A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  ód – the Polish Manchester. Fifteen thousand tailors had been sewing clothes there for the German Army. They were given four hundred grams of bread every day and nine hundred grams of sugar per month. At that time, people in the Warsaw ghetto were given eighty grams of bread per day.

  Genicksschuss – bullet in the back of the head.13

  Religious belief at the ghetto had decreased dramatically; in fact, Jewish workers aren’t religious in general. Biebow used to send a lot of vitamins to the ghetto. Rumkowsky’s assistant, the Jew Gertler, was connected with the Gestapo, but did a lot of good. He was a very kind man, and people loved him a lot.

  When Gertler came to power and the Germans began to show him a lot of respect, Rumkowsky began to hate him terribly.

  The hospital in the ghetto produced awe in doctors from Europe. A professor once said: ‘I haven’t seen such a clinic even in Berlin.’ Heroic death of Doctor Weisskopf at the ód ghetto – he had tried to bite through Bibach’s throat.

  The uprising at the ód; ghetto was headed by Kloppfisch, an engineer from ód.

  ód and Pozna were the two major cities of the Warthegau, the Nazi annexation of western Poland named after the River Warthe. Hitler appointed Arthur Greiser as the gauleiter. More than 70,000 Poles were killed during the process of ethnic cleansing to make way for ethnic German settlers. Hundreds of thousands more went to labour and concentration camps. After the Jews, the Poles lost the highest proportion of their population during the Second World War, even more than the Soviet Union.

  The Germans had forced all Polish peasants to leave their houses, took away their land, livestock, household utensils, made them live in huts and forced them to work as farm labourers. The Germans were mostly local, but some of them (160,000) had come from the Ukraine. The children of Polish peasants did not go to school. Children had to work from the age of twelve. Churches were closed. Only one was left out of twenty. The others were turned into warehouses. Farmhands were paid twenty marks per week and given food. Children were paid six marks per month. A German peasant had the right to keep for himself enough produce to feed his family.

  One Polish peasant was sent to Dachau because he had said to his German neighbour even before the Germans arrived [in September 1939]: ‘Why do you speak German? You aren’t in Berlin.’ Before the war, Nazis used to get together for [Nazi] Party meetings, under the pretext of praying.

  German [settlers] came in two waves – one in 1941, the other in 1944. Germans sold bread to the Poles illicitly, five marks for a kilo, wheat flour at twenty-five marks per kilo, and a kilo of pork fat cost two hundred marks. Thousands of Polish teachers, doctors, lawyers and Catholic priests were taken to Dachau and killed.

  ‘The Germans called our region the “Warthegau”. They forbade farmhands to move anywhere. They were slaves.’

  Poles were forbidden to enter shops, parks and gardens. They could not travel by tram on Sundays, and by motor vehicle all week.

  Bauerführer14 Schwandt had three male farmhands and three female. He was a huge fat man, and paid his farmhands nothing. Before the war, he had a bar and a grocer’s store. He had four Morgens [acres] before the war, and now he has fifty.

  There was a commission that checked the fulfilment of obligatory supplies of produce by German [farmers]. Poles weren’t given vodka, but Germans were allowed it on holidays. Poles would be sentenced to three months in prison for using a lighter fuelled with petrol.

  Some Germans didn’t believe that the Russians would come, and they made fun of those who made big carts to take away their belongings. They didn’t believe it until the last day.

  The [Red Army] infantry is travelling in carriages, coaches, cabriolets, shining with polish and glass. The guys are smoking makhorka, eating and drinking, playing cards. Carts in supply trains are decorated with carpets, cart drivers are sitting on feather beds. Soldiers don’t eat army food any more. There’s pork, turkey, chicken. There are some rounded faces with pink cheeks in the infantry now, this has had never happened before.15

  German civilians caught out by our tanks are now going back. They get beaten up [on the way]. People unharness their horses. Poles are robbing them. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked. They answered in Russian: ‘To Russia.’ Here, there are five kinds of Germans: those from the Black Sea, from the Balkans, from the Baltic countries, Volksdeutsche and Reichsdeutsche.16

  Grossman soon found that the behaviour of Red Army troops changed on foreign soil. He still tried to idealise front-line troops, while putting all the blame on rear units, such as supply and transport. In fact, the tank troops whom he so idealised were often the worst looters and rapists.

  The front-line soldiers advance by day and night in fire, holy and pure. The rear soldiers who follow them rape, drink, loot and rob. Two hundred and fifty of our girls were working at the Focke-Wulf plant. Germans had brought them from Voroshilovgrad, Kharkov and Kiev. According to the chief of the army political department, these girls have no clothes, are lice-infested and swollen from hunger. And according to what a man from the army newspaper said, these girls had been clean and well dressed, until our soldiers came and robbed them blind and took their watches. Liberated Soviet girls often complain about being raped by our soldiers. One girl said to me, crying: ‘He was an old man, older than my father.’

  1 The Panzerfaust was a shoulder-launched rocket propelled grenade produced in huge quantities at the end of the war by the Nazi war industry as a cheap anti-tank weapon.

  2 Grossman may have been referring to the Church of the Virgin’s Blood at 34 Leshno Street, the centre of Catholics of Jewish descent.

  3 They were not all Jewish ashes. The Nazis also used the ruins of the ghetto as an execution ground for Catholic Poles.

  4 He was a member of the National Council of the Polish Government in Exile.

  5 Lieutenant General Karl Litzmann was the German commander who died in 1915 while attempting to capture ód in the First World War. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite, the ‘Blue Max’.

  6 Volksdeutsche were ethnic Germans living outside the Reich. These were either members of the local German minority or, more likely, members of other German minorities brought in by the Nazi authorities to settle their new Gau, or Nazi district, the Warthegau, an area of north-west Poland, ethnically cleansed of Poles and annexed as part of the Reich. German commanders, such as General Guderian, were given large estates there by a grateful government.

  7 Out of a population of just under five million in 1939, the Warthegau contained 380,000 Jews and 325,000 ethnic Germans.

  8 Himmler gave the order to liquidate the ghetto on 10 June 1944, a few days after D-Day.

  9 Maslovitsy was also where Major Sharapovich discovered the German cache of valuable books which they had seized from the Turgenev Library in Paris. These were taken back to Moscow to the Lenin Library.

  10 Mordechai Chaim Rumkowsky was a controversial character to say the least. A bankrupt businessman appointed Judenälteste, or Jewish elder, by the Germans, he obtained complete power in the ghetto, through controlling the food supply. In an autocratic fashion, he not only ran the ghetto as if it were his private fiefdom, but decided who was to die and who was to survive, by selecting those for transports to Chelmno and later Auschwitz. Grossman’s account of the ghetto seems rather optimistic. Even within a year nearly 20 per cent of the population was dying from disease and starvation.

  11 Her name was Regine Weinberger.

  12 Rumkowsky’s ‘mistresses’ were young women threatened and forced into becoming his concubines.

  13 Literally ‘neck-shot’ in German, in practice to the base of the skull.

  14 A Bauerführer was the local Nazi Party leader and organiser of peasants and farmers.

  15 Red Army soldiers were looting from Polish farmers just as much as from German settlers.

  16 In this case, by Volksdeutsche he means ethnic Germans from Poland. Reichsdeutsche are, of course, those from pre-1939 German territory.

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  Into the Lair of the Fascist Beast

  During this part of the advance, Grossman remained attached to the headquarters of General Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army. Chuikov was furious when Marshal Zhukov, whom he detested for having claimed so much of the glory over Stalingrad, ordered his army to reduce the fortress city of Pozna, while the other armies rushed on towards the River Oder. Fighting in Pozna was the toughest street-fighting battle which the Red Army had faced since Stalingrad.

  The regimental commander complains: ‘Well, we broke into a street, and civilians rushed up to us shouting: “Our liberators! Our saviours!” At this moment, the Germans counter-attacked and pushed us back. Their self-propelled gun appeared. And I saw the same civilians rush out and start hugging Germans. Well, I gave the order to fire at them with canister.’

  Street fighting is going on. The quieter streets are filled with people. Ladies wearing fashionable hats, carrying bright handbags, are cutting pieces of meat off dead horses lying on the pavement.

  Chuikov is organising the street fighting in Pozna. After Stalingrad, he is considered the top expert in street fighting. Theory: the essence of the battle of Stalingrad is that our infantry created a wedge between the force of German mechanical power and the weakness of German infantry. And now, circumstances have driven Academician1 Chuikov into a situation which he cannot avoid, into the same situation as at Stalingrad, but here in Pozna, it’s vice versa. He is furiously attacking the Germans in the streets of Pozna, with a huge mechanised force and little infantry. And the more numerous German infantry is stubbornly fighting its hopeless battle.

  Chuikov is sitting in a cold, brightly lit room on the first floor of a two-storey villa. A telephone is ringing on the table. Commanders of units report on the street fighting in Pozna. In the pauses between telephone calls and reports, Chuikov tells me about breaking the Germans defences in the area of Warsaw.

  ‘We had been studying the Germans’ daily timetable for a month. During the day, they left the first line of trenches, and returned to it at night. Before we began to advance, we kept sending messages on the radio the whole night, we were broadcasting music and dances, and made use of confusion, bringing all our forces up into front-line positions.

  ‘At eight thirty, the time when they usually left the first line, we fired a salvo from 250 guns. On the first day, we breached the first line. We heard on the radio how the commander of the Ninth Army was calling his divisions, getting no bloody answer. At the same time, we destroyed two panzer divisions which they had pulled up from the rear. On the whole, we did it the following way: an air raid, a barrage of fire, and then we advanced. There was a milky fog on that morning. We stopped them on the anvil of the first line and hit them with the hammer of our artillery. If we were an hour late, we would have been hitting an empty spot. And the Germans thought that we had been strategically exhausted. There were Landwehr and Volkssturm there.’2

  Chuikov listens to the telephone, reaches to look at the map and says: ‘Just a minute, I’ll put on my glasses.’ He reads the report, laughs happily and taps his orderly on the nose with his pencil. He says: ‘Marchenko’s right flank can already feel Glebov’s fire. There’s a fire overlap, soon there will be live communications, too.’ He shouts into the telephone: ‘If they try to break through to the west, let them into the open, and then squash them like mites, damn them.’

  Chuikov then continued his conversation with Grossman.

  ‘Soldiers are tired of being on the defensive. They are dying to finish the war. They limbered up for two or three days, and then began to advance thirty to fifty kilometres every day.

  ‘There’s a certain amount of looting going on: a tank is moving, and a piglet is sitting on its track guard. We’ve stopped feeding our men. Our food isn’t tasty enough for them any longer. Transport drivers are driving around in carriages, playing accordions, like in Makhno’s army.3

  ‘The fortress in Pozna . . . Our men were walking around on top of it, and Germans were shooting up at them [from inside]. Then sappers poured in one and a half barrels of kerosene, set it on fire, and the Germans sprang out like rats. And you know, what is the most surprising thing, with all our experience of war and our wonderful reconnaissance, we overlooked one trifle. We didn’t know that Pozna was a first-class fortress, one of the strongest in Europe. We thought it was just another town and wanted to take it off the march, and here we are.’

  Pozna did not finally fall until Chuikov gave orders to storm the fortress on 18 February, following nine days of heavy bombardment. By this time the beleaguered garrison was over two hundred kilometres from their own lines. Holes in the walls were blasted at point-blank range with 203mm howitzers, and flame-throwers and grenades were used to clear one room after another. On the night of 22 February, Major-General Ernst Gomell, the German commander, lay down on a swastika flag in his room and shot himself. The garrison surrendered.

  Grossman did not wait for the end of the siege. He appears to have followed forward units of the 8th Guards Army on their route into the German Reich. Despite his urge to idealise the ordinary Red Army soldier, he was forced to admit the horrors resulting from their compulsion to get drunk.

  The absurd death of Hero of the Soviet Union Colonel Gorelov, commander of a Guards tank brigade. At the beginning of February, he was sorting out a traffic standstill on the road a few kilometres from the German border, and was killed by drunken Red Army soldiers. Katukov4 had been very fond of Gorelov; when giving orders to him and Babadzhanyan, he called them by their first names: Volodya and Arno. This wasn’t the only example of bloody, drunken outrage.

  All Soviet citizens, soldiers and civilians alike, were struck by the change, the moment they crossed the German border. A number wondered at the perfect order and prosperity of the place and wondered why any of the inhabitants would have wanted to go off to invade Russia.

  Twilight. It is foggy and rainy. A smell of forest mould. Puddles on the road. Dark pine woods, fields, farmsteads, barns, houses with pointed roofs. A huge poster: ‘Soldier, here it is! The Lair of the Fascist Beast.’

  There is great charm in this landscape. Its small but very thick woods are beautiful, as well as the bluish-grey asphalt and clinker roads leading into them. And our artillery, self-propelled guns, and shabby staff trucks full of looted things, are moving on from Pozna.

  Grossman in Schwerin as it was sacked by the 8th Guards Army.

  A liberated [Russian] girl, Galya, telling me about the gallant characteristics of different representatives of the captured male international: ‘There are different rules for Frenchmen.’

  From across the pre-1939 German border, the road to Küstrin and Berlin, took them through the town of Schwerin. When Grossman arrived, he found the 8th Guards Army, which he had so admired at Stalingrad, looting and raping. After the war, Grossman admitted to his daughter that the Red Army ‘changed for the worse as soon as it crossed the [Soviet] border’.

  Everything is on fire. Looting is in full swing. Gekhman and I are given a house which has survived. Everything is untouched, the stove is still warm, there’s a kettle with warm water on it, the owners must have fled a very short time ago. The cupboards are full of stuff. I categorically forbid [those with me] to touch them. The [town] commandant turns up asking my permission to billet a colonel from the general staff here who has just arrived. Of course, I agree. The colonel is majestic. A good Russian face. All night, we hear noises coming from the room where the tired colonel is staying. He leaves in the morning without saying goodbye. We go to his room: chaos, the colonel has emptied the cupboards like a real looter.

  An old woman has thrown herself from a window of a burning building.

  We enter a house, there’s a puddle of blood on the floor and in it an old man, shot by the looters. There are cages with rabbits and pigeons in the empty yards. We open their doors to save them from the fire. Two dead parrots in their cage.

  Horror in the eyes of women and g
irls.

  At the [town] commandant’s office. A group of French prisoners of war complain that some Red Army soldiers have seized their watches, giving them one rouble for each watch.

  A German woman dressed in black, with dead lips, is speaking in a barely audible rustling voice. She has brought with her a teenage girl with black, velvety bruises on her neck and face, a swollen eye, with terrible bruises on her hands. This girl was raped by a soldier from the signals company with army headquarters. He is also here, pink-cheeked, fat-faced, sleepy. The commandant is interrogating him without much enthusiasm.

  Horrifying things are happening to German women. An educated German whose wife has received ‘new visitors’ – Red Army soldiers – is explaining with expressive gestures and broken Russian words, that she has already been raped by ten men today. The lady is present.

  Women’s screams are heard from open windows. A Jewish officer, whose whole family was killed by Germans, is billeted in the apartment of a Gestapo man who has escaped. The women and girls [left behind] are safe while he is there. When he leaves, they all cry and plead with him to stay.

  Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now. Tonight, some of them are hiding in our correspondents’ room. During the night, we are woken up by screams: one of the correspondents couldn’t resist the temptation. A noisy discussion ensues, then order is re-established.

  A story about a breast-feeding mother who was being raped in a barn. Her relatives came to the barn and asked her attackers to let her have a break, because the hungry baby was crying the whole time.

  It is light during the night, everything is ablaze.

  When Colonel Mamaev entered a German house, children of four and five stood up in silence and raised their hands.

  The liberation of German territory produced dramatic reversals of fortune. The prisoners and the slave labourers now looted from their former masters. Many young women sent back to Germany from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union had worked on farms and in domestic service, as well as in factories. Red Army soldiers had suffered far more in their prison camps than even the slave labourers.