Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (27 page)

De profundis clamavi
: Lord save us . . . We are perishing. But his Greatness is as implacable as Soviet power is unbending. It is not important to it, having 150 million [people], to lose three million of them. His Greatness, resting in the heavens, does not value earthly life as we do . . . We are living in the frozen and starving city, ourselves abandoned and starving. I can’t remember the snow ever falling in such abundance. The city is covered in snowdrifts like a shroud. It is clean, because the factories aren’t working, and it is rare that smoke rises from the chimneys over the apartment buildings. The days are clear, and travel might be easy, but the city is buried like the provinces, white and crackling . . .

And everything is simple; no one says anything in particular. They don’t talk about anything except ration cards or evacuation. They simply suffer and probably think, like I do, that maybe it’s not their turn yet.

I feel the loneliness most of all at night, and the senselessness of petitions and prayers, and sometimes I cry quietly . . . And there is no salvation. And one can’t even be imagined, unless you give in to daydreams. ‘We turned our backs on Him,’ I think, ‘and He on us.’
Miserere
I mumble, and add – there it is,
dies irae
. Lord, save us.
20

Part 3

Mass Death: Winter 1941–2

Death certificate, December 1941. The cause of death is given as ‘dystrophy’, a euphemism for starvation.

I think that real life is hunger, and the rest a mirage. In the time of famine people revealed themselves, stripped themselves, freed themselves of all trumpery. Some turned out to be marvellous, incomparable heroes, others – scoundrels, villains, murderers, cannibals. There were no half-measures. Everything was real. The heavens were unfurled and in them God was seen . . .

Dmitri Likhachev

10

The Ice Road

Lieutenant Fritz Hockenjos was thirty-two years old and commander of a
Radfahrzug
, or bicycle reconnaissance unit, within the 215th Infantry Division of General Busch’s Sixteenth Army.
1
A forestry manager in civilian life, he came, like most of his men, from Lahr, a picture-perfect medieval town set amid rolling vineyards between the Rhine valley and the western edge of the Black Forest. He had a wife, Elsa, and two young sons, and his hobbies were hunting, birdwatching, photography and singing in the local church choir.

He entered the Soviet Union on 24 November in a heavily laden troop train. His first view of it, from the flat-bed carrying the train’s anti-aircraft guns, was of the wide arable fields of Lithuania. ‘Here is a landscape after my own heart! No barbed-wire fences or telegraph poles – just freedom and space!’ Stopping at a country station to feed and exercise their horses, the soldiers were quickly surrounded by a friendly crowd of gawky teenage boys and women in felt boots and coloured headscarves: ‘They all spoke a little German, joked with us . . . A lively barter trade began, and when the band got out and struck up a waltz, it wouldn’t have taken much for the soldiers to start dancing with the girls, who looked as if they wouldn’t have minded.’ The next day they stopped at Riga, where they saw their first Russians – prisoners of war working on the railway track under a Latvian auxiliary:

They wear rags and have starved, blank faces. They look so hungry you think they’re going to collapse at any moment. They came up to the train and started begging – I shrink from the comparison but there is no other – like animals. Our soft-hearted boys handed them bread, but the Latvian drove the poor devils off with the butt of his rifle. As they trotted away between the tracks they picked up sausage skins, bits of bread and cigarette butts, frantically stuffing everything into their mouths. The Latvian explained that in his camp about fifty prisoners die every day from hunger or illness, or are shot while trying to escape. But he also told us that the Bolsheviks, as they retreated, took with them half of Riga’s children and sixty percent of the people of Dünaburg [today’s Daugavpils]. All this chilled us; here in the East there’s a damned hard wind blowing.

On the night of the 26th they reached the barbed wire and wooden watchtowers of the pre-1939 border with Russia itself. ‘I was sitting by the window and blew on the frost-covered glass so as to be able to see out . . . In the pale moonlight I could see heather, moorland, felled forests, untilled fields, undergrowth.’ From now on, the train had to be blacked out at night, and its wheels defrosted with blowtorches after every halt. Outside, the landscape remained ‘always the same, always comfortless’:

A few stunted willows and birches; otherwise, white monotony. A herd of small dark huts huddle forlornly; dark forests circle the horizon; it snows a little. We were stuck on an open stretch for several hours. Thickly wrapped figures were working on the tracks – women and old men. They looked up as we passed, but it was as if they didn’t see us. Only the children waved or begged for bread – ‘Pan [Sir], gib Brot!’ they shouted. These were the first words we heard from Russians, and we were to hear them again and again.

On 28 November Hockenjos and his men disembarked from the troop train and took to the roads, which was already seething with soldiers, horses and long columns of prisoners. Pushing their heavily laden bicycles into a freezing wind, they crossed the River Volkhov on a pontoon bridge, passed through the ruined town and castle of Gruzino, then on from village to overflowing village looking for regimental command, which they eventually found ‘squeezed into one small, smelly hut – staff officers, clerk, cartographer, messenger, telephone operator and radio operator all in one room’. Their own billet for the night was a cottage with a peasant woman and her three children. The family were not, the mother made haste to explain, Russians, but Latvians, descendants of Baptists exiled by the tsars for refusing to serve in the army. ‘In 1938’, Hockenjos gathered, ‘the Soviets had come and taken all the men, and sent them to a labour camp near Archangel. We promised that when we found her husband there we would send him home. Adolf Hitler – who she recognised on a stamp – would put everything right!’

After supper their hostess played chorales on a harmonium, in return for which the young Germans showed her their family photographs, and amused the children by demonstrating the workings of their ink pens, pocket alarm clocks and the dynamo lamps on their bicycles. ‘I asked her about “Kolchos, Komsomol and Komissar”; no – in the town there were no Party members and no commissar, but there was a
kolkhoz
[collective farm]. “Oh, Kolchos kaput! Gutt, gutt! Bolschewik – nix gut!”’

The next day the bicycle unit moved on to the village of Rakhmysha, eight kilometres behind the front line and its final destination. ‘We have been given’, Hockenjos wrote that evening,

a typical Russian hut, so sour-smelling that we almost reeled straight back out again. The walls are papered with old newspapers – against cockroaches, as we soon discovered. A table, a bench, a bed behind the stove and two pictures of saints are the only furnishings. The only metal objects are the stovepipe and the samovar . . . Fedor, our host, is the archetypal Russian
muzhik
. His wife is unbelievably dirty and seems to be the source of all the unpleasant smells in the place. It’s difficult to tell the children’s ages, so it’s hard to say whether the blonde girl with red cheeks, who reminds me of a little piglet with her round body and dirty feet, is their daughter or grand-daughter. A small runny-nosed boy called Kolya completes the family . . .

We don’t talk a lot. We sit at the table or lie on the floor, smoking and drinking tea. From time to time Fedor comes out from behind the stove and picks cigarette butts out of the herring tin that serves as an ashtray. If there’s nothing in it he takes a piece of newspaper, comes to the table, clicks his heels together and smiles, holding out the empty paper. Willynilly I then have to reach into my tobacco and give him a few strands, whereupon he makes a deep bow and retires behind the stove again.

The poverty of these people surpasses all our previous conceptions of the peasants’ and workers’ paradise. Fedor hasn’t seen tea or sugar for years, and tobacco and paraffin are luxuries. Sitting in the embers of the fire is a pot filled with potatoes and some sort of unidentifiable broth, on which the family live from day to day. They drink hot water out of the samovar in old tin cans. When I gave little Kolya a roll of boiled sweets the old woman grabbed it from him and put one in each can, adding hot water.

Life now began to be frightening as well as uncomfortable. On the very evening of his arrival in Rakhmysha, Hockenjos was sent to deal with the first of what was to be a long series of Soviet guerrilla attacks:

Darkness falls at four, and in the gloomy light of the paraffin lamp the hours are long. So we all go to bed at eight – the Russians climb onto the stove, and we bed down on straw . . . At ten o’clock someone knocks on the door and shouts ‘Alarm! A field-ambulance is on fire on the road to Glad. Shots have been fired. Bicycle unit, go and investigate immediately!’

Arriving at the scene, the unit found the ambulance burned out and its driver badly injured. ‘We can’t find any tracks through the forest. A long-distance patrol? Partisans? By two in the morning we are back lying on our straw.’ Over the next five days three more trucks ran over mines.

When not picking up casualties, the
Radfahrzug
’s job was to patrol the gaps between German-held villages along the straggling front line. On the evening of 7 December, Hockenjos and his men were ordered to pick up reinforcements from a neighbouring battalion. In the pitch-black darkness and forty-one degrees of frost at six o’clock the following morning, they discovered that their lorry, despite having been kept running most of the night, would not start. Instead they set off on foot, the frost scorching lungs and icing up eyelashes and nostrils. At nine the sun rose out of the woods in a red haze, lighting up tiny ice crystals that hung suspended in the motionless air. At ten they reached a command post, by which time two men had already been disabled by frostbite. ‘In five hours’, wrote Hockenjos,

it will be dark again. We creep out and dive once more into no-man’s-land – a long row of dark figures in a bright aspen wood, clumsy in the knee-deep snow and a frighteningly good target against the white. We have neither snow-capes nor snow-shoes.

For a good hour we stumble through the tall, silent, snow-filled forest. Here and there shells have made little clearings amongst the spruce and pines. A larger clearing opens up, with a half-ruined cabin. We think we see movement so I set up a machine gun at the edge of the trees and send a group over. They find two shaggy horses, who have been feeding off the cabin’s thatched roof. They gallop away, manes and tails flying.

Further on the woods thinned out and the snow reached the men’s hips. They crossed the tracks of what they guessed were wolf and elk. From the south came the sound of heavy fighting, and they pressed themselves against the trees when Russian fighters flew overhead. At seven in the evening, four hours after the sun had set, they came to a road, a neat stack of corpses and a line of huts – the village of Gorneshno. ‘Schnapps, tea, and army bread . . . Twenty of my men have frostbite, mostly of the worst degree. The feet of some have turned black, and they crawl to their quarters on hands and knees.’ The next morning Hockenjos was told that during the night a field kitchen had driven over a mine, leaving only one survivor. ‘We wait for our truck but it doesn’t come. Instead a patrol comes