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 Küstrin2 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 revier3 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 th
e 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. “Tovarich4…” 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 Feldwebel5 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.
34
The infirmary
C
arrying 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 newspaper1 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, Yu
goslavia – 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?”
Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45 (Soviet Memories of War) Page 26