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Weinma
The military doctor, a rather chubby, almost bald Vie
In Simferopol, the terminus, they loaded us into trucks or ambulances for a convoy to Yalta. Hohenegg, who had come to visit the doctors of AOK 11, stayed in Simferopol; I parted from him regretfully. Our convoy took a mountain road, to the east, via Alushta, since Bakhchisaray was still in the zone of operations of the siege of Sebastopol. I was put up in a sanatorium west of Yalta, high over the road to Livadia, its back to the steep snow-covered mountains overlooking the city, a former royal palace converted into a Kurort for Soviet workers; it had been damaged a bit by the fighting but quickly patched up and repainted. I had a nice little bedroom on the third floor, with a bathroom and a small balcony: the furniture left something to be desired, but at my feet, beyond a few cypress trees, stretched the Black Sea, smooth, gray, calm. I couldn’t get enough of looking at it. Though it was still a little cold, the air was much softer than in the Ukraine, and I could go out to smoke on the balcony; otherwise, lying on the sofa facing the French doors, I spent long tranquil hours reading. I didn’t lack reading material: I had my own books, and the sanatorium too had a library, made up mostly of books abandoned by previous patients, very eclectic, even including, next to the unreadable Myth of the Twentieth Century, some German translations of Chekhov that I discovered with great pleasure. I didn’t have any medical obligations. At my arrival a doctor had examined me and had me describe my symptoms. “It’s nothing,” he concluded after reading Dr. Sperath’s note. “Nervous fatigue. Rest, baths, no excitement, as little alcohol as possible, and beware of Ukrainian girls. It will pass on its own. Have a nice stay.”
A joyful atmosphere reigned in this sanatorium: most of the patients and convalescents were a mix of young subalterns from all branches, whose bawdy humor was sharpened, at night, by the Crimean wine served with the meals and by the scarcity of females. That might have contributed to the surprising freedom of tone during discussions: the most cutting jokes were circulating about the Wehrmacht, about Party dignitaries; one officer, showing me his medal for the winter campaign, asked me ironically, “And what about you in the SS—you haven’t received the Order of the Frozen Meat yet?” The fact that they were in the presence of an officer from the SD didn’t bother these young men at all; they seemed to think it went without saying that I shared their wildest ideas. The most critical of them were the officers from Army Group Center; whereas in the Ukraine, people thought that the transfer south of Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, at the begi