Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45

33. “She died a hero’s death”

The pilots who had returned from the sortie reported that Egorova’s crew had been killed in the target area. As was done in such cases, they sent a death notice to my mum, Stepanida Vasilievna Egorova in the village of Volodovo in the Kalinin Region. However, this time death had missed me again: miraculously, I’d been thrown out of the burning Sturmovik. When I opened my eyes I saw that I was falling with no parachute canopy over my head. Just above the ground (I don’t remember how it happened myself), I jerked the ring, and the smouldering parachute opened up, although not completely…

I regained consciousness with terrible pain engulfing my whole body — it was so strong that I couldn’t move. My head burned like fire, my spine hurt unbearably, as did my arms and legs, scorched nearly to the bone. When I half-opened my eyes with difficulty I saw a soldier in a grey-green uniform over me. A terrible realisation shot through me stronger than any pain: “A Fascist! I’m in the Fascist’s hands!” This was the one thing I’d feared most of all in the war. The moral pain was a hundred times more dreadful than fire, bullets, physical pain. Only one thought pulsated feverishly inside my head: “I’ve been captured!” Helpless, incapable of resistance! I couldn’t even stretch my arm towards my pistol! And the German set his foot against my chest and pulled my broken arm for some reason. Oblivion…

The next time I came to my senses was from hitting the ground: the Hitlerites had tried to seat me in a vehicle but I couldn’t stay upright. I was falling as soon as they let go. Then they brought a stretcher and put me on that. As if in a dream I heard Polish. “Maybe the partisans have snatched me away?” the hope flashed through my mind. No, I saw the Hitlerites again and heard them conversing. “Schnell, schnell!” they were rushing two Polish medics, urging them to treat my wounds faster: a raid by Soviet aviation was on. Again a tiny ray of hope glimmered in me — our planes were around! I’d be happy if they hit this place where I was lying…

The Poles gave me no medication, they simply bandaged me, deftly hiding all my decorations and Party membership card under the bandages. I had to gather all my strength so as not to let out a moan in front of the enemy…

The Polish medics were conversing in whispers and I caught something about the Radom concentration camp. Then among the gaps in my memory there was an endlessly long shed, and when I came to my senses I found myself on the floor…

“What have they done to you, the freaks? It’d be good to put some ointment on now…” I heard a young female voice.

“Where would I get it from, this ointment? The Germans haven’t stocked medicines for us”, a male voice replied and asked straightaway: “And you, girl, who are you anyway, how did you end up here?”

“I’m a medical orderly, Yulya Krashchenko. I ended up here from the Magnuszew bridgehead beyond the Vistula, just like you. A tank ironed out the trench I was bandaging wounded men in, and then the Hitlerite submachine-gunners took us prisoners…”

“You know what, sister, I do know you. You’re from the 2nd Guards Battalion. Your commander, Captain Tskayev, is from my neighbourhood. Move over here closer to us, Orderly Krashchenko, let’s talk. We’ve examined a female pilot here, and found decorations under the bandages… We’d better take them off and hide them so as not to let the Fritzes have them. You do it, sister, it’s easier for you — the Fascists could accuse us of God knows what.”

“I understand. But where can I hide them?”

“Let’s put them into her burned flying boots — the Fascists won’t want them — they prefer new stuff”, someone else suggested.

When I heard my native speech, a spasm squeezed my throat and the first word burst out of me with my first groan: “Wa-a-ater!”

From that moment Yulia was with me all the time. The Hitelerites couldn’t drive her away from me with curses, nor with blows… I remember lying on a trestle-bed in some room of the shed, and a tearful Yulia sat next to me. Three men in rubber aprons, and with gauze bands on their faces, tore from my scorched arms and legs the bandages the Poles had put on me, tipped some powder over them and went away. As Yulia told me later, I began writhing in pain, dashing my head against the bed, yelling, losing consciousness… The Poles held in the Radom camp for participation in the Warsaw Uprising stood up for me. They began smashing windows and breaking everything indiscriminately, demanding a halt to the torture of the Russian pilot. Then these three ‘physicians’ appeared again and washed my burns of all they’d tipped on them before.

On the second day they loaded us into a freight car and rode us somewhere. Apparently the frontline was getting closer — after all it was September 1944. “Us” meant me, Yulia, a barely alive soldier from a penal company and a battalion zampolit — a completely fit Captain. He dreamed of escaping, but there had been no suitable chance, and the Captain was taking fatherly care of the dying soldier. We, the POWs, occupied one half of the car: all laying on the floor. Huge bunks were built in the second half where lay, slept, ate, played cards, sang and told jokes two German soldiers and three Ukrainian Polizei164. The Germans behaved reservedly, but the Polizei lacked any mercy at all towards us, their compatriots.

Fortunately, Yulia the medical orderly was nearby. I tossed in delirium: it seemed to me all the time that I was falling to earth in a burning plane, that flames were licking my head as if they encircled it, that I should do something to break out of their strong grip… But when I regained consciousness I saw Yulia sitting next to me. “Be patient a bit longer, sweetie, one day they’ll get us somewhere. We’ll find medicine, we will for sure”, she wept and wailed.

For five days the SS guards rode us through Germany. At stops the freight car door would open with a rumble. “Look!” an SS guard would yell and many eyes, spiteful or sympathetic or indifferent, would look where on the floor lay the dying POW soldier and I.

I was very thirsty. But how could I quench my thirst when instead of my face there was a dreadful mask with its lips stuck together? It was hot. Festering appeared on my burns, I was suffocating. I wanted this agony to end fast… Five days of hell…

At last the train arrived at its destination. A column of POWs, surrounded by numerous escorts, passed through the gate of the Hitlerite ‘SZ’ camp. Fellow-sufferers carried me on a stretcher as they carry the dead to the cemetery. The gate closed behind us, they put the stretcher on the ground — and at that moment many Germans rushed up to have a look at the dying female Russian POW. I lay helpless, burned, with broken bones. I was dying…

Later I was told that the whole camp was overwhelmed by the news as if by an exploded bomb: “A Russian female pilot!” The Germans surrounding me were arguing loudly about something. I understood one word: “lockup”. Then they carried me on the stretcher through a narrow corridor made of barbed wire: I could see watch towers with submachine-gunners on them. From behind the barbed wire on both sides I heard a sort of buzzing, and something flew onto me. It appeared that the French, Italians, British POWs of the Küstrin165 camp were throwing me pieces of bread and sugar as a sign of support and solidarity. Yulia, walking beside the stretcher, collected everything and put it into the lap of her Army skirt.

Yulia Krashchenko and I were placed into an isolated stone cell. There were smooth concrete walls, two-tier bunks by one of the walls. There was a low cement ceiling with a wooden crossbar and a bulb on it, two small windows with double bars. The lockup was formerly located on these premises.

Yulia tipped off onto my legs (there was no other place) all the pieces of bread she had picked up, and at that moment a huge Gestapo man, who could speak reasonable Russian, came in, two German soldiers with him. “You will be fine here!” he addressed me and added straightaway: “What kind of rubbish is this?”

The German pointed his knout at the bread lying on my bunk: “Take it away!” The soldiers scooped everything up, not leaving a single bit. Yulia began to ask them to leave us the bread and sugar, but the Gestapo man was implacable. Then they left, but a submachine-gun-armed Hitlerite with a wooden look stood by the door of the lockup. Yulia had hidden under me (to be precise, under my bed, in a scorched flying boot) my Party membership card, two Orders of the Red Banner, a medal ‘For Valour’ and one ‘For the Defence of the Caucasus’.

Thus began my nightmarish existence, full of mental anguish and physical pain, in the ‘SZ’ Fascist camp.

The lockup, according to the Hitlerites’ point of view, was the most appropriate place for a person who was between life and death. Everything they were doing to me was in the spirit of Nazism. They didn’t torture me, didn’t torment me — no, they simply threw me into a damp concrete casemate, and threw me on the mercy of fate without elementary medical aid. They didn’t kill me straightaway but with Jesuit cruelty gave me the chance to die on my own, slowly and agonisingly. But I was saved from death by something they hadn’t thought about — human solidarity. The very same day I was put inside the lockup a real battle for the life of the Russian female pilot began — a battle joined in by dozens and hundreds of people representing the most varied nationalities. By that time a strong, deeply conspiratorial clandestine resistance organisation was operating in the camp. Its members were conducting a broad propaganda campaign among the inmates, delivering them the truth about the situation on the fronts, organising acts of sabotage, unmasking traitors, supporting the sick and wounded. From the first minute of my presence in the camp I, all unsuspecting, found myself observed by the organisation, one of whose leaders was Doctor Sinyakov, known as ‘The Russian Doctor’. He had been head of a hospital in Kiev, and when our troops were leaving the city, all who could walk left. Only soldiers badly wounded during the siege of Kiev — there were a large number of them — were left. He got to someone on the phone, carts arrived to pick the wounded men up and transport them to the rear. All the other doctors had scattered, and the nurses and medics also fled in fear. Kiev had already been occupied, the sound of shooting was already heard nearby, but together with one nurse and some slightly wounded men assisting them, he carried down and loaded the badly wounded into the carts. The Germans had already begun to fire at the convoy — they managed to set out, but the Germans caught up with them… They shot dead everyone, leaving only him and a wounded female nurse. Both were placed in a cellar, and the nurse died in his arms: that was how he told his story. Then he found himself in the camp…

Doctor Sinyakov’s first concern was naturally my medical condition. For the experienced doctor even a brief glance at me at the moment I was being carried through the camp on a stretcher was enough to be sure that I was in the most serious condition. If no immediate aid were provided, then…

The clandestine committee instructed Doctor Sinyakov and a Belgrade University Professor Pavlo Trpinac to try to get the camp administration’s permission to treat the wounded POW. Then Sinyakov reported to the camp office and appeared before the Commandant. Looking at the Doctor from outside, it was impossible to ascribe to him the power, energy and firmness he really possessed. Not a tall man, emaciated, slow in his movements, with a shock of half-grey unruly hair… He spoke German unhurriedly, but in his every word there was steel and self-confidence.

“A badly wounded female Russian pilot has arrived in the camp…”

“And what of it?” The Fascist said. “New parties of prisoners arrive here daily. The Reich needs labour…”

“She’s not like all of them, she’s maimed and burned all over… She’s had no medical treatment for ten days.”

“It’s not a hospital here…”

“On behalf of all the camp prisoners I demand that Doctor Trpinac and I be given access to the wounded woman.”

“You demand, do you?” The Gestapo man went purple. “For that one word I could simply…”

Yes, here in the camp everything was simple… Death called up new victims from the POW ranks on a daily basis. Insubordination — a bullet; refusal to work — a bullet. Any guardsman was a judge. Everything was as simple here as in the Stone Age. Sinyakov knew all that, and yet he looked directly into the Hitlerite’s mad eyes… The Doctor was protected from the Nazi’s fury by his hands: the cunning, strong, capable hands of a surgeon…

When Georgiy Fedorovich had arrived in the Küstrin camp in another party, he was walked to what they called the revier166 or just the infirmary, protected by guards in the middle of the camp behind the barbed wire. The Doctor was greatly surprised seeing in this hell, in this stationary Fascist execution truck, a surgical table, a scalpel, bandages, iodine and other stuff. But then it became clear: the infirmary was here not because of humanism. It was just that 1944 was coming to an end, our army had entered Europe, and the Fascists could no longer kill all the POWs… The front was gobbling up Hitler’s divisions. Germany badly needed labour, but the POWs living in hellish conditions were dying in their hundreds and thousands. This situation had become disadvantageous to the Reich, and that was why the hospital had been established. Actually, there was another reason. POWs were carriers of disease, and the Fascists were terrified of infection in their densely populated country. For this reason people would be sent over to the revier, behind the third row of barbed wire, on the smallest suspicion of disease.

When Doctor Sinyakov was appointed as a surgeon, he was ordered to operate on the stomach of a maimed, burned, dying tankman who was barely breathing. All the camp Germans, headed by Doctor Koschel, came to see the ‘Russian Doctor’s’ first operation. Koschel brought along his fellow German surgeons and along with them the French, British and Yugoslav specialists from among the prisoners. Let them, he said, see for themselves what sort of medics these worthless Russians are! The patient was brought in. The hands of Georgiy Fedorovich’s assistants were shaking from worry — behind their backs someone among the Fascists was loudly holding forth about how the best Russian doctor of medicine was no better than a German medical orderly. And Doctor Sinyakov, his legs barely holding him up, pale, barefoot and ragged, was performing a stomach resection. His movements were accurate, confident and those present understood that this surgeon didn’t need an exam. After a one-and-a-half-hour long operation, superbly performed by Georgiy Fedorovich, the Germans left. The French, British and Yugoslavs remained. Standing up, they cheered the Russian doctor’s first victory in captivity. “Tovarich167…” said Pavle Trpinac, the only Russian word he knew, and shook Sinyakov’s hand.

Trpinac, like a campaigner, began to talk about the Russian doctor in the camp, and people from all blocks began to come to Sinyak one after another for treatment: they said he knew how to raise the dead! Georgiy Fedorovich cured perforated ulcers, pleurisy, osteomyelitis, performed surgery for cancer and thyroid diseases. Each day there were up to five operations and more than fifty dressings. The doctor was terribly tired, but the knowledge that there were more than a thousand and a half sick and wounded men in the hospital did not allow him to take any rest.

And so Sinyakov had no fear of the Commandant’s threats, and repeated his demand… Finally the Gestapo men allowed Doctors Sinyakov and Trpinac to treat me…

Twilight. The door opened with a creak, and a German Feldwebel168 came in like a ghost.

“Wow! It smells of a dead corpse here already”, he said, taking a drag on his cigarette, then leaned over the bunk and exclaimed, astonished: “A thousand devils! What does it take to kill these Russian witches! She’s breathing… skinned alive but still breathing!”

I really did smell like a dead corpse. The heavy burns on my face, arms and legs were covered with pus. Later that would save me from rough scars formed where the burns were.

“Come in!” The Feldwebel told a man standing by the door. It was the ‘Russian Doctor’ — that was what they called 2nd Class Army Surgeon Georgiy Fedorovic Sinyakov.