Babi Yar, page 41
At last I tired of doing that, dropped the box into a ditch and went into the house of Mishura, the woman who lived next door to us, because I remembered that she had a cellar. Unfortunately, it had already been cleaned out, except for a few old mildewed cucumbers left in the bottom of a tub. I proceeded to take them out, covered in dill and mould, wiped them on my trousers and bit into them. I sat down there in a dark, damp corner of the cellar, munched my cucumbers and reflected that it was like the situation described by Wells in his War of the Worlds, when the Martians arrived on the earth and then started to die off themselves, because everything was in ruins and deserted and there were no people left.
PROFESSION-FIRE-RAISERS
We lived in a state of isolation, with no one at all to talk to. Once or twice German troops passed down Kirillovskaya and some tanks rumbled through, but they didn’t come past our house. We occasionally heard the sound of gunfire from the direction of Vyshgorod, but on the whole everything was quiet, as if there were no fighting going on at all.
I investigated all the houses in the vicinity, making holes in the fences so that I didn’t have to show myself on the street. My routes, like Titus’s, led across the roofs of barns, through trapdoors and windows. I was always looking for food.
Suddenly the street was filled with noise and the clatter of wheels. We cowered down inside in our fright: a German unit had arrived. Some officers strode quickly into the yard, stamped around the veranda, threw open the door, and stepped back in fright. The first one pulled out a revolver and pointed it at my mother, saying:
‘A woman and a boy! Why? Everybody evacuated.’
My mother tried to explain, but the officer would not listen, and made as though to shoot us.
We stood there, more dead than alive. But they quickly looked over the house and then signed to us to get out.
The soldiers were already throwing the gates open and a very smart car drove into the yard with a high-ranking officer in it. Nobody paid any attention to us any more, and we slipped quickly into the barn.
Our house became the scene of furious activity. They carried in a telephone exchange and radio receivers; signals troops rushed up, unrolling coils of wire; orderlies cheerfully carted a nickel bedstead, a divan and pots of flowers from the neighbouring house; messengers kept arriving at the gate on horseback.
Then a lorry drove up loaded with belongings, and two Russian girls started bustling about and giving orders. The German soldiers carried out their instructions without question.
The officer had a great collection of things: women’s fur coats, winter boots, lengths of material, even a child’s wheelchair—all of which he was apparently intending to send off to Germany. Inside the house the radio was blaring, the cook had wrung the necks of a couple of geese and was cleaning them. It became all very gay and noisy.
One of the girls was dark-haired, the other fair, and both were pretty and rather plump, with attractive voices and lazy movements. They called each other Shura and Lyuba.
‘You stayed here all the time?’ Shura, the dark-haired one, asked my mother. ‘They could simply shoot you. Or maybe they’ll just throw you out, depends who deals with you—they’re beasts, these Germans. In any case nothing will be left alive here, so don’t waste your time hoping. The front line will pass through here for a long time, and the city will be burnt down.’
‘Why for a long time?’ my mother asked.
‘Our general has been ordered not to abandon Kiev at any cost. The front will stop here, you’ll see.’
‘But what’s your job here—translating?’ mother asked.
‘Ach!’ Shura made a contemptuous gesture with her hand and laughed. ‘We are just attached to the general. We have been retreating with him all the way from Kharkov.’
‘He likes sleeping with two women,’ said Lyuba cynically, munching a pie. ‘We keep him warm, one on each side. Poor old chap, he gets cold at night.’
They both burst out laughing. A soldier came in and summoned my mother to go and clean some vegetables and cut up some meat in the kitchen, and she went off and was busy there till evening. At one point she slipped out for a minute and brought me some of the general’s thick soup.
I decided not to hang around where I would be seen, so I tucked myself away in the hay-loft, took the whole of Pushkin along with me and read Yevgeni Onegin. I had tried to read it before a couple of times, but couldn’t get on with it. I preferred reading about Pugachov and the novels of Belkin. But now once I had started it I couldn’t put it down, forgetting about the hay-loft and the Germans and letting myself be carried away by the music of the poetry:
You came to me in my dreams,
Unseen, you seemed so lovely,
Your beauty overcame me,
I heard your voice within me
Long ago …
I went on reading late into the night, for as long as I could make out the words. Then I lay back in the hay and went over the poetry again in my mind, regretting only that Titus was missing. As soon as the Germans came in Titus had once again vanished.
The general remained with us for about three days and then took off as suddenly as he had appeared. They swiftly rolled up the wires, loaded the divan, the nickel-plated bed and the pot of flowers, and the general and all his suite departed northwards, towards Pushcha-Voditsa.
But the house remained empty for no more than a couple of hours: some of General Vlasov’s troops—Russians fighting along with the Germans—appeared outside, cheerful, noisy, one of them playing a concertina. We were glad to see them because they were not Germans but our own people, all speaking Russian, and after being isolated there for so long we weren’t used to hearing our own language spoken. They were not even very surprised to see us. They simply said that our house was in a better state than the others, and they were going to move in.
They quickly installed themselves and started quarrelling about something, shouting and laughing; there was an air of recklessness and tension about the whole bunch. They wound up a gramophone and had a great pile of records to play, but at first the thing seemed not to work properly—only a squeaky voice, which appeared to be a speech by Lenin, coming through the scratching and wheezing. (Before the war it used to be sold on the other side of the tune ‘Katyusha’.) One of them went out on to the veranda and threw Lenin over the fence into the road, so that it broke into a thousand pieces, and from the gramophone came the sounds of a Ukrainian folk-song.
‘So here we are, my dear, with the job of destroying all this,’ their officer, a former Red Army commander, said with a grim smile. ‘Tears will make no difference; we’ve got our orders. We are going to burn all these houses down; this is going to be a no-man’s-land, and Kiev will exist no more—you can say good-bye to Kiev. But you’d better get out of the city before it’s too late. So long as we’re here I’ll say you’re working for us, but if other people come along it’ll be “Bang!” and you’ll be no more. It’s so very simple. We ought to pop you off too, really …’
The first thing the Vlasov men did was to steal a cow from the Germans. This daring operation was carried out somewhere on the other side of the bridge. The Germans got on their tracks and came chasing around our square in a very bad mood, waving their guns about. But a ferocious-looking Vlasov man stood guard at our gate, while his pals were already skinning the cow in the barn.
That evening they had a marvellous feast. They played the accordion, danced till the plaster began to fall off the ceiling, drank recklessly, staggered out into the courtyard and finished up lying all over the place. ‘Let’s have some fun before we die!’ they cried.
But next morning they were as smartly turned-out as guardsmen, and they formed up outside and marched off in the direction of Pushcha-Voditsa.
They did not come back till late in the evening, tired, their faces black with soot and their clothes smelling of petrol. They were carrying whole bales of things they had stolen or picked up.
‘We’ve started on the job,’ the officer said to my mother. ‘We burnt down about a hundred houses today.’
‘What did you do—pour petrol over them?’
‘Some we did with petrol, some with straw. Depends how you set about it. Each of us has a quota to fulfil, and we have to make sure everything is burnt to ashes. It’s always the wrong way round: when you don’t want a place to catch fire, it’ll go up on its own; but when you want to burn it down, it just won’t catch light at all. What a job!’
‘And you found the things there?’
‘The things were buried in the ground.’
‘What are you going to do with such a lot of stuff?’
‘Barter them for vodka.’
And that’s what they did: two of them set off at once across the bridge with bundles of clothes, and returned later with a large can of home-made spirit which they had obtained from some Germans. In the meantime others had organized a full-scale hunt for hares and there was nothing but shooting going on everywhere.
Others went round the gardens with long sticks, walking slowly in a long line as though they were looking for mines. They kept their eyes fixed on the ground and could detect immediately where something had been buried: they would poke the stick into the ground, feel around with it and then start digging. Sometimes they would pull out a trunk or a barrel of something, and in this way they got together a whole pile of clothes and linen. They were especially delighted when they came across a gramophone or a guitar.
‘The Germans are like second-hand merchants: they’ll take anything!’
For the second night in succession they again drank and made merry; they could be heard all over Kurenyovka. They broke one accordion and immediately took up another. We got some petrol from them, and just sat there listening to their goings-on. There was something rather horrible about their merrymaking.
The officer saw our light and, rather drunk, came and sat down with us, holding his head in his hands.
‘We’re in a fine mess now. We went to fight for the freedom of Russia, and look at that freedom now …’
‘Are you one of those they talk about who turned your weapons on your own people?’
‘Some of us mutinied, some escaped from prison camps, some joined up because they were starving and some because they were dying. But the Germans are no fools: they immediately gave us the dirtiest jobs to do, so that we could never go back. So we’re in it right up to our ears. With the Germans we shall get as far as the first crossroads, and if we’re caught by the Reds they’ll hang us by our balls.’
‘Is there really no way out for you?’
’What way out can there be? Where is there any way out today anywhere in the world?’
One of his friends came to fetch him:
‘Give over, Mikhail! He’s always like this—he has a drop to drink and straight away starts philosophizing. Come on, let’s get some more drink.’
Mikhail jumped up, let out a hysterical growl and started tearing the front of his shirt apart, saying:
‘Ach—we shall fetch up somewhere like dogs in a ditch!’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ said his friend easily. ‘But why ruin your shirt!’
For several days they formed up in platoons each morning and marched off to their work near the park at the ‘Cheer-Up’ sanatorium. Then they decided it was too far to go and they moved to the other side of the embankment. We were left alone in the house once again.
We stayed there, quiet as mice. At nights there was a great, silent glow beyond the embankment, all the more ominous for being so completely silent. No-man’s-land was drawing nearer.
HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD I BE SHOT?
By the time I had reached the age of fourteen I had committed so many crimes on this earth that I should have been shot many times over. Here is a list of my offences:
1. Not informing on a Jew (my friend Shurka)
2. Concealing an escaped prisoner (Vasili)
3. Wearing felt winter boots
4. Being out after the curfew
5. Concealing a red flag
6. Not returning all my loot from the shop
7. Not handing over fuel
8. Not handing over surplus food supplies
9. Sticking up a leaflet
10. Stealing (beetroot, peat, wood, fir trees)
11. Working illegally with a sausage-maker
12. Dodging being sent to Germany (in Vyshgorod)
13. Dodging the transport again (in Priorka)
14. Stealing a weapon and using it
15. Possessing ammunition
16. Not observing the order regarding gold (failing to report it)
17. Not reporting for registration at the age of fourteen
18. Not informing on underground fighters
19. Being anti-German and encouraging anti-German attitudes (there was a decree about this, too)
20. Spending forty days in the forbidden zone, for which alone I should have been shot forty times over.
Moreover I was not a member of the party or the Komsomol, nor a member of the underground; I was not a Jew or a gypsy; I did not keep pigeons or have a radio set; I did not commit any crimes openly; and I did not get taken as a hostage. I was in fact a most ORDINARY, unexceptional, insignificant little chap in a peaked cap.
But if the regulations drawn up by the authorities had been observed scrupulously, according to the principle of ‘If you did it you pay the penalty’, then I had LOST THE RIGHT TO BE ALIVE twenty times over.
I persist stubbornly in remaining alive, while the number of my crimes increases in a catastrophic manner, so that I have stopped counting them. All I know is that I am a terrible criminal who has still not been caught.
It is largely as a result of a misunderstanding that I am still alive; it is simply because in all the haste and confusion, the regulations and laws which the authorities draw up are never carried out fully, to the last letter. Just as I always managed to slip through the holes in the net, and get away by pure chance, I might, by the same chance, have been caught. We all hang on a thread; none of us depends on his own will, but on chance, on the luck of the draw, on somebody else’s mood, and even to a great extent on his own swift legs.
And on what besides? Today one two-legged scoundrel arbitrarily makes one rule; tomorrow another one comes along and adds a second rule, and so on, until five or ten, and God knows how many more, may be conceived in the murky minds of the Nazis, [the N.K.V.D., the royalists, Marxists, Chinese and Martians, and all our other uninvited benefactors whose name is legion.]
But I want to live!
To live as long as is permitted me by Mother Nature and not by the two-legged degenerates. How dare they, what right have they, to claim to decide the question of MY life or death—
of HOW LONG I should live
of HOW I should live
of WHERE I should live
of WHAT I should THINK
of WHAT I should FEEL
and of WHEN I SHOULD DIE?
I want to live so long that there will be no trace left of those people!
I loathe you all, dictators, enemies of life; I scorn you as the most loathsome things which the earth has ever given birth to. You are cursed! Cursed! CURSED!
FIVE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF AGONY
Monday, November 1st
On the Sunday night I had had a terrible feeling of the imminence of death for which there was no obvious reason. It was simply that we were surrounded by solid, impenetrable darkness in which the city lay dead. I had a sense of foreboding within me that my life was coming to an end.
We all have moments when we can foresee clearly our coming, inevitable death. With some it happens sooner, with others later, but we all at one time or another realize suddenly, with a chill in our hearts, that the moment must come when that ‘I’ will cease to exist. It will cease to breathe and to think, and these hands, this head and these eyes will be no more. And each one of us reacts in his own way as he throws off that obnoxious feeling and seizes that straw of reassurance that says: ‘It’s not today; it’s still a long way off.’
I first experienced that feeling when my grandmother died; but that was nothing compared with what came over me that Sunday night. The trouble was that I couldn’t clutch on to that ‘not today’—in fact, every day could well be ‘today’. I felt short of breath.
The utter silence made my head swim. It was like being tied up in a black sack or buried alive deep under the ground, where you just couldn’t budge and it was no use wriggling about because there was no way out.
I slid down from the stove, felt around with icy hands for the oil-lamp and matches, and went out into the yard, carefully feeling my way in the pitch darkness.
I could hardly tell I was outside—it was the same pitch darkness, the same black sack, and not a sound to be heard, as though my ears were blocked. I took a spade and crept under the house.
The house stood on raised brick foundations, and there was a gap between the floor and the ground into which I could just squeeze myself. The space between the beams and the earth below was less than a foot, but I eased my way through, lying flat on the ground, my chin digging into the earth, holding the lamp with one hand and dragging the spade along with the other. I kept bumping into the wooden posts and coming across dead rats which had dried out into parchment. In a fit of annoyance I knocked one of them out of the way and it rolled off with the sound of an empty box.
Once I had crawled far enough underneath I lit the lamp and stood it up in the dry earth. My face was covered in dust and cobwebs, which I wiped off and then, lying on my side, I started to dig.
At first it was very awkward, because I had to twist round to get each spadeful out. But when I rolled over into the hole I had made and could raise myself on my elbows I was able to dig faster.
