Matryona and I talked as we cleared the table and washed the dishes. ‘Do you remember,’ she asked, ‘that last night before you were travelling on, and we had the bombing?’ I remembered it only too well. The Germans were rarely flying nights at that time: they had pretty much a free hand even during the day. Matryona had been generous with heating the hut, so that we should be well warmed up before going on our way. The house was positively hot and the bedbugs crawled out in droves. To get away from them, I moved out of my corner to the bench by the wall opposite, with my head to the icon corner. I was wakened by a loud explosion and the whistling of shards of glass from the windows flying through the air.

‘They riddled the house,’ someone said. Matryona, protecting the flickering light of the pegaska with her hand, looked around and said, ‘He hit our holy Saviour.’ If I had woken up a moment sooner and sat up, I would have had my brains blown out. Matryona decided it was the Saviour who had saved me, and been wounded himself.

‘And now, if you please, I have my daughter Valya coming home from the school and saying, “Mummy, you have to get rid of the boards.”’ Their teacher had been asking them to get the icons taken down. I said, ‘While we have breath in our bodies they’re doing no harm.’ ‘Well then, Mum, at least give me the cloths from them.’

The schoolmistress is very respected in the village. Before she came nobody grew flowers in Zaimishche. She was very persistent, showed how to grow them, and now people have lilac planted, flowers growing under their windows, and they sow them in their vegetable plots. Everybody is very pleased, but there is Valya saying, ‘Mum, we need to throw the icons out.’

In the morning I found myself alone in the house. Matryona and her entire family had got on a cart and gone off to dig up the potatoes. I went out to the passage and opened the door to the yard. Just as then, there were the birch-twig brushes ready for use in the bathhouse. Sawn logs were piled up by the wall. The salted cabbage was being pressed by a weight in the keg. Chickens dozed on their perch. That smell was just the same. Nothing, I suppose, stirs our emotions and reawakens our memories like smells.

I went back to the kitchen and there too, in my solitude, I was pursued by smells. There was a smell of calf, tobacco, sheepskin, and leather. The smell of our nomadic army life seemed to have suffused this peasant lodging ineradicably.

I remembered the icon. In the ‘clean’, living half of the hut, where it used to hang, there was nothing. What had become of it?

From the low ceiling there hung paper crackers for the New Year tree, each containing some little treat. They alternated with embroidered towels folded in half and pinned to the ceiling. That continued right through the room, and the closer you came to the corner, the more dense were the colourful crackers, and the towels from the trunk for Valya’s dowry were lowered full length, blocking any view of the corner.

I parted the towels, disrupting Valya’s little masquerade. The icon she had ‘masked’ was in its place. I looked at it again and gasped. The Saviour was holding an open book on which was inscribed:

A jagged wound had pierced the old dark wood and damaged the words ‘That ye love’. To anyone who did not see it with their own eyes this will seem far fetched, and that is why I never mentioned it. ‘That ye love one another’. It continued in Church Slavonic, ‘as I…’ That was all: there was no room for more on the open page of the book.

Matryona and Vasiliy Mikhailovich wrote to me, sharing their worries and urging me to visit them. Two years later I was again in Rzhev, and again went to Zaimishche to see them. We were sitting at the table when I suddenly noticed that the icon, that very icon, was now, for some reason, leaning on the kitchen windowsill. I asked why it was in such an unbecoming place. Vasiliy Mikhailovich answered animatedly, ‘Well, the next time you come it will have been chopped up for firewood.’

I was horrified. What was he saying? This was a historic icon. They needed to take such good care of it. ‘Would you?’ he asked. ‘Of course I would.’ ‘Then you take it.’ ‘But it’s not my icon. You should put it back in the icon corner. Why did you move it? That was its place. After all, that is where it was hit.’

Matryona, who had said nothing up till now, said, ‘Take it.’ ‘Only I’m telling you,’ Vasiliy Mikhailovich said, ‘you’ll get woodworm in all your furniture.’ He turned the icon round and showed where the wood had been eaten away on the back.

On my last visit Matryona had said of the icons, ‘While we have breath in our bodies they’re doing no harm.’ Evidently, however, her husband had sided with the children against her. On my last morning, when I came into the kitchen I saw Matryona washing the icon, preparing it for its journey and talking to it. ‘Now, don’t be upset, Lord Jesus. You’ll be better off there.’ She wrapped the icon in an old apron and put it into a bag along with a pair of woollen socks she had knitted for me.

We hugged and took a long time saying goodbye. I assured her I would come again and invited her to come and stay with me. ‘My sister Katya keeps inviting me to stay with her and Nyura. “What are you doing pottering about there? Come to us and have a holiday.” Well, one of these days I will, I’ll come and visit you all.’ It did not happen.

We corresponded until the day she died, and after that I corresponded with Valya, the daughter born just after the war. And later, in February 2006, just as I was working on this book, there was one of those small miracles my life has been so full of. I had a letter from Valya’s daughter, who by then was about thirty. She wrote to say they had seen me in a television programme and been remembering me. All her family were living well and sent greetings. She was not herself planning to have any children yet because, as young people do nowadays, she thought it was still a bit early.

It is pouring with rain in the Smolensk region and in the swampy woodlands there is no shelter. My tunic is soaked, my underwear damp, my boots squelch. In this place at this time the rain never stops.

I might have expected the historic events in Berlin in which I was involved during the last days of the war would have erased many other things from memory. In fact, though, what has left the deepest impression are those days of incessant rain in the environs of Rzhev when the efforts of an army at war and the lives of the population in that frontal zone created a tremendous sense of a whole people at war.

In the initial dismaying succession of defeats, the war gave us back a sense of our value, of human solidarity, and often also of human dignity. After the terrible delusions of the late 1930s, we had a clear, righteous aim to strive for: to defend our Motherland and vanquish a terrible foe that had almost all the rest of Europe under its heel.

Now, as the tide of war changed in the direction of victory, something supremely important was being taken away again.

Our army newspaper, Boevoye Znamya, The Battle Standard: ‘Yesterday at dawn our units re-entered the territory of Soviet Byelorussia.’ There is a hill in front of me. The sun is setting and the sky becomes as golden as pie crust. On the horizon, outlined against what will be tomorrow’s frost, horses, people on foot, and laden trucks are on the move.

General Kutuzov before the Battle of the Berezina: ‘God is with us, we have a broken enemy before us, let there be stillness and peace behind us.’