View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  One by one my neighbours straightened in their chairs, rose to their feet as if at the command of a powerful hypnotist, allowed themselves to be drawn away into the street and into the crowd, began to clap and fell into step. The café emptied, and the tired waiter, roused by the rhythm to the point of tapping it out on his tray, caught my eye and came over. ‘At your service,’ he said, and I asked him what it was all about.

  ‘Clowns,’ he said. ‘They’re limbering up for Cita en Sevilla [Appointment in Seville]. Starts tomorrow and finishes on 21st June.’

  ‘Don’t tell me another fiesta,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite that,’ the waiter said. ‘The Municipality’s trying out something new. They didn’t want us to be bored, so they’re importing six jazz bands, two Czech-Slovak orchestras, visual poetry from Italy (whatever they mean by that), Son et Lumiere, an ice-show with a real ice-breaker, musicians from Morocco, and clowns from all over. Half a dozen famous opera singers have been invited; there’ll be poetry readings, canteflamenco, art and photographic shows, and the biggest antiques fair ever, or so they say. That’s about the lot.’

  ‘What happens after 21st June?’ I asked.

  ‘We haven’t been told yet. Be sure they’ll think of something.’

  ‘It’s a lively town,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right,’ the waiter agreed. ‘There’s always something to look forward to.’

  He dropped into a chair at the next table, and put his head in his hands for a moment. ‘Sometimes I think they overdo it,’ he said.

  17

  The Cossacks Go Home

  THE BAD NEWS when I came in on the pellucid evening of October 22nd 1944, from a day in the apple-scented criminal villages encircling Naples, was that I would be leaving for Taranto next morning to take 3,000 Soviet prisoners back to the Soviet Union.

  Our senior sergeant and I stood together under the vast, dusty chandeliers of the Palace of the Dukes of Satriano, where 312 FS Section had its headquarters, and the doleful cries of Naples reached us through its open windows. The sergeant said that this was something that couldn’t be handled by an NCO. Arrangements would have to be made for an emergency commission, but the Field Security Officer was away and it was too late to do anything that day. ‘We’ll try and fix it up in Taranto for you as soon as you get there,’ he said.

  Next morning I took the train to Taranto, a pleasant trip in the almost icy perfection of the South’s most splendid month, after the air is washed and cooled by the first autumnal rains. At Taranto there was no talk of emergency commissions. A major was waiting for me at Movement Control. He wore no Intelligence green flash, but the faint aroma of lunacy, and the fierce but vague eyes identified him almost certainly as a member of the Intelligence Corps.

  ‘You’re taking over 3,000 shits,’ the major said. ‘My orders are these. If any man so much as attempts to escape, you personally will shoot him. Is that clear?’

  At this point the correct reply should have been, ‘With all due respect sir, this is an improper order,’ but I said nothing, assuming the man to be mad.

  ‘Show me your gun,’ the major said.

  I took the .38 Webley out of its holster and handed it to him.

  ‘Is this the only weapon you have?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I see. Well I suppose there are plenty of guns to be had. Are you a good shot?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m a bad one.’

  ‘Oh. Well, you must do your best. Where do you come from? Naples, is it? Do they have any foxes up there?’

  ‘Not as far as I know, sir.’

  ‘Pity. They do in Rome. That may surprise you. In the woods.’

  Mention had been made a few weeks before by a Taranto section member on visit to Naples of a concentration camp for Russians having been put up outside the town. The news had surprised us because it was the first intimation we had received of the presence of any quantity of Russians in Italy. I was too late to visit the camp, for just before my arrival they had been moved out – with some difficulty, as it appeared – and put aboard the Reina del Pacifico, a regular troopship providing stark accommodation for troops and ‘3rd class families’. Here they were confined in remarkably cramped conditions below deck, guarded by the infantry company that would travel with them, via Khorramshahr in Iran, whence they would entrain for the last stage of their journey to the Soviet Union.

  I went aboard, and went below immediately to inspect the prisoners, finding a dispirited rabble of men in rumpled German uniforms, lying about wherever they could, and covering every inch of deck space. An army that has suffered defeat and captivity is like a man overtaken by a sudden illness. The change is dramatic and instantaneous. Men seem to have shrunk in their uniforms which now no longer fit; movements behind the wire had slowed down, and discussions become spiritless and desultory. To this familiar climate of demoralisation, the prisoners had added a depressing ingredient of their own, for a number were singing an endless and mournful song. This was explained by a young Jewish interpreter, supplied by the army, as a tribal death chant. Nearly all the prisoners were from Soviet Central Asia.

  According to Benjamin, the interpreter, the ‘Russians’ had not been told that they were to be repatriated to the Soviet Union, until Red Army officers had arrived in the camp to inspect them, like looking over cattle that would soon go to the slaughterhouse. The result had been panic, and some attempts at suicide. These men’s grievance lay in the fact that, although compelled – as they claimed – to serve in the German army in Italy, they had deserted as soon as possible to the partisans, and when rounded up by advancing British forces they had been promised Allied status, which was to include re-fitting them out in British uniforms.

  A young Russian – the only obvious European in sight – presented himself. His name was Ivan Golik, a Muscovite with the rank of senior lieutenant, who had assumed command. Golik was miraculously spruce and untouched by the demoralisation which surrounded him, but the message he had for us contained no comfort. Golik said violence had been used, and a number of men injured before they could be driven aboard, and that if our promise of Allied status was not kept we could expect mass suicides. I passed this information to the Officer Commanding Troops who promised to contact GHQ for further instructions. On the strength of this, I told Golik that I believed that any promise made to the prisoners would be honoured, but that as the ship was leaving forthwith, nothing could be done about relieving them of the detested German uniforms until we reached Port Said. The assurance seemed to cool the atmosphere, and the Kalmuck death chant ceased, but it was still thought prudent to search the prisoners for combustible materials that might be used to set fire to the ship, and to keep them below hatches until Egypt was reached.

  In the meanwhile, there were urgent problems to be dealt with, one being the production of a nominal roll required by the OC Troops – all original documentation relating to the prisoners having been lost. This task was complicated by the fact that many men possessed the same name, and there were accusations among the Russians that some men had given false names in an attempt to conceal their identities. The inference was that certain of the prisoners had committed crimes while serving in the Wehrmacht.

  In the course of these routine enquiries the facts soon proved to be less simple than we had supposed. Practically all these Asiatics had been members of the 162 Turkoman Infantry Division, composed of Uzbeks, Khirgiz, Kazakhis and other Muslim racial groups, who had fought in Northern Italy under the command of Lt General Von Heygendorff. The mere fact that they had served in the Turkoman Division was significant, because that meant that they were ‘volunteers’, and not mere freiwillige, who normally served in non-combatant labour battalions.

  The division had begun life in 1942 in German-occupied Poland under the command of an eccentric Wehrmacht officer General Von Niedermeyer, who thought of himself as the German Lawrence of Arabia, spoke Turkic even in his home, embraced Islam, and dressed as a native. In 1943 the divis
ion operated in the Ukraine, and after the defeat at Stalingrad it returned to Germany for re-organisation, before being sent to Northern Italy.

  Here it fought well under the German officers, but committed to battle in July 1944 against American armour it began to disintegrate. It took a bad mauling near Orbetello-Grosetto and Massa Maritima, and this provided the opportunity for many of the Asiatics to change sides. They were terrified, they said, of falling into the hands of the Americans who, as they thought, believed them to be Japanese auxiliaries under German command, and who – as the rumour went – ran over such prisoners with their tanks. For this reason they took care to surrender only to the Partisans, and it was to the Partisans that they gave themselves up in large numbers on September 13th during heavy defensive fighting near Rimini.

  Starvation and the most atrocious treatment in German POW camps, and the realisation that they were faced with the alternative of certain death had induced these men to serve in the German armed forces. These ultimate survivors spoke in the most matter-of-fact way of their experiences, some of which had been macabre indeed, and I soon came to know that for every Soviet who had come through the fiery furnace of the POW camps, a hundred had found a miserable death.

  It was a fire of a magnitude that Russia and Central Asia could never have known in all history, for there were vast human surpluses to be cleared as rapidly and as economically as possible. Every prisoner was ready with his own personal recital of horror, but a typical account providing a hundred variations on the same theme was provided by a young Tadjik herdsman. This boy who had hardly ever seen a real Russian, and never heard of Germany, had been snatched suddenly out of the steppes, put into uniform and given the first train ride of his life, in the great westward scramble of an unprepared and ill-equipped army to face the Nazi tanks. The train stopped and the soldiers began to march towards a distant cannonading, but a few hours later were ordered to turn back. Marching thereafter in the direction from which they had come they were halted by soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms who disarmed them, put them in lorries and drove them a short distance to an enormous barbed-wire enclosure. It was only at this point that they realised that they were prisoners of the Germans. They remained here for three days without food and water, before a body of Germans arrived accompanied by one who addressed them in Russian through a loud-hailer. The Tadjik remembered him as short, bespectacled and mild in his manner. ‘There are far more of you than we expected,’ he explained. ‘We have food for a thousand, and there are ten thousand here, so you must draw your own conclusions.’

  The prisoners were then lined up and the order was given for Officers, Communists and Jews to step out of rank, but no one moved. All the prisoners had by now torn off their badges of rank. The bespectacled German then invited any prisoner who wished to do so to denounce any of his comrades belonging to these categories. He promised that those who co-operated in this way would receive favoured treatment, including all the food they could eat, and after some urging and more promises and threats on the German’s part a number of men stepped out of the ranks and the betrayal began. Those selected in this way were marched off to a separate enclosure, and at this point the bespectacled German said that a further problem had arisen through the shortage of ammunition. The men who had betrayed their comrades were given cudgels, and ordered on pain of instant death to use these to carry out the execution.

  The Germans, on the whole, contrived to have prisoners kill prisoners. There were not enough SS ‘special squads’ to go round, and it was found that regular army soldiers were reluctant to engage in mass murder. It was true, too, that ammunition for such secondary uses was running low. Later in the war an SS squad leader provided me with the official statistic that unless a man was shot in such a way that the muzzle of the weapon virtually touched a vital area of the body, it took on average three shots to kill him, and inexperienced squads armed with automatic weapons and firing at a range of 12–15 feet, used up double that number of rounds. At that time there were countless thousands to be destroyed.

  In the disorder of those early days of the German push to the East, I learned from my SS informants that the method of selecting Jews for elimination was both rapid and unscientific. Prisoners, as soon as taken, were ordered to drop their trousers, and those found to be circumcised, shot on the spot. As all the Muslims composing the Asian units were also circumcised, these, too were butchered en masse.

  Later, when the Germans came to realise that many of the Asiatics were fiercely anti-Russian, and therefore employable as required in the German armed forces, the selection became more careful, but mistakes were still made. At one camp, in which several of the men I questioned had been held, the shibboleth of old was still in use. Every captive in turn was made to repeat in the presence of a Muscovite collaborator the sentence ‘Na garye araratye rostut krupniye vinogradi’ (On the Mountain of Ararat grow great vineyards), and those who had difficulty with their Ps were assumed to be Jews, although in fact many Asian tribesmen found this as difficult to cope with as the Jews.

  Between four and five million soldiers died in these camps, most of them of starvation, but for those men of iron resistance determined to survive, come what might, the first hurdle to be cleared was an aversion to cannibalism; and I was convinced that all the men on this ship had eaten human flesh. The majority admitted to this without hesitation, often – as if the confession provided psychological release – with a kind of eagerness. Squatting in the fetid twilight below deck they would describe, as if relating some grim old Asian fable, the screaming, clawing scrambles that sometimes happened when a man died, when the prisoners fought like ravenous dogs to gorge themselves on the corpse before the Germans could drag it away. It was commonplace for a man too weak from starvation to defend himself, to be smuggled away to a quiet corner, knocked on the head and then eaten. One of the Asiatic Russians I interviewed displayed the cavity in the back of his leg where half his calf had been gnawed away while in a coma. In these episodes there were certain privileges that fell to the strong, who like lions over a kill, were left to take their share of the meat before the hyenas were permitted to approach. Cruellest of the camps from which my informants had sought any way of escape, seemed to have been at Salsk in the Kalmuck steppes, on the railroad between Stalingrad and Krasnodar. Here, seven days of total starvation prepared the prisoners for what was to come. When bread finally arrived they were forced to crawl on their hands and knees to reach it under the fire of German soldiers, who were being trained as marksmen. Nearly all killings were carried out by prisoners. Jews were buried alive by their non-Jewish comrades, force-fed with excrement, and very commonly drowned in the latrines. There were spectacles here from the dementia of the Roman Empire, in its death throes, when naked prisoners were compelled to fight each other to death with their bare hands, while their captors stood by urging them on and taking photographs with their Leicas. An innocent-faced Uzbek hardly out of his teens described these combats. A killer could earn a little favour, gather a little following among the Germans by developing his own murderous speciality. One man used to kill a defeated opponent by biting his throat out. Another would bring a man down by twisting his testicles, before breaking his neck by a kick to the head. The Uzbek claimed to have despatched one of the guards’ favourites by braining him with a femur he had wrenched from a corpse and kept hidden until the moment came. For this he was much applauded, given a crust of bread and the chance to volunteer for service in one of the Muslim auxiliary units being formed at that time.

  Deep divisions and animosities had developed among the prisoners as a result of their sufferings in the camps, where it had been every man for himself; and I soon came to the conclusion that only Ivan Golik could keep them in order, and that our dependence upon him was total. Two days out from Taranto the interpreter, Benjamin, told me that Golik had asked to see me alone and I had him brought to my cabin.

  A discussion was conducted with some difficulty in a mixture of Russian and G
erman, and Golik told me that a mutiny was being planned by a mullah, who was held in great awe by the Asiatics. This mullah’s official name on the nominal roll was Sultanov, but he was known to the prisoners as Haj el Haq (the Pilgrim of Truth). Although enlisted as a mere private in the Red Army, he had been a member of the royal family of the Emirs of Bokhara, who had been such a thorn in the side of the Kremlin, until the Russians had entered the city in the early twenties and had this man’s murderous old great-uncle thrown from the tower of his own palace.

  The mullah, a detester of all Russians, and enthusiastically pro-German, managed to convince most of the Muslim soldiers that Adolf Hitler was working secretly for their cause and had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Golik explained that a leadership struggle had developed between him and the holy man, with both pulling in opposite directions. ‘I am determined,’ Golik said, ‘to take these men home. I am their guardian angel. Haj el Haq believes in paradise. He wants us all to die.’ Golik’s view was that the mullah would be shot as soon as he set foot on Russian soil, and therefore the mullah had nothing to lose by instigating a revolt. Golik believed that as soon as he gained enough following, the mullah would order the men to force their way past the guards up on to the deck, and there commit suicide by throwing themselves into the sea.

  As part of his strategy, he said, the mullah had ordered the men to resist the reintroduction of army discipline and to reject all orders given them either by Golik himself, or by the two junior lieutenants, or by men who had previously held non-commissioned rank in the Red Army. He believed that the mullah’s influence could only be combated by the transformation of this rabble into something like the semblance of a fighting force. The argument came back to the British uniforms. If the prisoners got them all would be well, because the mere wearing of them would proclaim to the Soviets when they arrived at the end of their journey, that the British had recognised them as their allies. The new uniforms, worn with Red Army badges of rank would transform sluggards into soldiers and banish day-dreaming and despair. Golik wanted to be able to hold inspections, arrange parades, award punishments, do a little ceremonial drilling on deck if that could be sanctioned, as soon as the uniforms came. If they did not, the mullah would have won, and the men would fall in behind him.