In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  The sky is turning a hot red, the croaking of the frogs is deafening. He talks about old Warsaw. ‘Today Warsaw is a monocultural city, which is some people's ideal. But before 1939 it was a typically multicultural society. Those were the city's most productive years. We lost that multi-cultural character during the war; along with all the rest; that was one of the greatest losses for this city, and for this country.’

  By August 1944, Matwin was a lieutenant in the Red Army. He witnessed the second great uprising in Warsaw from close up; this time the revolt was led by Polish partisans and was fought out all over the city. ‘We were right outside Warsaw, on the other bank of the Vistula, but we couldn't do a thing.’ He still finds it hard to talk about it. ‘I don't think I'm the only one. Almost every Pole here, looking back on things, has mixed emotions about it. It was a bitter tragedy. It cost us a large part of the city, and tens of thousands of lives. They fought like tigers all over town, using the strangest weapons. The girls in particular did the craziest things. Almost all of them were killed. The whole thing was very badly planned.’

  But would it not have been easy for the Red Army to intervene? Wasn't that what the partisans were waiting for? So why were they left to their fate?

  Matwin sighs deeply. ‘There's a romantic version of the uprising, the one that's always told, the one they've made movies about. And there's also a political version. The Russians should have intervened, even if only for humanitarian reasons. But it would have been highly inconvenient for them, both politically and strategically. The uprising, in fact, was also aimed at them. There was absolutely no contact beforehand between the rebels and us, the Polish officers in the advancing Red Army. That's very strange, don't you think? When your allies are on their way, and you're planning a revolt, you try to coordinate things, don't you? But all the instructions came from the Polish government in exile, far away in London. What they wanted, we thought, was to establish a bridgehead of their own in Warsaw, against the Russians. That's what it was about.’

  In the municipal museum I had seen a few of the weapons used by the rebels: a club made from a steel spring, a long chain with a heavy bolt at one end, home-made crow's feet for puncturing tyres. There was also a transmitter dropped by the RAF. Beside it, pencilled farewell letters from partisans who knew, after two endless months, that the end was near.

  ‘Was it really impossible for the army to do anything to help Warsaw's partisans?’ I ask again. We fall silent. Then Matwin says: ‘If the Soviets had really wanted to, they could have done it. Sure. Those boys and girls in Warsaw were unbelievably brave. But politics was the schweinerei.’

  In the end, the SS and the Wehrmacht killed almost quarter of a million of Warsaw's inhabitants during the uprising. Only five months later, on 17 January, 1945, did the Soviets cross the river and enter the abandoned ruins of the city. Of the thirty-five million Poles, more than six million – half of them Jews – did not survive the war. Busy, cheerful Nalewki Street, along with hundreds of others, was wiped off the face of the earth. Almost nothing of the city was left, except its name.

  Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

  Leningrad

  ON DISPLAY IN ST PETERSBURG'S MUNICIPAL MUSEUM IS THE THIN, light-blue diary of eleven-year-old Tanya Savitsyeva. The only entries for 1941–2 are these:

  Zyenya died, 28 December, 12.00 a.m. Grandmother died, 25 January, 1942, 3 p.m. Leka died, 17 March, 5 p.m. Uncle Vasya died, 13 April, 2 p.m. Uncle Aleksei, 10 May. Mama died, 13 May, 7.30 a.m. The Savitsyeva family is dead.

  Following page:‘They are all dead.’ Following page:‘I am here alone.’ Tanya was evacuated and died in an orphanage, in 1944.

  ‘I've lived in St Petersburg all my life,’ says Anna Smirnova. ‘I was twenty-one when it all started, on Sunday, 22 June, 1941. It was a beautiful day, and I remember how angry I was when I was awakened early that morning by the droning of whole swarms of planes. I wanted to sleep! After breakfast, we heard on the radio at noon that the war had begun. We weren't even surprised. We had talked about it a great deal, the Finnish war was already over, blackout drills had already been held. All the older people had been through a war before, and we all knew that we would experience one or more wars in the course of our lives. But this time my parents were terrified. My father said: ‘This is horrible. This is disgusting. This is death.’ He sensed it beforehand.

  ‘There was a huge run on the shops that same afternoon. Whenever anything happens, of course, Russians expect a food shortage, so everyone started stockpiling matches, salt, sugar, flour, things like that. And six weeks later there really was nothing left in the shops. The war was approaching fast. In July the air-raid sirens went off all the time, we didn't have any bomb shelters, so we crawled under a couple of stone archways in the garden. We had to help dig antitank trenches outside the city, thousands of people were out there with shovels. Meanwhile, at the theatre school, classes went on as usual.

  ‘On 8 September, the Germans reached the ring around our city, and the siege began. There were two million of us packed in there, closed off from everything else. You had to be in line at the bakery at 5 a.m., by 11.00 there was no bread left. It wasn't easy to walk around when you were starving, you had to drag yourself along by force of will. If possible, you kept all your clothes on in bed. You lay there like a big ball of rags, you forgot you even had a body. But, well, we were young Soviets, we had absolutely no doubt that we would be victorious. On the radio they said the whole war might last a year or two, but that the siege of Leningrad would be over soon. They kept saying that. And we believed it, what else could we do? No one told the truth. There were no newspapers, no letters arrived, all we had was the radio.

  ‘Excuse me if I become a little emotional, I don't talk about this very often.

  ‘The total lack of heat and water was the worst. Everyone who had a job tried to stay at work as much as possible, sometimes there was still a little heating there. The Marunsky theatre never closed, but the ballet dancers had to wear special costumes because it was so cold. There was no more transport. And that winter was so incredibly cold, it has only rarely been that cold.

  ‘I think that's what killed my father.

  ‘In mid-February 1942 the theatre school closed down and I was admitted to the hospital. I was so hungry I couldn't move any more. So my mother was given a package of dry bread, a little pork and some sugar. My sister fed that to me and got me out of the hospital. I started walking again, I was able to stand in line again for food.

  ‘That was my great stroke of luck. A few weeks later I ran into a student from my old school. “You're just the person I've been looking for!” he shouted. It seems they had set up a special theatre brigade, and their singer had fallen ill. My old schoolfriend had come back to the city from the front to look for a new one. “I'm completely worn out,” I told him. “We'll fix you up,” he said. And that's what they did. In April 1942 he took me to the front, and from then on I performed for the troops.

  ‘The theatre brigade saved my life, if only because they had food to eat. I was even able to save my mother and my sister by tucking away whatever I could for them. It was too late to help my father.

  'This is how it went.

  ‘It was in late 1941, six months after that Sunday when the war started. All our money was gone. It was incredibly cold in our room. He needed warmth and medicine, but there was nothing. He just died of the cold, right there in our room. That was on 5 January, 1942. It was the worst day of my life. Most people died in January and February, those were the worst months. My sister took his body on the sled, through the snow, as far as she could. She probably just left him on the street somewhere, she had no strength left either. That happened a lot back then. But she has never talked about it.’

  ‘It was the women who won the war, everyone knows that. Their lot was the heaviest to bear. The party bosses could leave the city and come back by plane. They had their own food flown in as well, we found out about that a few years ago. They told dramatic
stories about all their heroic hardships, but meanwhile they took good care of themselves. The common people couldn't do that. We wasted away, we were being shelled all the time. On Nevsky Prospect, next to the Crédit Lyonnais, you can still the blue lettering on the wall from back then: “This side of the street is the most dangerous during a bombardment.”

  ‘Stalin could easily have had the city evacuated. But he didn't. The only route out of the city was by car, along what we called “The Life Road”, across the ice of Lake Ladoga. A friend of ours was taken out of the city on that route when he was a young boy. The Germans fired on the convoys the whole time. But all he remembers is a glorious day, the sun was shining, and all around him the water sprayed up in cheerful fountains. You can imagine the kind of work those drivers did. They kept the city alive. In my memory, that gap in the siege was the start of the victory.

  ‘We performed at the front every day. Beneath those flimsy stage costumes we always felt like we were freezing to death. The show would start with the victory song. That was very popular then. In fact, the song itself dated from the time of the czars, but the composer had been sent to Siberia so the Soviets could claim it for themselves. After that came a couple of other songs, a sketch about a stupid German, I gave a rousing speech, another girl danced, and that was it.

  ‘The soldiers were crazy about us. For a moment, they were seeing something from the normal world, even though we lived in the same frozen trenches, under the same bombardments, with the same canisters under our head for a pillow. When we were in the city we went to plays and concerts to keep up our feeling of normalcy and self-respect. Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony had its premiere in Leningrad on 9 August, 1942, and it was dedicated to the suffering city. That was a remarkable event, none of us will ever forget it. Listen to that music again, and imagine how we listened to it, with our skinny bodies, in our tattered rags, we all stood there weeping. At the close we heard our artillery pounding along with the music. They had to keep the Nazis from shelling the concert hall.

  ‘People were really fantastic in those times. The Muscovites did all they could to escape, but the people of Leningrad were much more loyal. They stayed put. They planted cabbages and potatoes in the parade grounds and in the Summer Gardens, and made little kitchen plots wherever they could. While they waited impatiently for their beans and lettuces to come up, they ate leaves and grass, just to have some greens.

  ‘In early 1943 we heard about the liberation of Stalingrad. We were at the front, an officer came in with the news, it was just before a performance. We knew about the battle going on there, we were very nervous about it. Then came that report, and you should have heard the tumult it caused! All those worn-out soldiers at the front began cheering and singing, throwing their caps in the air, they almost blew the roof off the recreation hall!

  ‘After that, everything became easier to bear. There was more food, more hope. I fell in love with a naval officer. But still, it went on for another year. It was only on 27 January, 1944, after 900 days, that the siege was broken and the first regular Russian soldiers appeared in our streets. Every year on that day, friends and family still call to congratulate each other. About 650,000 people, a third of the city's population, didn't survive the siege.’

  ‘In May 1945 I was happy as a lark. Spring had come, I was just married, I was expecting a baby.

  ‘My life didn't change much after that. I remember the period of transition between Stalin and Khrushchev as a difficult, scary time. In late 1953, Beria, the big boss of the intelligence service, was suddenly executed, supposedly for being a British spy. When that happened everyone began realising that real changes were on their way.

  ‘After that, the Khrushchev era was quite pleasant. We were young, we were able to see Western films, the papers became more interesting. And after that this country simply became a huge mess. Gorbachev was a good man, but I think I'm the only one who would still say that these days. Today things are completely terrible. Everyone's a thief. The whole country has been milked dry. As a veteran, I always had a good pension. And I only had to pay half the rent for my flat. But it's become harder to make ends meet now, even for me.

  ‘I'm still in touch with a few of those student volunteers from back then. After the war we had a kind of club: drinking, poetry, lovers, marriages, prams. When you saw them later, it was impossible to imagine how these respectable artists and intellectuals had ever survived the front. But still, they did, they even received medals for it, they still have them in a drawer somewhere.’

  ‘We all thought another war would break out sometime during our lifetime. After all, we only went through one of them. Only in the last few years has that feeling begun to dwindle.’

  Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

  Moscow

  AT 3.30 A.M. ON 22 JUNE, 1941, OPERATION BARBAROSSA BEGAN. Germany rolled across the Soviet border with more than 3 million men, divided over almost 150 divisions, plus 750,000 horses, 600,000 trucks, more than 3,500 tanks, at least 7,000 pieces of heavy artillery and 1,800 aircraft.

  Stalin was caught completely off guard. He hid away in his dacha, sought comfort in the bottle, and tried to seduce the Germans into a new peace treaty, in exchange for the Baltic States and other territories. When that failed, he had the four most important commanders of the western Red Army shot for taking part in ‘a military conspiracy aimed against the Soviet Union’. Only two weeks later did he address the Russian people. He could not believe what was happening.

  The Soviet leader had systematically ignored every signal indicating an approaching German invasion: the warnings of his ambassador Ivan Mayski in London, the reports from his own intelligence services, the secret messages from Churchill. In May 1941, Russia's top agent in Tokyo, the German correspondent Richard Sorge, had predicted Operation Barbarossa almost down to the day. At the time, Stalin had shouted: ‘Tell him to stick it up his arse!’

  Twenty-five years later, when asked what had got into Stalin, Ivan Mayski replied: ‘Stalin was suspicious of everyone. The only person he trusted was Hitler.’

  The beginning of the German advance of June 1941 was every bit as spectacular as the western attack of May 1940. At Minsk, the Soviets lost fifteen divisions within the space of a few days. About 300,000 men were taken prisoner, 2,500 tanks were destroyed or captured. Moscow was massively bombed. The Germans advanced so quickly that they reached the Russian capital five months later. It was there that they ran into trouble: their supply lines were just too long. And because there was no chance of taking the Kremlin before winter set in, their attack was stranded. It was the first time that had happened. The rains came, tanks and trucks sank into the mud, the Soviet troops began to regroup, the temperature dropped to far below zero, and the German Army was stuck.

  Only then did it become clear how poorly this new German offensive had been planned. Napoleon's disastrous campaign of 1812 was described in detail in all the handbooks of military strategy, yet the Germans made precisely the same mistakes in 1941. They had only one scenario: a fast and easy victory. Their intelligence services consistently underestimated the capacities of the Red Army. The Germans were absolutely unaware of the existence of the new Soviet T-34 tank, probably the best tank in the world in 1941, until they were confronted with it on the field of battle. The path of the advance had been charted so badly that two German infantry units wandered unexpectedly into the enormous Pripyat swamps and became hopelessly bogged down. Hitler had refused to allow his soldiers to take winter equipment with them; after all, the whole expedition would be over before Christmas.

  By early December 1941, three quarters of all the German tanks had become mired in the mud, ice and snow. The exhausted soldiers in the front lines could see the flash of the artillery around the Kremlin, but could not move one step closer. The Germans dealt mercilessly with Russian farmers and partisans – often youthful Komsomol members. Two photographs of eighteen-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya made their way around the world. The first one was found on
the corpse of a German soldier: it had been taken just after her capture, she looked dignified and proud, aware of what was going to happen. The second photograph showed her frozen, ravaged body as it was found in the expanse of snow outside Moscow, tortured, hanged.

  For Stalin, there was only one real question: what was Tokyo going to do? For him, everything depended on the situation in the Far East. Japan was clearly occupied with establishing a new empire in East Asia, and so the only question was which country they would attack next: would it be Mongolia, or the Pacific? This state of uncertainty forced the Soviet Union to hold back a major part of the Red Army, to counter a possible attack from the east.

  It was here that agent Richard Sorge's espionage network played a decisive role. On 15 October, just as it seemed that Moscow would fall, a report came in from Sorge saying that Tokyo had made a final decision to concentrate on Singapore, Indochina and the United States. This time Stalin believed him. A few days later, during the festive parade to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution, his troops marched almost defiantly across Red Square and straight on to the front, just outside the city.

  Forty Siberian divisions were now dispatched hell for leather to Moscow, with troops specially trained and equipped for fighting under arctic conditions. They had warm white uniforms, thick fur-lined boots and fast skis. At twenty degrees below zero their T-34 tanks raced effortlessly through the snow. Atop their trucks were the strange-looking Katyusha rocket launchers that, with a gruesome howl, could fire more than a dozen 130-millimetre rockets at a time; the Germans soon began referring to them as ‘Stalin Organs’. In addition, these troops were fighting under the leadership of one of the outstanding generals of the Second World War, Georgi Zhukov. They deployed unobtrusively on the other side of Moscow, and began the counterattack on 6 December.