Babi Yar, page 19
The prisoners scribbled notes, wrapped them round stones and threw them over the wire. The women who were constantly crowding around the camp would gather these notes up and distribute them throughout the whole of the Ukraine. The contents were always the same: ‘I am in Darnitsa. Bring some potatoes. Bring my papers along and try to get me out.’ And an address.
These notes were passed from hand to hand. Women would go around the market calling out: ‘Anybody here from Ivankov? Here’s a note: take it!’ If there was no one from Ivankov, then they would give it to someone from Demidov, and from there to someone from Dymer, and so on until it reached its destination.
I can’t remember how many times I handed on such messages, practically illegible and torn from much handling, so that in some cases I had to go over them again in ink.
This kind of spontaneous postal service never failed, and there was no one so mean as to throw such a note away or too lazy to deliver it.
Once they had received the message the relatives, wives and mothers would, of course, hurry off to Darnitsa, but by no means all of them found the man who had written the message still alive, and even if he were alive, what could they do for him?
Vasili was put to work burying the dead outside the wire and he and a man from Kiev picked a likely place, got hold of an iron bar, crept out of their hut at night and started to dig a passage under the wire.
They covered each other with sand so as not to be too easily seen and dug their trench in a place where the searchlights threw least light.
Of course, it made no difference really; they were quite obvious, especially once they had crawled through the first line of wire and were in the area where the earth had been dug up.
‘I was shaking like a lunatic,’ Vasili recalled. ‘I knew I had to move cautiously, and yet I was running. I saw that I could just squeeze through; I heard my tunic being ripped, the barbed wire scraping down my back, but I got through and ran for it! When I looked round I saw that my chum was missing, and I guessed that he was broader in the shoulders than me and must have got stuck. Then they started shooting …’
Anyway, that’s the story as Vasili told it. His comrade perished: obviously he had not been able to crawl through quickly enough, had tried to dig his way out and been noticed. It is possible that the guards decided that he was on his own in the escape, or else they didn’t want to go chasing after someone across the dark fields. Vasili heard them shouting and swearing, then went on his way.
He managed at last to find a potato field. The earth was frozen on the surface, but Vasili started to dig away at it with his fingers, got some potatoes out and gnawed at them, earth and all. He realized that he had to keep constantly on the move, but he had to eat his fill. Then he committed a great stupidity: he stood up and ran for it. He could not remember how long he went on running and staggering along until he collapsed into a hole and covered himself up with beet-tops.
He spent two whole days in the fields, like an animal, skirting round the villages and feeding himself on potato and beet—he wished for no better food.
He stumbled into a battlefield, covered with rotting corpses, piles of military equipment and weapons. People had already been there in search of loot: there were no boots on the bodies, their pockets had all been turned inside out, and in many cases they were completely naked. Vasili also took what he needed: he chose himself some clothes that were not too ragged and equipped himself with a revolver. In the woods he found a black horse limping around, caught it, mounted it and went on his way. Then he saw a two-wheeled cart in a ditch, harnessed the horse to it and rode on the cart.
Finally he summoned up courage to ride into a farmyard, where the women fed him and gave him some civilian clothes. When he looked at himself in a mirror he saw an old man with a beard, emaciated and in rags.
The women advised him to keep on the move in any direction, so long as he didn’t stay in those parts: the Germans were still snooping around, hunting for prisoners. His dead comrade had told him a lot about his family in Kiev, and Vasili could remember their address. And he thought it would not be difficult to get lost among the people of a large city.
He did not dare travel along the main roads but wound his way round the cart tracks until he finally came out on the bank of the Dnieper. He was driving along the river, thinking he would have to get rid of the horse and cart and swim across, when he came to a ferry. He paid for the crossing with the revolver, which was going to be no use to him in Kiev anyhow.
Fate was kind to him. All the way to Kiev he did not see a single German. This made him rather bolder, and he came to the conclusion that they went about only in groups, units and whole armies along well defined routes, and that there was a great deal of space around and plenty of room to hide in.
He drove into Kiev itself full of confidence. At that time there were so many old men driving carts that nobody paid the least attention to him. But he arrived at the address only to find the house burnt to the ground—it was near the Kreshchatik.
Vasili carried on driving right through the city, and when he arrived in Kurenyovka he didn’t know what to do next. Catching sight of my grandmother over the fence he asked to be allowed to sleep the night and Grandma ordered me to open the gate. When he told us who he was and where he had come from, Grandma crossed herself in her amazement.
‘You have come from the other world … ’
Investigations have established that sixty-eight thousand men perished in Darnitsa. There were similar camps in Slavuta, in Kiev itself on Kerosinnaya Street and in other places. [The Germans did not treat the prisoners of any other country in such an inhuman manner as they did the prisoners they took in the Soviet Union. And those men were without any protection whatsoever, even the purely formal assistance from the International Red Cross, because Stalin had placed the Soviet Union outside its sphere of operation.]
When I tried to find out what had happened later to the people who had been in charge of Darnitsa, I discovered that not one of them, not even Bizer, had appeared before a court.
[Even more astonishing, however, was the fate of the Soviet prisoners after Germany’s defeat. On Stalin’s orders all those who had not died in German camps were arrested and sent to Siberia. Out of German concentration camps and into Soviet ones.]
REMINDER: Please tear yourself away for a moment and turn to the very beginning of this book, the chapter entitled ‘Ashes’, and refresh your memory of its first words.
* Jaroslav Hašnek, The Good Soldier Schweik (London, 1930). [Tr.]
A BEAUTIFUL, SPACIOUS, BLESSED LAND
It was my grandfather’s idea and I think he was right: Vasili could not remain in the city; he ought to go away as far into the depths of the countryside as he could, where a man, and especially a man with a horse, was now worth his weight in gold.
I went with him to show him the way.
The road to Dymer used always to be full of life, but we drove along it now without meeting a single soul, and there was nothing but the clatter of the wheels, as big as me, of our army cart echoing in the wood.
Here and there between the cobbles were bits of straw trampled down, horse manure and yellowing scraps of newspaper. Flowering grasses were pushing up between the stones. Some time or other people had used that road, but that was long ago, and the people had disappeared; they had died off, and there was only myself, Vasili and the black horse.
There was still the world itself. So vast and with so much life always surging up. The tall old pine trees of the dense Pushcha-Voditsa forest towered into the sky, rustling quietly and swaying to and fro against the blue heavens, full of peace and wisdom.
I lay face upwards in the straw, watching the tree-tops float by, sometimes catching sight of a brown squirrel or a brightly coloured woodpecker, and thinking, I suppose, about everything at once: that the world is a vast place; that Vasili turned out to be right, that the murderous, all-destroying locusts kept to the main roads and centres, such as our city, where goodness knows what was going on—Babi Yar, Darnitsa, orders, starvation, Aryans, Volksdeutsche, book-burning; yet close at hand the fir trees were swaying gently in the breeze as they had done a million years ago, and the earth, vast and blessed, was spread out beneath the sky, neither Aryan, nor Jewish, nor gypsy, but just the earth intended for the benefit of people. That was it—for PEOPLE. My God, either there aren’t people in the world any more, or else there are some somewhere but I don’t know about them … How many thousands of years has the human race been living on the earth, and people still don’t know how to share things out.
If only there was something worthwhile sharing. But in fact one beggar would hang out his old socks to dry and another beggar would come along and murder him for the sake of those socks. Can it really be true that the only thing people have learnt to do to perfection in the whole of their history is to murder each other?
When we came to the end of the Pushcha-Voditsa we found ourselves on the top of a hill and we could see for twenty or thirty miles ahead. Beneath us the blue Dnieper wound its way through the valley, but there was no sign of any ship or even a boat on it. Everywhere was deserted, utterly deserted; nothing but fields and fields, right to the horizon, with the white line of the road, overgrown with grass, running as straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler and leading, it seemed, to the sky.
We noticed two crosses standing at the side of the road among some pretty bushes—simple, wooden things, with German helmets hanging on them. Flowers had been put on the little mounds of earth, but they had long since faded and withered away. Somewhere in Germany, no doubt, some mothers were weeping or children had been left without fathers. Their fathers would never return with cases full of loot or even bicycle bells. Had it been worth while making such a long and difficult journey just to finish up rotting beneath a rusty helmet? Is there really anything at all in the world for whose sake it is worth rotting beneath a rusty helmet? Century after century, people are killed and rot in the earth, now for one thing and now for another, and later it turns out that everything was in vain and that they ought to have died for something quite different …
Vasili was dozing the whole time and sometimes fell right off to sleep, and then our poor lame nag, obviously utterly fed up with limping along not knowing where he was going, would gradually reduce his pace until he stopped altogether. Then Vasili would wake up and use the whip on his belly, and the horse would start up eagerly, moving his head vigorously up and down, as if to say: All right, all right, now I know what you want!
The first village on our route was Petrivtsy, and we passed through it like men from Mars or people from another world. Women and children ran out to stand at their fences and stare at us in astonishment, and the whole village stood looking after us until we were once again in the open country and out of sight along the lifeless highway.
By the middle of the day our livers and spleens had changed places because of all the shaking on the cobblestones, and we turned the horse off to the sandy track at the side of the road. But it was harder work for him there and he didn’t like it very much. So he stopped looking at the road and kept turning his head, apparently praying to his particular god that Vasili would doze off. And when he did the old nag would turn with obvious pleasure back on to the hard road, not realizing that Vasili would be awakened by the bumping and shaking.
After he had taken us another three or four miles, full of misunderstandings, conflicts and insults, the black horse went on strike.
We unharnessed him, hobbled him and let him graze, while we munched some dried crusts, piled up some hay beneath a bush, laid a worn-out raincoat and an equally tattered jacket on top of it and lay down there to sleep. We were in no hurry to get anywhere, and that was one of the best sleeps I ever had in my life.
After the crosses with the helmets on them we were reminded once again of war by a bridge across the river Irpen, near the village of Demidov, which had been blown up in a most picturesque manner. There was no village left: there were only ashes, with the remains of the brick stoves standing out starkly among them, their chimneys pointing like fingerposts up into the sky. [Which meant that there had been a battle here between one lot of benefactors to humanity and another—and all, of course, for the greater happiness of the whole world.]
The Irpen was not a very pleasant little stream, but very fast-running. To ford it, the German units had laid brushwood and logs on the river bed, across an arm of the river, but they had treated them so roughly that we very nearly lost our heavy cart as we made our way over. But once we had entered the ruined village and then turned off the hard road on to a cart track our destination was very near.
I liked our army cart, with its steps down the outside, its handles along the sides, locks like on a lorry, and compartments under the seats. Everything on it was so well thought out, with the exception of one small detail—its wheels were not the same width apart as the ruts in the country roads.
All farm-carts are built with exactly the same distance between their wheels. Anyone who fails to observe this most important rule had better not try and travel on our roads. After all, what are the roads that cross Mother Russia? They consist either of dried mud with deep ruts, in which a cart runs as if on rails; or of real, deep mud, so that if you get out of the rut you are in it up to the axles. At best it is two deep ruts, almost ditches, worn across a meadow with fields and frogs all around. Ruts everywhere.
One of the wheels of our cart went in the rut, the other jumped about all over the place, catching on every bump and ridge and pothole, so that we drove along with the cart tipped right over to one side and very nearly overturning. If we had been carrying shells, which is probably what the cart was intended for, we should have tipped right over from their weight. Two or three miles travelling like that were far more exhausting and five times as difficult as the distance we had covered in a whole day. I understood what Vasili meant when he said that if we were beaten in the war, a modest contribution to that defeat would have been made by whoever it was who designed our army carts.
When Leskov’s hero Levsha visited London what most struck him was the fact that the English did not clean their weapons with powdered brick-dust. Back in Petersburg, and dying in a police station, he asked that the Tsar should be informed that it was because Russian weapons were constantly being cleaned that the bullets were loose in the bores and the guns were therefore—‘may God preserve us from war, no good for shooting with’.
We had such a lot of extremely vigilant people, who were even capable of detecting a crown among flowers on a schoolboy’s notebook, but no one appeared to be disturbed by the fact that none of our army carts—‘may God preserve us from war’—were any use on our roads.
Ivan Svinchenko lived at the far end of Litvinovka, in the ‘settlement’ across the weir, next to the burnt-out remains of an old mill-house. He received Vasili without hesitation like a brother, only crossing himself when he recalled that he himself had escaped practically by a miracle from German hands.
There were a whole lot of Svinchenkos there, and it was Ivan’s sister Gapka who took me in.
Hers was a typical Ukrainian shack; a very low building, seeming to grow out of the ground, with tiny little windows peering out beneath the thatch, which had holes in it where it had rotted. Inside it was like a cave, with an uneven earth floor on which lay some old rags and dolls made of straw, and children and kittens were crawling about. In the middle stood a stove built of plain bricks, and next to it a sort of wooden shelf, with some old rags thrown down on it, known as the ‘floor’ on which they all slept side by side. The atmosphere in the hut was strange and heavy for someone coming from the city. It was, after all, the village, and the sort of place most collective farmers lived in.
Gapka had lost her husband in the war and had been left with a lot of children. Her next-door neighbour had children, too, and they were all crawling around the shack and the yard outside like cockroaches, with bare bellies, dirty faces and running noses, in worn-out vests and dresses, and the smaller ones in nothing at all
Sitting on the stove and rather frightening to me at first were a mysterious-looking old man and woman, matriarch and patriarch of the Svinchenko line. The old man was almost transparently thin, and kept coughing and spitting, but the old woman would clamber down from the stove and shuffle slowly round the yard, scarcely able to walk but trying all the time to do something. She was hunchbacked, bent nearly double, so that she walked around looking down at the ground right in front of her as if she was looking for a lost kopek.
My mother had told me before I left home that Gapka was a most unfortunate and hard-working woman, and that the old grandparents were terribly kind-hearted people who had spent their whole lives doing nothing but good to others. But at first I could not shake off a strange sense of fear.
Gapka inquired how we had been getting on in the city, gave vent to her horror and concern and then proceeded to tell us about her own life.
They had had, it appeared, some good luck—there were no more collective farms. They had simply collapsed, and good riddance to them.
There were no more farm bosses, nor any of the various officials and hangers-on who had made an easy living off the farms at the expense of the peasants. As for the Germans, once they had passed through no one had seen them again. There was just the village of Litvinovka and there were the peasant families, just as they were, and they didn’t belong to the landowners or the Soviets or the Germans. Good God, when had things ever been like that before?
So everybody started to live according to his own ideas. All around were fields which had not been harvested, and everyone selected a patch of land for himself, cut the corn, dug the potatoes and carried the hay. There wasn’t enough room to store it all. And they ate and ate and ate. Even the old folk could not recall it ever happening before that the village of Litvinovka had eaten its fill.
