A Writer at War (54 page)

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. Katukov
⁴
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 girls.

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.

Huge crowds on the roads. Prisoners of war of all nationalities: French, Belgian, Dutch, all loaded with looted things. Only Americans are walking light, without even hats. They don’t need anything except alcohol. Some of them greet us waving bottles. The Civilian International of Europe is moving on other roads. Women wearing pants, all pushing thousands of prams full of loot. It is a mad chaos, full of joy. Where’s East, where’s West?

Liberated cripples – former Red Army soldiers. One of them, mournful, dying, says: ‘I will never make it back to my home.’ When Germans wanted to kill them, the cripples cut the wire, got hold of a sub-machine gun and one rifle, and decided to fight.

A Russian girl leaving German slavery says: ‘To hell with the Frau. I am sorry only to abandon her six-year-old boy.’

After Schwerin, Grossman reached Landsberg, further down the River Warthe, which flowed into the Oder at Küstrin. In a measure close to Stalin’s heart, each large Soviet formation had a commission attached to confiscate German valuables to compensate for the war damage inflicted on the Soviet Union. The members were civilian accountants dressed up rather unconvincingly as Red Army colonels. Germans obediently opened the safes for them. The real problem came with Red Army soldiers who tried to open safes on their own account. They used captured
Panzerfaust
rockets, which destroyed the safe and everything in it.