see what they've done to Kharkov railway station—a mountain of wreckage which will
take weeks to clear... "
He was not at all optimistic about the immediate prospects of the Russian offensive; he thought it had come near the end of its tether, and after three months' continuous fighting the Russian soldiers were physically exhausted. "As it is," he said, "we are living mostly on 'trophy' food; with so few roads, our supplies have gone to pot. Not that this selection is bad," he added, pointing at the table and pouring me out a glass of reasonably good mousseux. The wine was French or Hungarian, the sardines Portuguese; there were chocolates from Vienna and pickled lemons, probably from Italy. "At Valuiki," he said,
"we captured an enormous food dump. My men and I just stacked a couple of tons into planes, and brought it here."
"The Ukrainian Government," he said, "arrived in Kharkov yesterday. They intend to set up the Ukrainian capital here, till Kiev is liberated." Then he made a face. "Don't know that it's a good idea," he added. "Maybe they're in too great a hurry..."
After sampling some of this produce of Hitler's New Order, we drove on. Kharkov
seemed endless; we drove for miles through suburban and town areas before we reached the centre of the city, marked by the high tower of an onion-domed church, and, further to the left, high up on the hill, by an agglomeration of fourteen- or sixteen-storey skyscrapers built during a brief constructivist period in the late '20's. These were the skyscrapers of Dzerzhinsky Square. But, as we were to discover the next day, most of them had been burned out by the Germans before they left, and only two—which had
housed some of the central industrial administration of the Ukraine—were still intact, except that the Germans had mined them before leaving.
We were put up in a small well-built house in the residential and almost undamaged part of Sumskaya Street, the main street of Kharkov. The house was guarded by half-a-dozen tough soldiers with pistols and tommyguns. Kharkov was still considered far from safe as there might be many German spies and agents around. These soldiers belonged to
General Zaitsev's division, which had been the first to break into Kharkov, and were very pleased with themselves. The house, like most houses in Kharkov, had neither electricity nor water. We had to live by candle-light, and water was brought from somewhere in
pails.
There had been 900,000 people in Kharkov before the war, but when the war spread to
the Ukraine, and the refugees started pouring in from the west, this figure swelled to 1,200,000 or 1,300,000. Later, in October 1941, with the Germans approaching, the
evacuation of Kharkov began in real earnest. Most of the larger plants were more or less successfully evacuated, among them the great Tractor Plant, with nearly all its workers.
By the time the Germans came, some 700,000 people were left in the city. Now there
were only 350,000. What had happened to the rest?
According to the Russian authorities, the disappearance of half the population of October 1941 is accounted for as follows: it has been established that 120,000 people, mostly young people, had been deported as slaves to Germany; some 70,000 or 80,000 had died of hunger, cold and privation, especially during the terrible winter of 1941-2; some 30,000 had been killed by the Germans, among them some 16,000 Jews (men, women
and children) who had remained behind in Kharkov; the rest had fled to the villages.
Various checks I made in the next few days suggested that the figure for deaths from hunger, et cetera, was slightly, but not greatly, exaggerated; so too was that for non-Jews shot, but the figure for the Jews was correct. On the other hand, the figure for slave-labour deportations was, if anything, an under-estimate.
The next day the lime-trees and poplars in Sumskaya Street were white with hoar-frost.
Poplars! This was the Ukraine, the south, two-thirds of the way from Moscow to the sea.
Everywhere there were still German notice-boards: Parken Verboten, and this verboten and that verboten. The street signs were in German, too, and on one house was the ominous notice-board "Arbeitsbehörde Charkow". This was where they mobilised people to be sent to Germany.
In Dzerzhinsky Square, with its enormous burned-out or mined skyscrapers, there were large crowds of people; most of them were shabby, undernourished, haggard, and with a look of great nervous strain. Only the crowds of young boys looked normal; and they
were lively and talkative. But, looking at the adults, one could readily believe that many thousands had died of undernourishment—even here, in this rich part of the Ukraine.
These people in the streets of Kharkov were enormously talkative; one felt that all of them wanted to tell some story. I remember, for instance, a misshapen, very sick-looking little man. He said he was arrested soon after the Germans came; they kept him locked up at the International Hotel (now burned out) in this very square, and they kept him there, almost without food, for a fortnight. Then he was released. But it had been a harrowing experience; because every night he could hear people being taken away to be shot; many of them were communists who had been denounced to the Germans. He had been an
optician before the war; in the end, he got a job from the Germans in the big Kharkov electrical plant, which a big German concern had taken over; but since the Russians had evacuated all the machinery, the Germans had had to bring their own, and never
employed more than 2,500 workers there, as against 25,000 before the war. Once a day there was a hot meal, and the bread ration was 11 ounces. "The pay." he said, "was supposed to be one rouble seventy kopeks an hour, but at the end of a fortnight I went to collect my wages, and the German clerk handed me seventy-five roubles. When I
objected, the German said: 'There were taxes to deduct, and you can take it or leave it; and another word from you, and you'll get your face knocked in.' Finally I couldn't stand it any longer, and the Germans let me go, because I was a sick man." Later he made a meagre living by selling spectacles in the market.
It was clear that thousands of people had managed to keep body and soul together by
selling and buying in the black market; people with jobs, people without jobs—all had to do it. "If you had money," one woman said, "you could buy anything you wanted from the German soldiers. They had wrist-watches by the dozen. They'd take them off people in the street, and then sell them in the market." "And not only wrist-watches," another woman joined in, "In broad daylight my daughter was stopped by a German soldier; he had taken a fancy to her shoes, and ordered her to take them off. He sold them in the market, or sent them home." "Your daughter was lucky," said the little man, "or else she must be very ugly. They would often compel girls to follow them." Many of those standing around shouted that that was true, and, worse still, many girls were forced into army brothels; they'd just go and pick up the good-looking ones in a queue at the
Arbeitsamt. And, of course, there was now a lot of v.d. in the city...
Then people talked about the hangings. Public hangings. It was that which seemed to
have left the deepest impression of all. At the corner of Sumskaya and Dzerzhinsky
Square there was a large burned-out building which had been the Gestapo headquarters.
Now several women told excitedly how in November 1941 the population was
summoned to the square to hear a German announcement; and when a crowd had
gathered, several people inside the Gestapo building were thrown over the balconies, with ropes tied round their necks, and the other end tied to the balcony rail. That day many people were hanged in many parts of Kharkov. There were quite a lot of traitors, who had denounced these Reds to the Germans...
Two or three other women talked about how the children had become undisciplined and
demoralised. The schools had been closed, and little boys had to beg in the street, or else they'd have little handcarts and carry the German soldiers' kit, and luggage, and black-market packages, and earn a few roubles tha
t way. "Half the people," one pale-faced woman said, "expected their small children to work for themselves... Small children, hungry, having to fend for themselves; have you heard anything like it? Under Stalin children get the best of everything, but not under these German swine. And now a lot of them will be good-for-nothings, thieves and little hooligans. But then how could you help it, with bread costing 150 roubles a kilo in the black market?"
I then got into conversation with a man called Cherepakhin, a working-class type who claimed to have been in the Communist underground during the occupation, and told
many harrowing stories about the Gestapo. "It may be un-Marxist to say so," he said, "but the Germans are a bad lot—practically every one of them. If there are exceptions, I haven't come across any." But he had met some Italians in Kharkov, and they were really quite different from the Germans. They hated the Germans, and he was sure the Italians would soon get out of the war. "A lot of these Italians were really decent chaps," he said.
"I managed to get a set of guitar strings for one of them, and he asked me, on the quiet, to the house where he and a number of other Italians were living; and there they would
curse Hitler, and play the guitar and sing. They had little to eat, but they gave me some nice wine from a straw-covered bottle. Good chaps. But they were miserable, and they hadn't even any proper shoes, and suffered from the cold. I also talked to a lot of
Hungarians; and although a lot of them are thieves and black-marketeers, most of them were good fellows at heart, and hated the Germans.
"There was no love lost between the Germans and their allies," Cherepakhin said. "Only Germans were admitted into the principal restaurants in Kharkov—not their so-called
Allies."
He then told me how the Germans discriminated between the Russians and the
Ukrainians; many Ukrainians served in the local police—many of them were more or less forced into it. Somehow, the Germans preferred Ukrainians to Russians, though, in
reality, most of the Ukrainians hated them as much as the Russians did; even the
Ukrainian nationalists, who thought they'd have a wonderful time under the Germans,
were soon going to be disappointed.
I happened to talk to one of them in the street that day. He was an elderly man with a small red nose, and round face, and wore a shabby coat and frayed grey flannel trousers, and shoes that were split on the sides. He said he had taken a job on the town council, but had found it didn't pay. The Germans paid him only 400 roubles a month, and he had a wife and child to keep, and he couldn't live on that. So he took to black-marketing, too.
He would travel beyond Poltava, and bring bags of flour to Kharkov. As we passed a new picture of Stalin and another of Voroshilov stuck up on a bombed wall, he gave a faint shrug. "The Germans certainly made a mess of things," he said. "They promised us a New Europe, but then everything went wrong." Maybe, he said, the Germans would
come back, but that would no longer do any good to anybody. They'd missed their
chance. Even this little collaborator had received mighty little satisfaction from the Germans... He had wanted one of his brothers in France and another in Yugoslavia to
"come home" to Kharkov, but now it was useless.
Of course, there were people, especially of the artisan and shopkeeper class who, without being "unpatriotic", had tried to adapt themselves as best they could to the German occupation.
One such citizen was the lady barber who used to come in the mornings to shave us and the Red Army officers living in the same house. With her came her "assistant", a pretty boy of fifteen with blue eyes and long eyelashes. He was much more anti-German than
she was. He told the familiar story of how the Germans used to hang people from
balconies; and one day he saw—this was early in the Occupation—how they marched
fifteen Red Navy sailors through the streets. Hitler had said, the boy declared, that Bolshevik sailors were not to be shot, but drowned. They were manacled, and as they
were being led along, there were crowds of people on either side of the street, weeping.
The sailors sang the song of the Black Sea Fleet, Raskinulos' more shiroko. And still weeping, people joined in the song. "The Germans," the boy said, "took them handcuffed to the river, and there they drowned them. I didn't see it myself, but others told me... "
"The kids in Kharkov," the boy went on, "used to sing a song, and the Germans got furious whenever they heard it—
Doloi tserkov, doloi khram,
Doloi Hitlera trista gram,
Davai kluby i kino
Davai stalinskoye kilo.
[To hell with the church,
To hell with the cathedral,
To hell with Hitler's 300 grammes;
Let's have workers' clubs and cinemas,
And Stalin's kilogram (of bread).]
He also told me how they took 16,000 Jews, kids and grandmothers and all, to the brick-works outside the town and there after a fortnight in a camp, they killed the lot; they also sent thousands and thousands of people to Germany—pushed them into railway carriages like a lot of cattle.
The buxom young lady barber, with rouge, lipstick, manicure and perm, and now wearing a red beret and a white overall, admitted that she had lived better than most people under the Occupation. She had worked in a barber's shop near the main railway station, paying fifty per cent of the takings to her Ukrainian boss. It was a small place, but very busy.
The boss was a good man; she didn't know what he was doing now. The barber's shop
had been destroyed the week before, along with the railway station and all the
surrounding buildings. She was as talkative as barbers are. "Germans or no Germans,"
she said, "one's got to live. With a ration of 11 ounces of bread, you just couldn't do it.
I've got a child of four, and my husband has been away for over three years. And the prices in the market were just awful—130 or 150 roubles a kilo of bread. You should
have seen how happy people were last May, when they thought the Red Army was
returning. But it didn't, and I had to go on with my job in the barber's shop. A lot of the Germans, I must say, were quite nice people. There was a major who, for a long time, used to come in for a shave every day, and once or twice I cut him slightly, and I'd say:
'Ach, entschuldigen sie bitte, Herr Major!' and he'd laugh and say: 'Ach, das tut nichts.'
And the German officers certainly tipped very well. The face-cream, the eau de Cologne and the powder we'd buy from German soldiers in the black market... Of course, awful things used to happen. All those hangings; made one ill for days... And it was awful about the Jews, too. They'd drive them in an endless procession through the streets, many of them pushing wheelbarrows or prams with babies inside, and they'd all weep and wail. I could understand their wanting to send the Jews away somewhere—but to kill them all in this awful way, that was going a bit far, don't you think?" Then she said: "Yes, the Germans can be very cruel people. But some were nice. And some of the officers were
quite crazy about our women; positively sentimental. .. But then our women are so much more attractive than German women. And these German women were certainly bitches.
They behaved as if the place belonged to them. There were hundreds of them here. The best flats were commandeered for German families, and they and some Ukrainians would open shops and restaurants... If any Russian had a decent flat, he was sure to be thrown out..."
I also heard something of the tragi-comedy of the Ukrainian nationalists. When the
Germans first came to Kharkov, a bunch of Ukrainian nationalists started a newspaper called Nova Ukraina. On the face of it, there wasn't a single known person among the contributors; they wrote under pseudonyms. The principal writer signed "Petro
Sagaidashny"—the name of an old Ukrainian hero. He was head of a self-appointed Ukrainian Propaganda Department, and, for a short time, the Germans
patronised these people. But two months later, several of the ringleaders were shot by the Germans
themselves. To the survivors the Germans made it quite clear that they were the bosses.
This was rubbed in in a thousand different ways: for example, all sign-posts and street-names were written in German first and only then (and not always) in Ukrainian.
Although an Ukrainian operetta was performed at the theatre the programmes were
printed in German only.
A professor of the Kharkov Technical Institute, Kramarenko, who became burgomaster
of one of the Kharkov districts, at first conducted a strong pro-German campaign; he made speeches in favour of developing a "Ukrainian national consciousness". Then, when he and his friends realised that the Germans were not interested in Ukrainian
independence or autonomy, they rebelled; Kramarenko was dismissed from his post and
shot soon afterwards.
Lubchenko and other Ukrainian intellectuals who ran the Nova Ukraina paper also soon realised that they were kidding themselves; it was the last straw when, in March 1942, the Germans ordered them to remove from the front page of the paper the Herman's Trident, a token of Ukrainian autonomy or independence. For even if Rosenberg's Ostministerium was sympathetic to such Ukrainian ambitions, it had very little influence either with the military authorities in the Eastern Ukraine, or with Erich Koch in the Western and
Central Ukraine; since the beginning of 1942, when the Ukraine began to be treated first and foremost as a reservoir of slave labour, there could no longer be any doubt about dominant German attitude to the Ukraine.
The fact that, in some of the surviving elementary schools pictures were displayed not only of Hitler but also of "Hetman" Petlura, who had been assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1928, could be considered no more than a piece of primitive anti-semitic propaganda.
It did not imply any promise of Ukrainian autonomy or independence.
To the German Army, the Ukraine was colonial territory in which the position of
Ukrainian adolescents, who eked out a meagre living by carrying the Germans' luggage, was rather like that of young Arabs in Algiers in the heyday of French colonialism. The very young, who had benefited most from the Soviet régime, were among the most
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