Life And Fate

These officers had indeed become human again, but not in the most admirable ma

The driver was wearing a smart white sheepskin coat. Mikhailov told him to drive more slowly.

'Certainly, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,' he answered quietly.

The driver was very much looking forward to telling his comrades about Paulus, to going home at the end of the war and saying: 'Now, when I was driving Field-Marshal Paulus…' He was also determined to drive outstandingly well, to make Paulus say: 'So that's what a Soviet driver's like! A true professional!'

It was hard for a soldier's eye to take in this spectacle, to get used to seeing Russians and Germans in such close proximity. Cheerful squads of infantrymen were searching through cellars, climbing down into the mouths of sewers, herding the Germans up to the frozen surface.

On patches of wasteland and empty streets, with much prodding and shouting, these infantrymen then re-formed the German army, throwing men from quite different arms of the service into the same column.

The Germans trudged on, trying not to stumble, looking round now and again at the Russian soldiers and their guns. They were submissive not only because it would be so easy for the Russian soldiers to shoot them; they were submissive because of the hypnotic aura of power that surrounded them.

The field-marshal was being driven south; the columns of prisoners were being marched in the opposite direction. A powerful loudspeaker was roaring out a well-known song:

'I left yesterday for distant lands,

My love waved her handkerchief beside the gate.'

A wounded prisoner was being carried along by two comrades; his pale, dirty arms hung round their necks. The heads of his two bearers drew closer together, his deathly pale face and burning eyes between them. Another wounded prisoner was being dragged out of a bunker on a blanket.

The snow was dotted with blue-grey stacks of weapons. They were like ricks of steel straw that had just been threshed.

A Russian soldier was being lowered into his tomb to a salute of gunfire. A few yards away lay heaps of dead Germans who had just been hauled up from the hospital cellars. A crowd of Rumanian soldiers went past, guffawing, waving their arms about, making fun of the Germans – both living and dead.

Prisoners were being herded along from the Nursery, from the Tsaritsa, from the House of Specialists… They walked with a very particular gait, the gait adopted by humans and animals who have lost their freedom. The lightly wounded and frostbitten were leaning on sticks or pieces of charred planks. On they marched; it seemed that all of them had the same greyish face, the same eyes, the same expression of suffering.

It was surprising how many of these men were very short, with large noses and low foreheads, with small hare-like mouths and bird-like heads. What a lot of Aryans there were whose dark skin was covered with freckles, boils and pimples.

They were weak, ugly men. None of them seemed to have strong chins, arrogant mouths, blonde hair, clear eyes or granite chests. How extraordinarily similar they were to the equally weak, ugly, unfortunate men who, in the autumn of 1941, had been prodded and beaten by the Germans towards prisoner-of-war camps in the West.

Now and then you could hear pistol-shots in the cellars and bunkers. The crowds of prisoners, still drifting along towards the Volga, understood the meaning of these shots only too well.

Lieutenant-Colonel Mikhailov continued to glance now and then at the Field-Marshal; meanwhile the driver studied his face in the mirror. Mikhailov could see a long, thin cheek; the driver could see his forehead, his eyes and his tight silent lips.

They drove past guns with barrels pointing up at the sky, past tanks painted with swastikas, past trucks whose tarpaulin covers were flapping about in the wind, past armoured troop-carriers and self-propelled guns.

The iron body, the muscles, of the 6th Army, were freezing solid, freezing into the ground. The men themselves were still marching slowly past; it seemed as if at any moment they too might come to a halt, might freeze into stillness.

Mikhailov, the driver and, the armed guard were all waiting for Paulus to say something, to call out to someone or at least to look round. But he remained silent; they had no idea where his eyes were looking or what messages they were bringing him.

Was he afraid of being seen by his soldiers? Or was that the very thing he wanted? Suddenly Paulus turned to Mikhailov and asked:

'Sagen Sie bitte, was ist es, Makhorka?'

This unexpected question did not help Mikhailov to understand Paulus's thoughts. In fact he was wondering anxiously whether or not he would have soup every day, whether he would have somewhere warm to sleep, whether he would be able to obtain tobacco.

48

Some German prisoners were carrying out Russian corpses from the cellar of a two-storey building that had once been the headquarters of the Gestapo.

In spite of the cold, a group of women, boys and old men were standing beside the sentry and watching the Germans lay out the corpses on the frozen earth.

Most of the prisoners wore an expression of complete indifference, they dragged their feet as they walked and breathed in the smell of death without flinching. There was just one, a young man in an officer's greatcoat, who had tied a handkerchief round his mouth and nose and was shaking his head convulsively like a horse stung by gadflies. The expression of torment in his eyes seemed close to madness.

Sometimes the prisoners put a stretcher down on the ground and stood over it for a while: some of the corpses were missing an arm or leg and the prisoners were wondering which of the spare limbs belonged to which corpse. Most of the corpses were half-naked or in their underclothes; a few were wearing trousers. One was quite naked: his mouth was wide open in a last cry; his stomach had sunk right into his backbone; he had reddish pubic hair and pitifully thin legs.

It was impossible to imagine that these corpses with their sunken mouths and eye-sockets had, until not long ago, been living beings with names and homes; that they had smoked cigarettes, longed for a mug of beer and said: 'My darling, my beautiful, give me a kiss – and don't forget me!'

The officer with the handkerchief round his mouth seemed to be the only person able to imagine all this. But for some reason he was the one who appeared to attract the anger of the women standing beside the entrance; they kept their eyes fixed on him and ignored the remaining prisoners – despite the fact that two of them had light patches on their overcoats where their SS insignia had once been.

'So you're trying to look away, are you?' muttered a squat woman who was holding a little boy by the hand.

The officer could sense the weight of emotion in the woman's slow, penetrating look. The air was full of a hatred that needed to be discharged; it was like the electrical energy in a storm-cloud that strikes blindly and with consuming power at one of the trees in a forest.

The officer's fellow-worker was a short soldier with a thin towel round his neck and some sacking tied with telephone cable round his legs.

The Russians standing in silence by the door looked so hostile that the prisoners felt relieved to go back down again into the dark cellar. They stayed there as long as they could, preferring the stench and darkness to the fresh air and daylight.

The prisoners were on their way back to the cellar with empty stretchers when they heard the familiar sound of Russian swearwords. They carried on at the same pace, sensing instinctively that one sudden movement would be enough to make the crowd turn on them.

[52] 'Tell me please, what is Makhorka?' (Makhorka is a coarse Russian tobacco.)