A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman Read Free Book Online Page A

encirclement round Kiev meant that Guderian’s Second Panzer Group had linked up with Kleist’s First Panzer Group near Lokhvitsa. General Kirponos’s South-Western Front, consisting of the 5th, 21st, 26th and 37th Armies was cut off. Stalin’s old crony, Marshal Budenny escaped, as did Nikita Khrushchev and General Timoshenko. Some 15,000 troops managed to slip through the German cordon, but the remaining half-million were condemned to a terrible fate of starvation, disease and exposure in Wehrmacht prison camps.
    Despite the military situation, most Ukrainian civilians were reluctant to be evacuated eastwards to the Volga region. Grossman himself, although born and brought up in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, saw these Ukrainian peasants almost as foreigners since he had never had any contact at all with rural life.
    Ukrainians had suffered in the civil war which had raged back and forth across their lands, and above all in the terrible famines triggered by Stalin’s policy to suppress the rich peasants or kulaks, and enforce the collectivisation of farms. Accordingly, many Ukrainians were prepared to welcome German troops as liberators. Grossman would later discover that Ukrainian volunteer police had even played a significant role in rounding up Jews in Berdichev, including his mother and their friends, and assisted in their massacre.
    Out in the fields. Wind, wind, wind. Cold. Nature is waiting for snow. Women, cold, in sackcloths. They are rebelling. They don’t want to leave this place and go to the Volga German Republic with their little children. Some have five or six children.
    They raise their sickles. The sickles shine dully in the grey autumn light. Their eyes are crying. The next moment, the women laughand swear, but then their anger and grief returns. They shout: ‘An old man, he’s got two sons, lieutenants. He hung himself yesterday. He didn’t want to go to the Volga German Republic. Germans will get us there, too. They’ll get us anywhere. We won’t leave, we’d rather die here. If any lousy snake comes to force us out of our homes, we’ll meet him with sickles.’
    The next moment one says: ‘When you haven’t got a man, you can take a cat and purr with it all night long.’
    ‘Look at the sky. Cranes are flying south. And we, where shall we go? Comrades, please help us.’
    Oh, women! These eyes of women in danger – alive, excited, angry, childish, and you can see murder in them. Women had carried rusks to their men in Kursk, which is two hundred kilometres away.
    The secretary of the local Raikom [the district Party Committee]: ‘Come and visit me, my friends. I’ve got spirits and women who aren’t too old.’
    Second night. A telephone rang. For a moment I thought it was for me. The Germans were thudding away. We lit a fire in the stove. The poignant heartache of somebody else’s stove. A sweet little girl with intelligent, dark eyes says softly: ‘You’re sitting in Daddy’s place.’ Girls. They are cursing Hitler, who’s taken away their boyfriends, their music, their dancing and singing.
    Troops are moving in the darkness. A girl runs to look at them: ‘To search for my brother.’ She looks like a doll, with a round face, blue eyes and a doll’s lips. These lips say the following about a one-year-old girl who is crying: ‘It will be just as well if she dies. One mouth less.’
    A wounded soldier was brought here last night. He was gasping for breath, and cried. Two women wept together with him all night long, they were cutting his bandages which were swollen with blood. He began to feel better. The men were afraid to take him to the hospital at night. He lay there until dawn came.
    Edinolochniks [individual peasant farmers] are whitewashing their khatas [simple Ukrainian houses]. They look at us with a challenge in their eyes: ‘It’s Easter.’
    The implication behind this strange remark in autumn was the hint that they were celebrating the arrival of the most