Never had the world seen such a glorification of racial purity. Defending the purity of German blood was proclaimed a sacred mission. Yet never in all German history was there more mixing of blood than during the years of the Third Reich, with vast numbers of foreign slaves flooding German factories and villages.
Hitler believed that the state he had created, founded on unprecedented violence, would endure for a thousand years.
But the millstones of history were already at work. Everything of Hitler’s would be ground to dust: his ideas, his armies, his Reich, his party, his science and his pitiful arts, his field marshals and gauleiters, he himself and the future of Germany. None of Hitler’s failures proved more catastrophic than his success. None brought more suffering to mankind.
Everything Hitler proclaimed was overturned by the course of history. Not one of his promises was fulfilled. Everything he fought against grew stronger and put down deeper roots.
•
There is more than one path by which an individual can take their place on the stage of history and remain in the memory of mankind. Not everyone goes through the main door, following the path of genius, labour and reason. Some slip quietly through a half-open side entrance; others break in at night; others are simply swept onto the world stage by a wave of events.
The measure of a historical figure’s true greatness is their ability to divine and give expression to a central, though still barely visible, line of human development, a line that will determine the evolution of human society for generations to come. Someone with this ability is like an experienced swimmer; at first, they appear to be swimming against the current, but, as they swim on, it becomes clear that the opposing forces were mere eddies and backwaters. With perseverance, they get the better of these surface currents. Their own strength and the deepest, most powerful current then join together and the swimmer is able to move freely and powerfully.
Many years—and many miles—later, this current in turn comes to seem secondary. Another swimmer, another great figure appears, able to sense in the hidden depths the first stirrings of some powerful new movement.
A swimmer of this kind, able to distinguish between the false and the real, between surface eddies and the mainstream of history, is no mere splinter of wood. He is, of course, moved by the currents, but he decides for himself which to fight and which to follow. And with the passage of time it becomes clear to almost everyone that he has followed the truest and most important current.
The path followed by the blind madmen of history is very different.
Can we call someone a great man if he has not brought into people’s lives a single atom of good, a single atom of freedom and intelligence?
Can we call someone a great man if he has left behind him only ashes, ruins and congealed blood, only poverty and the stench of racism, only the graves of the countless children and old people he has killed?
Can we call someone a great man because his unusual intelligence, able to detect and co-opt every dark and reactionary force, proved as virulent and destructive as the bacteria of bubonic plague?
The twentieth century is a critical and dangerous time for humanity. It is time for intelligent people to renounce, once and for all, the thoughtless and sentimental habit of admiring a criminal if the scope of his criminality is vast enough, of admiring an arsonist if he sets fire not to a village hut but to capital cities, of tolerating a demagogue if he deceives not just an uneducated lad from a village but entire nations, of pardoning a murderer because he has killed not one individual but millions.
Such criminals must be destroyed like rabid wolves. We must remember them only with disgust and burning hatred. We must expose their darkness to the light of day.
And if the forces of darkness engender new Hitlers, playing on people’s basest and most backward instincts in order to further new criminal designs against humanity, let no one see in them any trait of grandeur or heroism.
A crime is a crime, and criminals do not cease to be criminals because their crimes are recorded in history and their names are remembered. A criminal remains a criminal; a murderer remains a murderer.
History’s only true heroes, the only true leaders of mankind are those who help to establish freedom, who see freedom as the greatest strength of an individual, a nation or a state, who fight for the equality, in all respects, of every individual, people and nation.
31
THE DAY began the same as every other day. Yardmen out in the square stirred up clouds of dust, sending them towards the pavement. Old women and small girls went out to queue for bread. In hospital, military and city canteens, sleepy cooks banged pans about on cold stoves, then squatted down by the warm ashes below, hoping to find an ember they could use to light an extra-large morning cigarette. Flies took lazily to the air; they had been sleeping on walls still hot from kitchen chimneys, and they were annoyed with the cooks for starting work so early.
A young woman with tangled hair, holding her nightshirt against her chest, flung open a window, smiling and screwing up her eyes as she looked out at the clear morning. Night-shift workers went by, oblivious to the morning chill, still deafened by the din of their workshops. Army truck drivers awoke, yawning and rubbing stiff hips and shoulders after spending the night in city yards, asleep in their vehicles. Cats mewed meekly at doors, asking to be allowed back inside after their night-time escapades.
Down by the river station thousands of people were waiting for a ferry to the east bank. Slowly and reluctantly they woke up, yawned, scratched themselves, ate a little dry bread, clattered teapots, looked suspiciously at their neighbours and felt in their pockets to check that everything important was still there: money, documents and ration cards for their journey. An old woman with a waxen face passed by, on her way to the cemetery; she went every Sunday, to visit her dead husband. Elderly fishermen with rods and crayfish pots made their way down to the river. In the hospitals, assistant nurses were carrying out white buckets and preparing bandages for the wounded.
The sun climbed higher. A woman in a blue housecoat was gluing a copy of Stalingrad Pravda to a wall. A group of actors had met up by the yellow stone lions outside the city theatre; their loud laughter was attracting the attention of passers-by. A cashier went into the cinema, about to start selling tickets for The Bright Path.46 First, though, she spoke to a cleaner and asked her to find the jug she had lent the day before to the usher, so that the usher could collect her ration of sunflower oil. Then they both complained about the director, who was being slow to pay them their salary and who had shamelessly, in front of the whole collective, made off with twenty litres of malted milk recently delivered to the canteen for a children’s matinee.
The entire, anxiety-filled city—now an army camp as much as a city—was taking a deep breath, getting ready for the day’s work.
A Stalgres engineer, slowly chewing a small piece of bread, bent down towards a turbine, listening to its even hum. His thin face and narrowed eyes looked calm and alert.
A smelter, a young woman, frowned as she looked through her safety glasses at the white whirlwind raging in an open-hearth furnace. Then she walked away a little, ran her hand over the drops of sweat on her forehead, took a small round mirror from the breast pocket of her canvas overalls, straightened a lock of blonde hair that had slipped out from beneath her red, soot-blackened kerchief, and laughed. Her severe, dark face was transformed; her eyes and her white teeth gleamed.
A dozen workers of different ages were setting up an armoured turret outside the Red October steelworks. When the massive object finally yielded to their efforts and settled into its assigned position, they all let out what seemed like a single protracted sigh. Their tense faces relaxed into a shared expression of satisfaction and relief. One of the older workers said to the man beside him, “Time for a smoke. Give me some of your baccy—it’s good and strong.”
Among the bushes not far away someone was shouting commands: “Fire position—edge of ravine! Machine
gun—forward!” As part of a training exercise, some newly recruited militiamen began to drag a heavy machine gun into position. Patches of sunlight dappled the dark tunics and jackets on their bent backs.
Two women were talking at the district Party committee building on the corner of Barrikadnaya and Klinskaya streets. One was the young Party secretary of a small printing press; the other, who had grey hair and a wrinkled face, was a member of the committee bureau. “Olga Grigorievna,” the former was saying quietly, “you say we need to mobilize people for defence work. Well, our printers haven’t needed any mobilizing. They’re doing all they can already. The night-shift workers are digging trenches during the day, and the day-shift workers during the night. They bring their own spades. There’s one worker, Savostyanova, whose husband’s at the front. She brings her little boy along with her. She gives him something to eat at the press and then takes him with her to the trenches. The poor boy’s scared stiff of air raids. He won’t stay at home on his own for anything in the world.”
Two pretty young women were sitting on a bench by the main door of a white four-storey building. One, the wife of the house manager, was darning a little girl’s dress; the other was knitting a sock. The former loved to gossip; the other wasn’t saying anything, but she was smiling and watching the speaker alertly, enjoying her stories.
“There’s nothing I don’t know,” the house manager’s wife was saying. “All their little games: who’s doing what, who’s using whom, who’s bedding whom. So, there on the first floor we have the Shaposhnikov family. The old grandma’s not so bad—I’ve got no complaints about her. It’s true she’s always criticizing my husband—nothing in the building’s ever quite good enough for her. All the same, she’s not a bad sort, even if she is full of prejudices. A woman from another age, I suppose. But as for her dear daughters—excuse me, but they beggar belief! Marusya, the eldest, works in children’s homes. You should see what comes out of her briefcase when she gets home in the evening—bread rings, pastries, sugar, little pots of real butter, things the likes of us haven’t seen for the last six months. Yes, she steals straight from the children’s mouths. Her husband ditched her. What do you expect—with a mug as ugly as hers? And her husband’s quite a man—works as an engineer in the Tractor Factory, eats in the bosses’ dining room and gets special rations. Naturally, the woman moved heaven and earth to get him back. And as for her young sister Zhenya . . . What men see in her I don’t know. Though she’s certainly a sharp dresser. She has her brassieres specially made for her by a woman who makes dresses for the wife of our NKVD boss. And the young lady simply doesn’t know shame! At times I want to tell her straight out, to say to her face, ‘Think I haven’t seen you out here, sitting on this bench being pawed by that colonel of yours?’ Some nights I’m on air defence watch, by the main entrance. I hear things that make me go inside and sit in the stairwell—anything not to have to hear more. And then there’s Vera, Marusya’s daughter. She’s as foul-mouthed as they come. You should have heard her cursing and swearing when she came home from school with the boys. Now she works in the hospital—probably servicing the lieutenants . . . And then, on the same floor, just opposite that lot, we’ve got the Meshcheryakovs. I can tell you for sure that they won’t be leaving Stalingrad. No, they can’t wait for the Germans to come! Their maid’s from a village. She asked me the other day, ‘What’s a regime?’ ‘What makes you ask?’ I say. ‘’Cos of the man I work for,’ she says. ‘Every time he looks at the newspaper, he says, “Yes, this really is the end of the regime!”’ But the Meshcheryakovs don’t do too badly for themselves as things are. Sugar, grains, oils and fats—they’re never short of good food.”47
The house manager’s wife continued unstoppably, ever confident that she knew the truth and unshakably certain that all human beings, without exception, are weak, dishonest and hypocritical.
People like her are can see only human vices and weaknesses. This makes it impossible for them to understand how the victory was won, who it was who performed such great deeds and endured such great suffering. Years later, when these world-shaking events have receded far into the past, people like her look back at those days and see only sombre burial mounds bearing witness to superhuman achievements. Then they come to think that everyone alive then was a hero, a spiritual giant. This noble but naive view of the past is no less misguided.
The German axe was raised high in the air, suspended not only over the city of Stalingrad but also over the dream of justice, over devotion to freedom, over loyalty to the motherland, over man’s joy in labour, over maternal feeling and all sense of the holiness of life.
Stalingrad’s last hour, the last hour of the pre-war city, was little different from any of its previous days and hours. People pushed handcarts full of potatoes, queued for bread and talked about items in shops. In the market people sold or bartered army boots, milk and yellowish sugar. Factory workers worked as usual. And those we are used to calling simple, ordinary folk—a Stalgres engineer, clerks, doctors, students, a young woman smelter, manual workers, rank-and-file Party workers—had no idea that in a few hours many of them would be performing deeds that future generations would refer to as immortal, and that they would do this as naturally and straightforwardly as they had until then gone about their everyday work.
It is not only heroes who love freedom, take joy in labour, know maternal feelings and feel loyalty to their country. And here, perhaps, lies humanity’s greatest hope: great deeds can be accomplished by simple, ordinary people.
•
On the other side of the front line German officers opened their battle orders. Airfield mechanics shouted, “Ready for take off!” Tanks finished refuelling, engines began to throb and turret gunners got into position; infantrymen with sub-machine guns took their places in armoured personnel carriers, signallers checked their radios for the last time. Friedrich Paulus, like a mechanic who has just set hundreds of wheels of every size in motion, leaned back from his desk and lit a cigar, waiting for the axe of war to fall on Stalingrad.
32
THE FIRST planes appeared at about four in the afternoon. Six bombers were approaching the city from the east, at a high altitude. They seemed barely to have passed over Burkovsky Hamlet, not far from the Volga, when there was the sound of the first explosions. Smoke and chalky dust rose up from the bombed buildings. The planes were clearly visible. The air was transparent and the sun was shining, reflected in thousands of windows. People looked up and watched the planes disappear swiftly towards the west. A loud, youthful voice called out, “Just a few strays—not even worth an alert!”
This was immediately followed by a long dismal wail from steamship hooters and factory sirens. This cry, prophesying death and disaster, hung in the air, as if conveying the anguish of all the city’s inhabitants. It was the voice of the entire city—the voice not only of people but also of stone, of buildings, of cars, trucks and machines, of telegraph poles, of the grass and trees in the parks, of electric cables and tram rails; it was a cry let out not only by living beings but also by inanimate objects. All now sensed their coming destruction. Only a rusty iron throat could have engendered this sound, which expressed in equal measure animal horror and the anguish of a human heart.
It was followed by silence—Stalingrad’s last silence.
Planes were coming from every direction—from east of the Volga, from Sarepta and Beketovka to the south, from Kalach and Karpovka to the west, from Yerzovka and Rynok to the north. Their black bodies slipped freely and easily through the feathery clouds in the pale blue sky; it was as if hundreds of poisonous insects had emerged from secret nests and were now all heading towards their victim. The sun in its divine ignorance brushed these creatures with its rays, and their wings shone milky white. White moths and the wings of Junkers—there was something painful, almost blasphemous about the similarity.
The buzzing of engines grew continually louder, denser, more viscous. The sounds of the city faded, as if droopin
g or curling up; only this buzz kept intensifying, growing darker and still denser, its slow monotony conveying all the furious power of the engines. The sky was now covered with exploding anti-aircraft shells, their grey smoke like the heads of dandelions gone to seed. Enraged, the flying insects flew swiftly on. Taking off from airfields on both sides of the Volga, Soviet fighters climbed swiftly towards them. The German planes were flying in several tiers, taking up the full volume of the blue summer sky. For a while, the flak and the Soviet fighters seemed to disrupt their orderly progress. Damaged bombers caught fire, releasing long trails of smoke as they fell from the sky or broke up in mid-air. Bright parachute canopies opened over the steppe. Nevertheless, the bombers flew on.
As the planes coming from north, west, east and south met over Stalingrad, they began their descent. It seemed, however, to be the sky itself that was descending—sagging, as if under dark, heavy storm clouds, under the vast weight of metal and explosives it now bore.
Then came a new sound—or rather two new sounds: the piercing whistle of hundreds of high-explosive bombs falling towards the ground and the screech of tens of thousands of incendiary units tumbling out as their containers gaped open.48 This new sound, which lasted for three or four seconds, penetrated every living being. Hearts of those about to die, hearts of those who survived—all hearts clenched tight in anguish. The whistling grew fiercer, more insistent. There was no one who did not hear it: women who had been standing in queues and were running back home to be with their children; people who had managed to hide away in deep cellars, protected from the sky by thick stone slabs; people who dropped down on the tarmac in the middle of streets and squares; people who leaped into slit trenches in parks and pressed their heads against dry earth; patients in psychiatric hospitals; wounded soldiers lying under chloroform on operating tables; babies, red in the face as they cried angrily for their mothers’ milk; half-deaf, feeble-minded old men.
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