A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  The enemy fear being encircled. They don’t believe that their defence lines are strong, because their commanders keep deceiving them the whole time.

  Characteristics of our officers during this new phase: (1) Will; (2) Confidence; (3) Scorn towards the enemy; (4) Ability to fight using the force of tanks and artillery, the infantry being small in number; (5) Ability to save, to keep account of every cartridge and shell – a big war with poor reserves; (6) They have learned to hurry, but it isn’t their motto, it is just in everyone’s blood. They hurry to cross the rivers, because it is much quicker to use a branch than to wait for days on end for pontoons. The speed of pursuit matches the speed of the enemy’s retreat.

  Odessa was finally secured on 10 April. It had been garrisoned mainly by the Third Romanian Army. The Romanian occupation of the southwestern Ukraine was almost gentle in comparison to the German treatment of the population. Grossman entered with the liberators and looked around Peresyp, a district in Odessa.

  The day of the capture of Odessa. The port [is] empty. Puffs of smoke. Thunder of military vehicles and equipment pouring into the city. Crowds of people. Scorched corpses carried out of the Gestapo building. The charred corpse of a girl, with beautiful golden hair intact.

  Signs over Romanian canteens: ‘Entrance forbidden to Germans.’

  The first meeting of the Odessa OBKOM. The OBKOM Secretary has invited me to participate. This is the first time that I, not a member of the Party, have attended such a meeting.

  There is a lot of food – sugar, cakes, flour. The locals are cursing Romanians reluctantly, as if out of politeness.

  The prospect of the end of the war hastened the optimism of many civilians as well as Red Army soldiers. With the defeat of fascism, they told themselves, Stalin could disband the NKVD secret police and the Gulag camps. Grossman had already heard such talk in the trenches of Stalingrad, and it appears that he shared their hopes. But he now seems to have sensed that Stalinism would not change its spots.

  Odessa’s old men in the boulevard. Their fantastic talk about a complete reorganisation of Soviet government after the war.

  A poet, who had published under the Romanians a book of poetry [entitled] I Sing Today. Our conversation. He is an extremely unpleasant person. Suddenly I see his mother standing under the window outside. In her eyes there is a terrible fear for her son.

  Aisenshtadt Simon, the son of a famous rabbi from the little town of Ostrovets.7 A Russian girl had saved his life. She had been sheltering him in her room for more than a year. His story. Ghetto in Warsaw. The uprising. Poles had brought in the weapons. Polish Jews had to wear a white armband. Belgian and French Jews – a yellow one. Treblinka near Warsaw. The extermination camp for Jews. There was a chamber with moving knives, it was in a basement, under a banya. The bodies were cut into pieces and then burned. There were mountains of ashes, twenty to twenty-five metres high. In one place Jews had been chased into a pond full of acid. Their screams were so terrible that local peasants abandoned their homes. Fifty-eight thousand Odessa Jews were burned alive in Berezovka.8 Some of them were burned to death in railway carriages. Others were taken to a clearing where Germans poured petrol over them and them set them on fire.

  The account of OBKOM Secretary Ryasentsev. Domanevka was the place where Jews had been executed.9 The executions were carried out by the Ukrainian police. The chief of police in Domanevka had killed 12,000 people himself.

  In November 1942, Antonescu issued a law giving rights to Jews.10 Mass executions, which had gone on throughout 1942, halted. The chief of police in Domanevka and eight of his closest associates were arrested by Romanians, taken to Tiraspol11 and sent for trial. The court sentenced them to three months forced labour for their unlawful deeds towards the Jews.

  Outrage was caused by the public prosecutor [from Domanevka], a Russian lawyer from Odessa, who killed eight or nine people a day for amusement. This was called ‘going shooting’. They used to kill people in separate lots. Children were thrown alive into dry moats with straw burning on the bottom.

  Grossman having his boots cleaned in the streets of Odessa, April 1944. The bootblack was cut out of the shot for political reasons.

  By the time Antonescu’s order was published, there were about 380 Odessa Jews left in Domanevka and forty children in a nursery. They are still alive, have no clothes or shoes. The total number of Odessa Jews executed in Domanevka was about 90,000. Those who survived received aid from the Jewish committee in Romania. Romanian Jews were executed, too, along with Jews from Odessa. They had been tricked into going to Domanevka. This was how one of the richest Romanian millionaires was executed. He was brought to Domanevka under the pretext of organising the excavation and exploitation of the local ceramic clay. There were three Jews who participated in the torture and executions. They have been arrested.

  In Odessa, they had rounded up Jews and let them go home. Then, on 10 January 1942, they herded them into a ghetto in Slobodka. It was very cold, and when they were being driven from the ghetto to the trains, there remained hundreds of corpses of old people, children and women lying around in the streets.

  Having discovered that so many people he had known were now dead, Grossman had a contrary experience that spring, not far from Berdichev. He visited a tank brigade of the 1st Ukrainian Front, which was refitting at Vinnitsa, where Hitler’s headquarters, code-named Wehrwolf, had been based. He had dinner with the brigade commander, ‘a short, calm and good-natured man’, as Ortenberg described him in this account. ‘During dinner, when talking of dates and places of battles, Grossman realised that this was the very same Babadzhanyan who had commanded the 395th Regiment, and whom he had made the hero of his novel [The People Immortal]. “Yes, I was there,” confirmed Babadzhanyan. “But you killed me.”

  “I killed you,” Grossman answered, “but I can resurrect you, too.”’

  With the tank commander Colonel Babadzhanyan, Grossman’s hero who later crushed the Hungarian rising in 1956.

  1 The UPA was the Ukrainska povstanska armiia, or Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an extreme nationalist and anti-communist organisation which had collaborated with the Germans, but also fought them when the Ukraine was treated as ruthlessly by the Nazis as were other areas of the occupied territories.

  2 The YAZ 210G was the Red Army’s workhorse truck, a five-ton, canopied six-wheeler. Soviet drivers preferred American Lend-Lease vehicles. Red Army tank drivers, on the other hand, hated the American Grant which, being petrol-driven, was more likely to catch fire when hit than the diesel-engined T-34.

  3 A standard issue of ammunition was increased by 50 per cent during an advance because resupply became far more unpredictable than when stationary in defence.

  4 On 11 March 1944, detachments of Bogdanov’s 2nd Tank Army and Kravchenko’s 6th Tank Army had seized bridgeheads across the southern Bug.

  5 This was the 16th Panzergrenadier Division commanded by Major-General Günther von Manteuffel, and reconstituted as the 116th Panzer Division later.

  7 A town about 270 kilometres north of Odessa.

  8 Berezovka (or Berozovka) is about eighty kilometres north of Odessa on the railway line to Cherkassy and Nikolayev.

  9 Domanevka is another forty kilometres north-north-east of Berezovka.

  10 Marshal Ion Antonescu, the anti-communist military dictator of Romania, did not share his ally’s anti-Semitism. The Romanian authorities were granted a semi-autonomous military command of the Odessa region by the Nazi government.

  11 Tiraspol is a large town on the River Dnestr inside Moldovia, which the Romanians had reclaimed after losing it to Stalin in 1940. It was reintegrated into the Soviet Union as soon as the Red Army reoccupied it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Operation Bagration

  After the complete liberation of Leningrad and the rapid reconquest of the Ukraine, Stalin consulted with his Stavka advisers. They consisted of Zhukov, the deputy supreme commander; Vasilevsky, the chief of the general staff; his deputy
, General Antonov;1 and General Shtemenko,2 the chief of operations. In late April, the front commanders were allowed to consolidate their positions and go on to the defensive while the operational plan was decided. By the end of April, Stalin had chosen Belorussia for the next major blow. A success there would provide them with an intermediate position ready to strike towards Berlin early the following year.

  After the defeated Germans in the south were thrown back into Romania, Grossman was transferred northwards to the eastern border of Belorussia, the last major area of Soviet territory still under Nazi occupation. He found himself close to where he had started the war less than three years before. Eastern Belorussia was now to provide the start line for the most ambitious operation in the Nazi-Soviet conflict.

  The Stavka had just been informed by the Americans and British that Operation Overlord would take place at the end of May. Planning to attack the great Belorussian bulge went ahead under conditions of total secrecy. Apart from Stalin, only five men were privy to the plan. They knew that they had to mislead the Germans about the axis of attack. The tank armies in the south were kept there and grouped together to suggest the preparation of another massive blow south of the Pripet marshes. Radio silence was also imposed on the three Ukrainian Fronts to suggest an imminent attack and rumours were spread of a naval landing on the Black Sea coast of Romania. The Germans fell for the diversion. They reinforced the southern sectors, especially around Lvov.

  The Soviet plan involving 1,250,000 men was finalised on 20 May. Meanwhile, newly reinforced tank formations were secretly moved to the eastern border of Belorussia. Stalin himself chose the operational code name of ‘Bagration’ in honour of the great Georgian general who had been mortally wounded at Borodino. Rokossovsky, a Pole who been arrested before the war and tortured by Beria’s NKVD, had dared to stand up to Stalin in a furious argument over the first phase, which involved flanking attacks via Vitebsk and Bobruisk on the two flanks of the ‘Belorussian Balcony’ to encircle Minsk. Both Molotov and Malenkov tried to persuade Rokossovsky not to disagree with the vozhd, the boss. ‘Do you know who you are arguing with?’ they said. But Stalin respected Rokossovsky’s courage and accepted his point.

  The Western allies landed in Normandy on 6 June, while the Red Army waited impatiently for new equipment and reinforcements to arrive on a severely overtaxed railway system. Grossman noted the reaction to events in Normandy.

  On the subject of the Second Front. Great enthusiasm on the first day. Spontaneous meetings, shooting, saluting, then a sharp decrease of interest.

  A trait of character: one man said when he was on a train and learned about the attack by the Allies: ‘Well, probably they won’t even detrain us now.’

  Few soldiers, or even officers, ever had a chance to discover anything about life beyond their own unit, so an outsider like Grossman was bombarded with questions.

  Those most often asked by officers and soldiers are on international matters, and they are very numerous. They include the Second Front, Japan, Turkey, Iran, and hundreds of other issues. Questions about internal affairs are less numerous. Asking their questions, people apparently want to find out about the duration and course of the war.

  Grossman joined General Batov’s 65th Army, part of Marshal Rokossovsky’s First Belorussian Front, in time for the great offensive. After several delays, it finally began on 22 June, the third anniversary of the Nazi invasion. Two days later, three of Rokossovsky’s armies – Gorbatov’s 3rd Army, Romanenko’s 48th and Batov’s 65th – emerged from the boggy forests on the northern edge of the Pripet marshes to attack the German Ninth Army round Bobruisk on the River Beresina. On 27 June, the German defenders – some 5,000 men from the 383rd Infantry Division – managed to fight off the first attempt to storm the town. Then they found that they were surrounded. Led by their commander, General Hamann,3 they tried to fight their way out of the north side of the city, but were cut off by Gorbatov’s 3rd Army. Grossman, describing the scenes he encountered in Bobruisk, was unlike most Soviet journalists who concentrated on extolling the collective strength of the Red Army. He was always interested in the individual, even amid the dehumanised carnage of the battlefield.

  Sometimes you are so shaken by what you’ve seen, blood rushes from your heart, and you know that the terrible sight that your eyes have just taken in is going to haunt you and lie heavily on your soul all your life. It is strange that when you sit down to write about it, you don’t find enough room for it on paper. You write about a tank corps, about heavy artillery, but suddenly remember how bees were swarming in a burning village, and a barefooted old Belorussian climbed out of a little trench where he was hiding from shells and took the swarm off a branch, how soldiers were looking at him, and, my God, one can read so much in their thoughtful, melancholy eyes. In these little things exists the soul of the people and our war with its suffering and its victories . . .

  How [were we] to find our old Stalingrad acquaintances4 amid this dust and smoke, roar of engines, clatter of tank tracks and self-propelled guns and the squeaking of long columns of carts moving west, and a flow of barefooted children and women wearing white kerchiefs, moving east, back home? Some kind people advised us to look for a well-known feature of this division in order to avoid unnecessary stops and enquiries. This was a camel called Kuznechik [Grasshopper] in the supply unit of its artillery regiment. This camel, who came from Kazakhstan, has come all the way from Stalingrad to the Beresina. Liaison officers usually look for Kuznechik in the supply unit and do not need other enquiries to find the headquarters which is on the move day and night. We took this unusual advice as a joke and moved on.

  The first thing we see when we return to the dust and thundering of the main road is a brown camel pulling a cart. He is almost bald, having lost his hair. It proves to be the famous Kuznechik. A crowd of captured Germans is moving in the opposite direction. The camel turns his ugly head towards them, his lower lip turned down with a look of disdain. It is probably the unusual colour of the prisoners’ unforms or their unusual smell that have caught his attention. The driver [of the cart] says to the soldiers escorting the prisoners, in a businesslike way: ‘Give these Germans to us here. Kuznechik is going to eat them now!’ And presently we learn this camel’s biography. He hides in craters from shells and bombs if there’s a bombardment. He has already earned three wound-stripes and the medal ‘For the Defence of Stalingrad’. The commander of the artillery regiment, Kapramanyan, has promised the driver a decoration if he reaches Berlin with Kuznechik.5 We followed the route indicated by Kuznechik and found the division.

  I didn’t find many of my old acquaintances in Gurtiev’s division, whom I remembered well from our brief encounters. Gurtiev himself was killed in the fighting for Orel when a shell exploded at the observation post. He protected General Gorbatov with his body. Splashes of this soldier-general’s blood were found on Gorbatov’s cap.

  When we entered Bobruisk some buildings in it were ablaze and others lay in ruins. To Bobruisk led the road of revenge! With difficulty, our car finds its way amid scorched and distorted German tanks and self-propelled guns. Men are walking over German corpses. Corpses, hundreds and thousands of them, pave the road, lie in ditches, under the pines, in the green barley. In some places, vehicles have to drive over the corpses, so densely they lie upon the ground. People are busy all the time burying them, but they are so many that this work cannot be done in just one day. And the day is exhaustingly hot, still, and people walk and drive pressing handkerchiefs to their noses. A cauldron of death was boiling here, where the revenge was carried out – a ruthless, terrible revenge over those who hadn’t surrendered their arms and tried to break out to the west.

  A German soldier wounded in the legs is sitting on a low sandy bank of the Beresina by the route into the burning and destroyed Bobruisk. He raises his head and looks up at the tank columns moving across the bridge, at the artillery. A Red Army soldier comes up to him, takes some water from the river in a tin and give
s it to him to drink. I couldn’t help thinking, what would this German have done in the summer of 1941, when panzer columns of their troops were moving east across this bridge, if he had seen one of our soldiers with wounded legs sitting here on the sandy bank.

  Grossman was allowed to interview captured German generals. Lieutenant General von Lützov, the commander of XXXV Army Corps, was a fifty-two-year-old Prussian, who had been captured near Bobruisk in another of the encirclements.6 According to most accounts, he had collapsed under the strain of defending an impossible postion while Hitler refused requests to retreat.

  Leutnant-General [sic] Lützov does not praise our army particularly highly. The soldiers are devoid of initiative. When they have no leader on the battlefield they do not know what to do. The artillery is strong. The [Soviet] air force drops bombs with no aim whatsoever.

  Lützov was complaining about his total lack of freedom of action. For example, he needed permission from army headquarters to leave a position, the army needed permission from the headquarters of the army group, and the army group needed that of the general staff headquarters.7 Lützov received permission to retreat with XXXV Army Corps only when the ring of encirclement had already been closed.

  SS [sic] General Heyne about himself: ‘I’m a Frontschwein.’8

  Most of the German generals, officers and soldiers captured during Operation Bagration were forced to march through Moscow in a victory parade on 17 July. Soviet propaganda had been so exaggerated that many Russian children had expected to see ravening beasts, not defeated soldiers. In any case, it underlined the importance of this massive German defeat in which the Wehrmacht lost around a third of a million men, an even greater loss than at Stalingrad.