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

34. The infirmary

Carrying out instructions from a clandestine organisation of Russian POWs, Doctor Sinyakov was preparing escapes. In the hospital there were always five or six weakened POWs, who were to be fed up before an escape, helped to dry some bread for the journey, provided with a watch or a compass.

The first escape was organised in the camp in the spring of 1942. Then 5 men escaped, and three of them were airmen. Sinyakov said that he would remember for the rest of his life one of those escapees — a chap aged about 23. He’d been brought to the camp in very bad condition, with frostbitten toes on both feet and a high fever. His plane has been set afire deep behind the lines and he had to use a parachute. The pilot had walked through the forest for more than two days and had got his feet frostbitten: his fur-lined flying boots had been torn away during the jump from his plane. Having worn himself out he decided to have a rest, dozed off, and then two German shepherd dogs pounced on him… The Gestapo men transported him to the camp hospital. The guy had a large scalp wound on his head. Sinyakov told the Gestapo men the POW had skull and brain damage, and that he was unconscious. The doctor knew that the German doctors would easily notice his deceit the next day, but was doing it with his eyes open. In the night Georgiy Fedorovich and the medics replaced the pilot with a soldier who had died of wounds. They amputated half of the pilot’s feet, for gangrene had already set in. And then, having recuperated, the pilot first learned to walk and then made an escape. It had become another of the doctor’s victories.

Later I found out that once an alarmed guardsman with an interpreter from the POWs appeared unexpectedly before Georgiy Fedorovich and shouted: “To the commandant, immediately!”

You didn’t argue in the camp: if you were ordered to the commandant — you went. Why was there such a rush? But indeed business had been really urgent: some object had fallen into the trachea of the son of one of the Gestapo guards — a button or something. No one, actually, knew what the boy had swallowed. The boy was choking, immediate surgical intervention was required, but all the doctors were dismissing it as hopeless. Then the Germans remembered the ‘Russian Doctor’, remembered that this wonder-physician had been curing hopeless patients in the camp environment without essential instruments or assistants. Of course, he was a Russian — a representative of a ‘lower race’, but the Nazis had no choice. And did Doctor Sinyakov have a choice? An escort walked him — barefoot and ragged — to the spot. The Gestapo man said to him: “If you don’t save my son — you’ll be shot immediately”, and summoned all the camp doctors as witnesses. Had Sinyakov been ordered to operate on the father, a Gestapo man, a sadist and a notorious scoundrel, he would have said “No” but this was a child. Granted he was a German but all the same a child who was not to blame for his father being a Fascist. And he agreed to operate, immediately at that, for the child was nearly passing out. Georgiy Fedorovich asked for a piece of wire, did some trick with it, inserted the wire down the trachea and pulled out the button.

The man, staggering from constant malnutrition, suffering physically and morally every day but capable of preserving his clear mind and his craft, had saved the boy. And when death had retreated from the latter, another miracle occurred. The boy’s mother — a ‘pure-blooded Aryan’, haughty and swaggering, fell on her knees in front of the Russian doctor and kissed his hand, which had just put the instrument aside. Since then Doctor Sinyakov had obtained a kind of independence and right to state his requests. It had also played a role in Germans allowing him and Professor Trpinac to treat me.

Not knowing yet who these people were, having barely seen them at first, I understood that there were friends in front of me. Georgiy Fedorovich and Pavle Trpinac not only healed me, procuring medication for me, they tore off bread from their meagre camp ration. I will never forget that human generosity! I remember Trpinac bringing biscuits himself or sending his compatriot Zhiva Lazin — a peasant from the Banat — with a small bowl of kidney beans. In spite of everything, all the POWs except for the Russians were receiving food parcels and medication from the International Red Cross. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from that organisation. Stalin said then: “There are no POWs of ours — there are traitors…”

When Trpinac managed to get a Sovinformbureau communiqué, he would put on his gown, shove a cigarette into the guard’s hands so the latter would let him through to me, and would step quickly into the cell. “Oh, good news have I”, Pavle would say, mixing words in his native tongue and Russian ones, “The Red Army is gloriously advancing westward…”

Once he brought me a topographical map. The line of advance of the Soviet troops towards the Oder river was shown on it with a red pencil. Pavle fell to his knees, his back to the door, and showing me the red arrow directed with its point towards Berlin, said: “Soon they will come for us!”

At that moment the door opened and the Feldwebel ran into the cell cursing, but Trpinac managed to hide the map, and, pretending he had finished the dressing, walked out in silence. Next time the professor brought a piece of the Pravda newspaper169 in which there was a report about some Colonel Egorov’s heroic feat.

“Good news is a medicine too”, he said assuming my namesake was my husband or a relative. My dear Pavle of course did not know there as many Egorovs in Russia as Ivanovs or Stepanovs!

Sometimes Trpinac told me about his wonderful homeland, Yugoslavia — told me about his family and sighed heavily. His sister, Melka, was hanged by the Fascists in 1941. His second sister, Elena, joined the partisans with her daughter, in the future a national poet of Yugoslavia, Mira Aleckovic. The fascists had arrested Pavle himself on the podium where he was giving a lecture on Biochemistry at Belgrade University. Pavle’s wife Milena was still in Belgrade. Trpinac had been in the Küstrin camp since 1942 and before that he had been tormented in various jails. Trpinac hated Fascism with all his soul and fought against it as best as he could. He strongly believed in the final victory of the Red Army, made no secret of it and with no concerns for his own safety actively spread anti-Fascist propaganda among the POWs.

The medications I needed were found in the barracks of the French, British and American POWs who had been allowed to get parcels from the Red Cross and from home. Once, a high-ranking SS man who could speak Russian came to see me.

“Rotting away, girl?” he asked me with an insolent grin. I silently turned to the wall. The SS man tapped me on the shoulder with the handle of his rubber knout: “Oh, I’m not angry, kid! We respect the strong”, and, after a silence, added: “A word from you, and tomorrow you’ll be in the best Berlin hospital. And on the day after tomorrow all the newspapers in the Reich will be talking about you. Well?”

“Eh, you beasts! She’s, one might say, at death’s door, and you’ve got only one thing on your mind,” came Yulia’s sonorous voice.

“Shut up, you Russian swine!” The SS man exploded.

“You’re a swine yourself. A German one!”

“You can rot!” the Hitlerite shouted and ran out of the cell.

Later Georgiy Fedorovich came to see us. I told him about the SS man’s visit. “You need to be cunning with the enemy, but you were behaving like silly little kids. I can’t hide it — you are in trouble”, he said, and then I admitted to Sinyakov: “There’s a hiding place in my flying boot. Please, hide my Party membership card and decorations. If you make it back home, hand them over to the proper authorities…”

Sinyakov left, and we began to listen guardedly to every knock and rustle. We were very uneasy. We were silent for quite some time, each busy with our own thoughts. Then, interrupting the silence, I asked Yulia to tell me how she had ended up on the front.

“Very simple”, she began. “As soon as I had graduated from the 7-year school in my village of Novo-Chervonnoye in the Lougansk Region, the war broke out. Our village of Novo-Chervonnoye (near Donetsk) was occupied by the Hitlerites. Oh, it was a terrible time! My mum and I were kicked out of our house, and for a long while we lived in a shed. And when our troops had come back, first of all I grabbed my badge and certificate ‘Ready for Medical Defence’ I’d got while I was still at school, ran to see the unit commander and asked him to take me along with them to the front.

“I can do bandages, take me!” I said.

He said “My girl, what are you talking about? They’ll kill you!”

“No way will they kill me!”

“So how old are you?”

“Seventeen…”

Seventeen-year old Yulia Krashchenko was an army medic. Short and agile, she would rush about battlefields, hurry to any groan, any call of: “Sister! Help!”170 It might seem that it was beyond her strength to drag out even one casualty — often a big and heavy man. But she had dragged out more than five and more than ten…

During the forcing of the Southern Bug river the Fascists tried to break the thin river ice and drown her company that was striving to reach the occupied river bank. The bank was steep, the water was cold — and all around her were fire, groans and entreaties: “Sister, help…” Yulia was bandaging wounded men, but dragging them not to the rear but forward: it was impossible to crawl back — the enemy shells had already smashed the ice. She met the dawn of 23 February 1944 on the high bank of the Bug. It was then that Guards Sergeant Y.F. Krashchenko was awarded the medal ‘For Valour. And later, several months after that, a battle broke out on the Vistula river, which had been turned by the Germans into an impregnable defence line. One night a group of Soviet troops crossed the river and consolidated their grip on the opposite bank. Yulia Krashchenko was amongst them. The German artillery battered them incessantly, dozens of Fascist planes bombed the small bridgehead, trying to throw the troops into the Vistula. The company commander was killed but they held on, trying to keep the bridgehead. Like steel wedges, columns of Tigers, Ferdinands and Panthers advanced onto our lines pressed against the Vistula. During all those difficult hours our Air Force was helping the land troops. Yulia didn’t know that up there, in the skies, in a Sturmovik cockpit there was I — a woman with whom a shared misfortune would soon bring her together…

The Fascist tanks flattened the trench in which the medic Krashchenko was dressing the wounded. That’s how she had found herself in captivity. And then, after our conversation with the Gestapo man, towards evening two strong Germans appeared and said, pointing their fingers at Yulia: “Kommen. Schnell, schnell!”

I asked the Hitlerites where and why they were taking the girl? One of them, pressing a finger against his temple, squeezed out: “Pif! Paf!” and off they went.

They locked me inside. Silence. How terrible silence can be… Grief stripped all my strength. I wanted to shut my eyes and not open them again. A condition of extreme apathy twisted my last forces and will into a tight knot. And who knew how it all would have come to had I not sensed the tenfold strong support of friends. The POWs began to demonstrate their sympathy to me by different means, and even through the walls of the casemate I felt their fraternal handshakes. The Englishmen passed me a trench coat and the Poles tailored a jacket ‘in the latest style’ from it; the Yugoslavs found me a warm scarf, and our Russian guys hand-made me slippers out of trenchcoat cloth, with red stars on the toes. Had the camp administration found out about any of these gifts, severe punishment would have befallen the donors. But what is death by shooting against the great force of human solidarity! And the will to live arose in me again. To live so as to see the end of hateful Fascism with my own eyes!

They then banned Sinyakov and Trpinac from treating me, and a traitor with the black eyes of a brigand began to dress my wounds. But my comrades in misfortune didn’t abandon me even then. Miraculously once they passed me a bread ration with a note inside: “Hold on, sister!” That unforgettable bread ration… I won’t enlarge upon what that meagre piece of bread meant back then. He who has been hungry knows, and the one who has never starved — as they say — God forbid! Two hundred grams of ersatz bread and a litre of soup from unpeeled and badly washed turnips — such was the daily ration for the Russian POWs of the ‘SZ’ camp. And a starved man, reduced to dystrophy, had sent me his bread ration…

On one excruciating day of my solitary confinement my attention was attracted by a tall skinny guardsman — a youth of about seventeen. That was not his first day of guard duty, and each time he studied the ‘flying witch’ with unhidden curiosity. I saw that the guard wanted to talk to me but was hesitant. But once, looking back at the door, he produced a wrapper from his pocket, pulled out a piece of pie and actually stepped towards the bunk. Swiftly putting the pie on my chest, he smiled.

“Bitte essen, Russische Frau!” the youth said cordially and went back to his place straightaway. “Bitte…”

“Take it back! I don’t need anything of yours!” I replied more by gestures than by words.

“Nein! Nein! Ich bin Fascisten nicht!” The guard exclaimed and hurriedly began to explain that his mother had come to visit him from the countryside and brought him presents…

It was already January 1945. On the last day of that month Major Ilyin’s 5th Shock Army tanks liberated the accursed camp ‘SZ’, but two days before the arrival of our troops the SS guards drove out of the barracks all those who could still stand on their feet. Only the dying men and some doctors and medics headed by Doctor Sinyakov were left in the camp. Working together, they secretly dug a deep hole under the operating room and hid underneath till the liberation.

Through the bars on the window I saw a Gestapo man and two submachine-gunners with him were running into the French barracks and shooting: apparently they were finishing off those who couldn’t walk… But then the cannon shots, previously reaching the camp like a far-off roar of thunder, began to resound just nearby. The shells were bursting right and left of the punishment cell, which had been locked. There had been no one on guard for quite some time already. And suddenly everything fell silent. A lull set in. Suddenly the door swung open and I saw our tank-men in it… How happy I was! “They’ll fix me up for sure”, I thought. “I’ll get better myself — such is my character!”

Major Ilyin — the tank brigade commander — advised me go to hospital with the wounded tank crews who were about to be taken away in carts. He knew that I would be going through hard times — apparently he was aware of our SMERSh171. That’s was why he recommended I lose myself among the wounded tank-men. He said: “You were flying at tanks when they shot you down!” But I found out the 16th Aerial Army in which I used to serve was operating towards here. That was why I declined:

“I will be looking for my regiment. It must be somewhere here, on this sector of the front.”

With the tank crews’ field mail service, I immediately sent letters to my mum in the village of Volodovo, Kouvshinovskiy Region, and to the regiment. Because of the happiness, that day I got to my feet and walked. I remember I put on those gift slippers with red stars on the toes, made by an unknown friend for me, braced my hands against the bunk and moved forward. But my legs were trembling like strings, my flabby muscles wouldn’t obey me, my burns had just grown over and began to crack and bleed straightaway… “Stop! Sit down for a bit, have a rest”, I said to myself and then carefully shuffled around the floor again. One more step! I swayed but didn’t fall, stayed upright and walked on, although holding onto the wall…

And the ex-POWs of the camp, those who could hold weapons, climbed up on the tanks and went into the battle for Küstrin. Sinyakov organized a field hospital in the camp at the tank crews’ request: their rear lines had fallen behind during their rapid advance. Georgiy Fedorovich did more than seventy operations on wounded tank-men over several days. And back then, in the camp, immediately after the liberation he brought my Party membership card and decorations and handed them over to me…