by Glenn Meade
But not all Soviet commanders chose to flee the might of the Third Reich. Some chose to stay behind, fighting a fierce rearguard action that was to give the Germans a bloody foretaste of what was to lie ahead for them on the frozen steppes of Russia.
One of these Russian officers was Brigadier Yegor Grenko. At forty-two, he was already a divisional commander. A daring officer with a reputation for being headstrong, he had somehow survived the savage purges Stalin had inflicted on his army on the eve of war, when more than half of the senior officer corps were either shot or deported to Siberia, many without trial, simply because Stalin, acutely paranoid, had falsely suspected that they were plotting to overthrow him.
Along the way Grenko had met and married Nina Zinyakin, the daughter of an Armenian schoolteacher. Grenko first met her when she gave an impassioned lecture on Lenin at the Moscow Institute, and he was smitten at once. She was a resolute, fiery young woman of remarkable good looks, and not unlike her husband in temperament. Within ten months of marriage their first and only child was born.
By the time the Germans advanced on Tallinn, Anna Grenko was fifteen years old.
The initial battle orders from Stalin after the Germans had launched Operation Barbarossa had been to engage in the minimum of conflict. Still foolishly believing that Hitler would not push deep inside Russia and that hostilities would soon cease, Stalin had hoped to lessen the conflict by not angering the Germans with a savage counterattack.
Yegor Grenko saw it differently. Ordered by Moscow to retreat, he had steadfastly refused. In his opinion, Stalin was arrogant and insane, a bad mix for a strategist. Grenko didn’t believe the Germans would hold back at the Russian border. Convinced that within a week the battle orders would change to an offensive, Grenko decided to fight a rearguard action and for days was bombarded with cables from Moscow military command ordering him to retreat. He tore up every signal and even returned one in reply. “What the devil am I supposed to do? Sit back and allow the Germans to massacre my men?”
Yegor Grenko was convinced that history would prove Stalin wrong, just as he knew that the first weeks of battle are as crucial as the last. But when he could finally ignore the cables no more, he and his men boarded a troop train near Narva and headed back to Moscow.
When the train pulled into the Riga Station, Yegor Grenko was arrested and marched to a waiting car. When Anna Grenko’s mother tried to intervene she was brushed aside and told bluntly that her husband’s arrest was none of her business.
The following day came the visit from the secret police. Nina Grenko was coldly informed that her husband had been tried by a military tribunal and found guilty of disobeying orders. He had been executed that morning at Lefortovo prison.
A day later, fresh battle orders from Stalin were made public. Every citizen was to repel the invading Germans with every means, even to death, and no Soviet soldier was to retreat.
For Yegor Grenko, the order had come a day too late.
• • •
After the death of her father, Anna Grenko saw her family home in Moscow confiscated on the orders of the secret police. Her mother never recovered from the injustice of her husband’s execution, and in the second month of the siege of Moscow, Anna Grenko came home to find her mother’s corpse hanging from a water pipe.
For two days after they had cut down the body Anna lay in her bed, not eating and barely sleeping. There was suddenly a terrible void in her life and no one to turn to. Relatives shunned her, fearing guilt by association and the midnight knock on the door by the secret police.
On the third day she packed what meager belongings she had into one small suitcase and moved out of the apartment into a squalid, tiny room on the eastern side of the Moscow River.
The German army was seven miles away, the golden domes of the Kremlin visible through their field glasses. With the city under constant bombardment there was little to buy or eat and almost no fuel; anything that could be burned had long ago been burned. People devoured what few rations they were allowed. Dogs and cats fetched a month’s wages. Bodies were piled high in the suburbs, and the German shells and Stuka bombers made life impossible in freezing subzero temperatures.
Too young to fight, Anna Grenko was sent to work in an aircraft factory in the Urals. On her seventeenth birthday she was finally called up for military service. Given three weeks’ basic training, she was shipped south to the front and General Chuikov’s 62nd Army at Stalingrad.
And it was at Stalingrad she was to learn the real meaning of survival.
Fighting from street to street and factory to factory, holding out against the Germans in a siege that was to last for more than six months, crossing enemy lines at night in the mud and snow and attacking their positions, the fighting so savage and close she was often near enough to the enemy that she could hear their whispered voices in nearby trenches. The shelling so heavy that every leaf fell from the trees in the city and dogs drowned themselves in the Volga rather than endure the horrendous noise of battle that went on day and night.
Twice Anna was wounded, and twice she was decorated. In the battles that raged in pockets in and around Stalingrad the killing was merciless.
On the fifth incursion behind the German lines she was captured by a detachment of Ukrainian SS. After interrogation, she was brutally raped. Left for dead in a bomb crater, she had lain there in the freezing cold, a terrible pain between her legs where the five men had torn her flesh in their lust.
On the second morning she had awakened to the touch of snow on her face.
When she crawled up the gully she saw the Ukrainians on the far side, the same men who had raped her, standing around a lighted brazier, warming themselves and laughing.
Anna Grenko crawled back into the crater and waited until darkness fell. There was a terrible rage in her heart, a need for revenge, a livid urge to kill the men for what they had done to her. It overwhelmed her and went beyond any instinct for survival. When she crawled out again that night she found the Tokarev machine pistol and the stick grenades on the body of a fallen comrade.
She crawled back up the crater and over toward the soldiers.
One of the men turned and saw her, but already it was too late. She saw the horror on the man’s face as she unpinned the grenades and lobbed them into the group, firing the Tokarev at the same time, seeing the bodies dance in the light of the exploding flashes and hearing the screams until all was silence again.
When the lines were overrun the next day, she was found by her own troops lying in the crater, a pool of blood between her legs. She spent three weeks in a field hospital in Stalingrad before being called before a military tribunal and questioned, not about the ordeal of her rape, but about her capture by the Ukrainians and how she had allowed it to happen.
For that indignity, and despite her bravery, she received a month’s sentence in a military prison.
• • •
It was to be the fifth year after the war before Anna Grenko was to find any sort of personal happiness.
Within two years of the war’s end Moscow’s citizens had found a new zest for life. The city seemed to awaken after a long hibernation and took on an atmosphere of gaiety and abandon. Apartment blocks and cafés, dance halls and beer halls sprang up in every suburb, people wore fashionable clothes and bright colors, and in summer they danced on hotel terraces to the latest popular music.
Anna Grenko found secretarial work in a Moscow factory and with time on her hands she went to night school, and two years later she began to take evening lectures at the Moscow Language Institute. Although often asked out by men, she rarely accepted, and never agreed to their invitations to their homes. Only once did Anna Grenko make an exception.
One of the young lecturers she met was Ivan Khorev. He was only twenty-four and a slim, pale, sensitive young man, but he was already an admired and popular poet and his work had been published in several respected literary magazines.
One night after class he had asked An
na out for a drink. They went to a small open-air café on the banks of the Moscow River. They ate zakuski and drank strong Georgian wine, and Ivan Khorev talked about poetry. When he recited her a poem by Pasternak Anna thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. Ivan listened quietly and attentively to her opinions and didn’t try to dismiss them. He had the ability to poke fun at himself, and he certainly didn’t take his own literary reputation unduly seriously. And he liked to laugh.
There was a band playing on the terrace, a soft, sad waltz from before the war, and when he asked her to dance, Ivan Khorev didn’t try to touch or kiss her. Afterward he walked her home, but instead of a good-night peck he formally shook her hand.
A week later he asked her to his parents’ home for dinner. After the meal they all sat up until the early hours, and when she laughed at a joke his father made, Ivan Khorev smiled and said it was the first time he had seen her happy.
She had lain in bed afterward thinking about him. His quiet assurance and his gentleness and his humor. His ability to speak with authority on almost any topic, his sharp intelligence, and his sensitivity. His willingness to listen to her views and take them seriously. He was a loner, too, like her, but a different kind. His independence came from a quiet self-confidence, from a loving family background.
She fell in love, and they married a month after she graduated.
For their honeymoon they spent a week in a big wooden villa on the beach near Odessa, and every morning they went swimming in the warm Black Sea and then ran back to the dacha to make love.
At night he read her the poetry he had written and told her endlessly that he loved her, that he had loved her from the first day he saw her on campus, and when he saw the tears in the corners of her eyes he pulled her close and held her tightly.
When their first child was born a year later, Anna Khorev found her life complete. They had a daughter and they called her Sasha. They were allotted a small apartment off Lenin Prospect where she and Ivan often took their baby for walks in nearby Gorky Park.
Anna never forgot the first walk they had taken together as a family. She and Ivan and little Sasha. And the look of pride on Ivan’s face as he held their daughter in his arms. A man with a camera had taken their photograph by a bandstand for fifty kopecks; the three of them together, she and Ivan smiling, Sasha wrapped in a woolen cap and a white blanket, her face fat and pink and healthy and her tiny lips hungry for milk. Anna had kept the photograph on the mantelpiece in a silver frame, and every day she looked at it, as if to remind herself that her marriage and her happiness were real.
But in that first warm summer of complete joy she could never have imagined the pain that was to come.
The pounding on the apartment door came one Sunday at 2 a.m. Three men burst into the room, and Ivan was dragged outside to a waiting car. He had been accused of writing and publishing a poem in a dissident magazine. For that crime he was banished to a penal colony in Norylsk in northern Siberia for twenty-five years.
Anna Khorev never saw her husband again.
A week later the men from the secret police came back. She cried and screamed and kicked when they took her child; she almost killed the men who dragged her to the car waiting to take her to Lefortovo prison, but it did no good.
For her association with Ivan Khorev she was sentenced to twenty years in Nicochka Penal Camp. Her child was to be removed to a state orphanage where she would be brought up like a good communist. Anna was never to see her daughter again, and her right to parenthood was revoked by the state.
She was taken straight to Moscow’s Leningrad Station and put on board a cattle truck with dozens of other prisoners. The train wound northward for five hundred miles. When it finally pulled into a siding, she and the other prisoners were driven farther west to a prison camp in the middle of nowhere.
There was a blizzard blowing that night, and the icy gusts slashed at her face like a thousand razors. Anna Khorev was put in a drafty, squalid wooden hut with five other special-category prisoners. Two were blind and the others were prostitutes with syphilis. The remaining camp prisoners were drunks and political offenders, destined to live out the rest of their lives in the frozen wastes near the Arctic Circle. In the hundreds of penal camps that dotted the Soviet Union, millions of men, women, and children labored in mines and rock quarries and makeshift factories. They worked from dawn until dusk for nothing, until malnutrition, the freezing cold, disease, or suicide claimed their lives.
When they died, a mechanical digger gouged out a pit in the frozen ground, and their bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave.
No headstone or marker to acknowledge they ever existed.
• • •
By the second month of her imprisonment Anna Khorev felt she couldn’t go on. She was allowed no mail, except official state correspondence, and no visitors. She worked from daylight to darkness, and in the first weeks the despair and loneliness almost killed her. If she slackened she was beaten mercilessly by the camp guards. Every day and night her grief seemed overwhelming.
Sasha’s face kept coming into her mind, and Anna thought she was going mad. In the sixth month she received a letter from the penal camp information service in Moscow. It informed her that her husband, Ivan Khorev, had died of natural causes and had been buried in Norylsk. His personal belongings had been confiscated by the state, and no further communication on the matter was permitted.
She cried that night until she felt her heart was going to explode. She didn’t eat her meager rations of black bread and cabbage soup, and within a week she was suffering the effects of severe malnutrition. When Anna finally collapsed on her work detail she was taken to the drafty wooden hut that served as the camp hospital. The slovenly drunken doctor who visited once a week examined her with little interest, and when she still refused to eat she was marched to the camp commandant.
The commandant gave her a stern lecture on his responsibility to his prisoners, but she knew by the man’s tone that he didn’t care if she lived or died.
When the telephone rang in another room and he was called outside, Anna Khorev noticed the map on the wall. Something took root in her mind and she found herself staring at the map. It was a relief image of the surrounding area, the terrain and border posts, the roads and little red and blue flags marking military bases and civilian prison camps. She moved closer and studied the image intently for almost five minutes, burning every detail into her mind.
When the commandant finally dismissed her, she went back to her barrack hut. Anna found a piece of charcoal in the metal stove and on the back of the letter she had received informing her of Ivan’s death redrew everything she could remember of the map. Every detail she could recall: every road and river and little blue and red flag.
That evening she ate her first meal in eight days. And that night she made up her mind. She knew she would never see her child again and that her life would never be the same. But she wasn’t going to die in the wasteland of the Arctic Circle, and she wasn’t going to remain a prisoner.
The border toward Finland was a tortuous landscape of thick forest and hills teeming with wolves and bears, glacial ravines and wide frozen rivers. To attempt to escape across such territory in winter would be suicidal. The most accessible crossings were guarded, but that was her best chance, even if just as dangerous. She didn’t know what might lie beyond the Finnish border, but she knew that somehow she was going to escape.
There was a middle-aged camp officer Anna had noticed, a rough and lustful man who took the risk of bedding the female prisoners, trading extra food for sex. She had noticed the man watching her with a leering grin. She let it be known that she was available.
The officer came to her after dark three nights later. They met in a small woodshed at the rear of the camp. She timed the day so the man was off duty the next morning.
She waited until he had undressed her, an expectant smirk on his face, and when he turned to take off his coat and tunic she drove the
six-inch metal blade deep into his back. It had taken her three weeks to make the weapon in the hours after darkness, but only moments to use it. The man was slow to die and tried to strangle her, but she dug the blade in again and again until the floor was awash with blood.
Ten minutes later she unlocked the side gate with the man’s keys and walked through into the snowy night, wearing his bloodied uniform and coat and fur hat, carrying his pistol, taking the narrow road through the birch forest. The sentry in the nearest watchtower hadn’t even bothered to challenge her.
Within four hours, frozen and exhausted, Anna Khorev finally reached the border of Finland.
• • •
She spoke with Massey for almost an hour.
He sat listening quietly, nodding in understanding when she faltered or the pain of her memories became too much and she had to break off.
Every now and then she saw the shocked reaction on his face as she told him her story, the look in his eyes that was no longer detached, as if he suddenly understood the enormity of her pain and why she had killed as she had.
When she finally finished, Massey sat back and looked at her with compassion, and she knew he believed she was telling him the truth.
There would be other men who would want to speak with her, he said. Other questions to be asked, and maybe she would have to tell her story again, but for now she was to rest and try to build up her strength. The following day they would move her to a private hospital in Helsinki. He would do his best to help her.
Anna watched him go and then she was left alone in the small white room. Somewhere off in the distance she could hear a radio playing cheerful dance music, and it made her think of another time and another place, the first night Ivan Khorev had taken her dancing on the banks of the Moscow River, and in the corridor she heard laughing voices echo beyond the room. She felt the grief suddenly flood in on her like a tidal wave, and she tried not to cry.