Train to Budapest (27 page)

‘But meanwhile people were still dying.’

‘The Germans died in huge numbers. The situation took them by surprise, they were so used to winning. They lost twenty-four thousand men outside Stalingrad, and five hundred tanks as well.’

‘Then finally winter came.’

‘It was on 17 November 1942, according to reports, that it began to snow, making things even more difficult for the German armies. Facing them was a city up in arms on all sides. Snipers were firing on them from roofs and windows, while hand grenades were blowing up tanks. The first unit to yield was the Romanian Kletskaya Army, which enabled Zhukov to close the circle and imprison the Germans in a vice. General von Paulus had no idea what to do. He had repeatedly begged Hitler to let him withdraw from the quagmire so as to gain time and reorganise, but the only answer he received was “A German soldier must continue to stand where he has planted his foot.”’

‘Couldn’t he disobey Hitler?’

‘Of course. But he was too used to obedience. An honourable man who had given his word. In fact, a whole series of considerations made him powerless in the face of the Red Army which had caught him in a noose, squeezing his shoulders and sides.’

‘Was he killed?’

‘On 8 January 1943 the Russian command suggested to the Germans, by now surrounded and deprived of supplies, that they should surrender with honour. That meant leaving them in uniform, respecting the code of war and treating those they took prisoner, both officers and men, with consideration. They had two days to decide. Von Paulus communicated the terms to Hitler. Hitler, proud and stupid as always, turned them down, inflicting a terrible price on his forces. According to his twisted logic all that was left to them was to ‘conquer or die’, when it was already clear that victory was impossible so that he was in effect sending them all to be slaughtered.’

‘Did they all die?’

‘They were still a powerful force. But on 10 January Soviet artillery and planes began to bombard them incessantly day and night, while Soviet tanks advanced. The surrounded German soldiers, their supplies and munitions cut off and deprived of food and cover, surrendered en masse.’

‘If they had agreed to capitulate, would they have had better conditions and fewer losses?’

‘Between 27 and 29 January 1943 the Russians captured more than fifteen thousand German and allied soldiers. On 31 January Von Paulus was made a prisoner.’

‘Did they kill him?’

‘They asked him why he hadn’t escaped by air as he could have done and he answered that he had to remain with his men, and this earned him the esteem of the Russians who treated him with a certain respect.’

‘A gentleman of the old school.’

‘Probably, judging by his aristocratic name. Even so, the Battle of Stalingrad remains one of the biggest and most ferocious battles in human history. The Axis lost a million and a half men, three thousand five hundred tanks, twelve thousand cannon and mortars and three thousand planes. Who knows how the Normandy landings
of June 1944 would have gone if the greater part of the German forces had not been encircled in Russia.’

‘And the Italian ARMIR?’

‘It suffered disastrously from the lunatic ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini. Yet the boys of the ARMIR fought with great courage. For a whole month the Vicenza division managed to make headway against the Russians who were ten times more numerous and hidden in frozen holes in the steppes. And the Julia division held its position north of Stalingrad. Even if on 26 January ’43 they were finally defeated and dispersed.’

‘You promised to read me an Italian letter.’

‘Of course, here’s one:
“Dear Amelia. It’s thirty degrees below today. Many of our men have frozen feet. I keep mine moving, the way Grandpa taught me. It’s a great advantage to have been born and lived in the Friuli Mountains. Grandpa used to say: Never give way to the cold; fight back, jump, shout, leap about, but if you don’t keep moving you’re fucked. The trouble is our weapons freeze. They jam like a solid block of ice. How can we fire them? Yesterday we fought a battle for a place called Nikolayevka. We fought from twelve to three. I don’t know how many died. You couldn’t even walk there were so many bodies on the ground. I never stopped moving and this saved me from freezing to death. It was terrible seeing Giovanni crying because he could not walk any more and his tears turning to ice on his face. I hope I’ll get home again, love Giacomo …”’

‘Did Giacomo get home?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t say here. But it’s been calculated that among the Italians there were twenty-six thousand dead, forty-three thousand wounded and nearly seventy thousand missing.’

‘How many did come home?’

‘After the war the Soviet Union repatriated ten thousand Italian prisoners of war. Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand had left Italy and what with those repatriated, wounded and frostbitten, twenty-nine thousand six hundred and ninety came back. Wholesale butchery. It has been said the only corps that can regard itself as having been undefeated on Russian soil is the Italian Alpine Army Corps. No one knows who said it. But they were certainly heroic.’

‘Which contributed more to the defeat of Hitler, Stalingrad or the Normandy landings?’

‘The one couldn’t have happened without the other. Remember Hitler had invaded the whole of Europe and had decided beforehand to occupy Britain, as well as Russia of course. Europe was at his feet and this made him ever more sure of himself and increasingly bold and irrational. I don’t know if he understood when he lost the Battle of Stalingrad, where he had been crushed as if by a boa constrictor, that he was on his way to total defeat. I’ve no idea. But he had been totally convinced he could conquer everything and everybody.’

‘But these letters from the front; did they reach their destinations? And who read them?’

‘Someone collected them to make a memorial volume.’

At that moment the Old Testament prophet, the elderly librarian with enormous feet and a halo of white hair, came up to them smiling.

‘I am the soldier called Horvath,’ he says in a small voice. He seems moved. ‘It was I who collected these letters from fellow soldiers to preserve the memory of the horror.’

The man with the gazelles looks at him with surprise and curiosity.

‘Were you actually at Stalingrad? Are you Hungarian?’

‘My father was from Pécs and my mother from Klagenfurt. I was born in Budapest.’

‘How old were you when you were called up?’

‘Forty-five. But by then everyone was involved. In my heart I was against the Hitler regime, but I couldn’t admit it. I was sent with many other reservists who like me had served in the First World War, to the Russian front. They needed fresh forces there. In those days I was still tough, not like now when a puff of wind could blow me away. I was young and strong and had a full head of dark hair. My hair went white in ’43 after forty-eight consecutive hours in the midst of a monstrous battle with shells whistling from all sides. People died without a cry or a word, our eyes blinded by fog. The sky rained down bombs. It was 28 January. I was oiling my rifle when the storm began; they fired at us from all sides. We no longer had any rearguard and even if we’d wanted to we couldn’t have retreated. All we could do was hold up our hands and surrender, hoping our enemies wouldn’t kill us. I grabbed a white rag and went up to a Soviet tank. I’d been wounded by a grenade
which didn’t quite miss me but stripped off my clothes, singeing my hair and neck. A soldier stuck his head out of the tank and roared with laughter. He said something to his friends in a dialect I didn’t understand and pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was so funny, being almost naked, though I still had my socks round my ankles; I was singed black all over including my head and neck, with my few remaining hairs standing on end. The man must have felt sorry for me because he said ‘Get in,’ so I did. Among other things I told him I was a Hungarian who had been forced to fight with the Germans. I spoke to him in Russian but he just went on and on laughing. That’s how I survived. Then they put me in a camp for Axis prisoners. It wasn’t too bad. They gave us clothes and food. Shirts from dead men, but so what, better than nothing. They treated our wounds. And fed us once a day, potatoes boiled in broth. And powdered fish dissolved in the water that made a grey scum, but it was hot and we liked it. Like manna from heaven to us.’

‘And when did you get home?’

‘Three years later, at the end of the war. My hair had gone completely white and I was full of parasites. I had to delouse myself very thoroughly. But like all the poor I had parasites in my stomach: a bulging belly full of voracious worms that devoured everything I ate. But by now I was less exhausted and skeletal and was even beginning to put on weight. When I got back to my village they said, ‘Hi, Horvath, welcome home! We thought you were dead.’ And when they saw I was putting on weight they said, ‘We can see it’s not quite true that you starved at Stalingrad!’ No one realised that three years had passed since those horrors. But that didn’t matter to me. That was for the others. And that’s how I got the idea of collecting letters sent home by soldiers who didn’t survive. I went to see people and gathered together a large number of letters. I wrote letters to people myself and went to a lot of trouble. Then the library here helped me to publish the book. I’m glad it interested you. I’ll give you a copy. I’ve got heaps of them. Not many people want them. It seems the voices of the dead are of no interest. I deliberately put it up there in full view in the hope people might look at it. But no one touches it. You’re the first to have opened it and read it. For this I’d like to offer you a coffee. Come with me to my den.’

33

Moving with agility on his long thin legs, the elderly Horvath leads them to a little room almost too small to contain three people.

‘My kitchen, my living room, my lumber room, my study and my thinking corner. Please make yourselves at home.’

But where? There’s only one chair and it’s occupied by a pile of books. The table is piled with papers and magazines. But Horvath will not admit defeat; he runs out, opens the head librarian’s office and returns with two wooden folding chairs.

‘In any case the head librarian never appears. The secretary has just had a baby so it stands to reason she’s off work. Busy breastfeeding. But I can’t understand how the head librarian ever got his job. Anyway, he’s only interested in politicking. Hardly anyone ever comes to the library and I look after everything.’

As he speaks, he pulls down from a shelf three ceramic mugs with hook-shaped handles. Lighting a gas ring, he puts on a small pan filled with water from the tap. He opens an American army tin of soluble coffee, puts a spoonful in each mug and when the water boils he pours it into the cups. The coffee foams and spatters.

‘A little milk too?’

Amara and Hans say no. But he still extracts a tube of condensed milk from a shelf full of books and squirts it like toothpaste into the boiling coffee.

‘All done. Unfortunately there’s no sugar. But the milk is sweet. It’s the only way I have of sweetening coffee.’ He laughs. His teeth are broken and stained.

‘But what are you two doing here, what are your names?’

Amara and Hans tell him. And as they sip the bitterish coffee flavoured by the ancient pan that has boiled everything from onions to cabbage, potatoes and the occasional pork chop, they tell him their experiences. Horvath, who seemed so annoyed to have had to open the door to them that morning, is now cheerful
and sociable. He presses them to have more coffee and tells his own story, without excessive modesty.

‘I toured half Europe collecting these Stalingrad letters. You will say: how can you have toured Europe when you haven’t a penny to your name? But I’m good at chatting to people, I get them involved and they invite me to lunch or dinner, they ask me to spend the night at their homes. Even a railwayman became so passionately interested in the idea of the book that he let me travel free in his cab, pretending I was a railwayman too.’

‘How many had you collected by the time you finished?’

‘A hundred or so, I think, I’ve never counted them. Every now and then another reaches me, even now. The word has got around. Someone may remember the bombardment of 10 January. Someone else that of 31 January when the Russians captured more than fifteen thousand Germans. Then somebody might want to describe in detail how he managed to get home and how it took him a year, perhaps, wandering about, stopping to work for this person or that, taking cows to pasture to earn a pittance and then continuing his travels, always on foot, with the aim of reaching his own village.’

‘So you never went back to Hungary?’

‘I did go back. But the house had fallen down and my people were all dead. There was no place for me. I decided to come here to Austria, and worked for five months on a farm near the border. But they wouldn’t let me across the frontier without a permit and I had no papers; I’d lost everything when I was wounded. All those hours under two dead bodies. I always remember them with gratitude; they saved my life. One night I had to go out because a cow was in labour and I couldn’t find the vet. She mooed and mooed and couldn’t get the calf out. So I started pulling its legs and while I pulled I talked gently to the cow who was nervous, until she quietened down and I finally got her offspring out. I was covered in blood but the calf was born and the mother was safe and sound. Look, you should have been an obstetrician, I said to myself, you have the right hands for it. My boss was so pleased he gave me some money, enough for me to be able to buy myself a passage across the border. I was quickly taken past the barbed wire at night and into the snow-covered mountain forest. Which way should I go? I asked my guide, but he held out his hand: first you pay. I paid him. And he immediately turned his back on me without even
saying goodbye. Which way? I asked in desperation and he said, Go down to the valley. And so I did but after the first valley there was another then yet another. And I didn’t know whether I was going straight or crooked or where I was. I walked for a night and a day through a snowstorm with nothing to eat or drink. Then I saw a cave and slipped inside and found some wolves who looked at me as though I was a creature from another planet. I must have looked strange with my torn and dirty trousers, two blankets round my shoulders, enormous sandals made from a couple of American tyres, and white hair standing on end. The wolves gave me a wide berth and let me sleep; I couldn’t go any further. Next day I started walking again. There was no visible horizon; it was snowing continuously with a blizzard blowing. I had no idea where I was or where I was heading. Finally I came on a hovel and knocked, terrified that I’d find a forest ranger or police officer who would want to send me back to Hungary. Instead I found a countrywoman who was helping a she-goat to give birth. She made room for me at her side. Strange, don’t you think? From a calf to a kid. My life was hanging on a thread of maternity. Two corpses had saved me from being killed and two newborn animals saved me from freezing to death. The kindly countrywoman gave me a little milk from the she-goat and I was so unbelievably happy that I fell asleep there beside her. I stayed for three days and nights in that hut with no idea where I was, delirious with a high fever. The peasant woman, whose name was Herta, visited me and brought me milk. I was exhausted and my fever got worse but I was not about to die, I did know that. On the fifth day I felt better. This time when Herta brought me milk she kissed me and unbuttoned my flies and said, Look how well you are, you’re ready for love. So that’s what we did, there among the little goats. Herta seemed happy and so was I. I asked her rather carefully where we were. She spoke a strange dialect I could barely understand, but she explained, with the help of marks on the ground, that we were in Hungary, in the woods near Répcelak. I believed her; I had no reason not to. But it wasn’t true. The fact was that all the local men were dead and my Herta thought herself a queen because she had found a man for herself. She wanted to keep me. That was why she lied. In fact I was already in Austria, in the mountains round Sopron, near the Neusiedler See and the Hungarian border. She knew I wanted to
get to Austria, so kept me isolated, promising that as soon as I was strong enough she would help me across the border herself. So I stayed in that freezing hovel, kept warm by the goats, for more than three months. I knew I depended on her. I didn’t know the area which was all forest and on my own I would have been lost. I was afraid they’d stop me at the frontier and I believed the Hungarian guide had tricked me. Instead it was the woman who was fooling me. But she was sweet, my Herta. Methodical and reliable. She would bring me food: bread, an egg, a piece of fresh cheese. We would kiss till our lips were sore. We would make love, then she would leave again. Have you got a husband? I asked her once. She shook her head. If she’d had one he was dead. Any children? She gave an inscrutable smile. I would have liked to go to her home and meet her family, but she didn’t want that. She wanted me entirely for herself, hidden in that hovel in the woods with the goats. But after three months I was bored and felt trapped, and told her with some force I was not prepared to go on living like a mouse. She nodded very seriously. That evening she brought me a knapsack with fresh bread, dried meat, a piece of cheese and a small bottle of brandy. We kissed as we always did and made love more passionately than ever. Then she left and I never saw her again. I had no idea which way to go. But I could see a village in the distance in the forest, clinging to a steep hillside. I headed for it assuming it must be a Hungarian village. I was afraid and walked slowly, thinking things over in my mind. On the road I met a peasant and when I spoke to him I understood at once that my Herta had deceived me. We were in Austria, no doubt about it. I burst out laughing; the peasant didn’t understand. I laughed and laughed and he looked at me strangely. I asked him whether he had any work for me. I told him I was a vet, that I was good at helping cows to give birth. He took me with him and gave me fresh clothes and something to eat. He understood I was someone who had escaped but that didn’t matter to him. A free vet was more interesting. So I used the tiny library in the village and started studying books on medicine. And eventually I made it. I’ve learned so much from books. For that I love them and will always love them.’