Babi Yar, page 44
Next morning Alexandra came running in. She said the Germans had taken over the school, that the playground was full of half-tracks and the first floor crammed full of wounded. They were crying out and dying, the floors were running with blood and there were very few doctors. They had come and taken all Alexandra’s sheets and towels for bandages.
She had heard that somewhere near by in Kurenyovka a lot of people had taken refuge in a cave, and she wondered how she and her husband could join them. But where was the cave? My mother again gave Alexandra some potatoes and she went off to feed her husband.
It seemed time for the bombardment to start, and I expected that the planes would come over any minute; but time passed and everything remained quiet. The gunners started patching up bullet holes and saying, not very convincingly, that the Russian break-through had been stopped, though they themselves hardly believed what they were saying. The whole day passed in agonizing silence.
As darkness came, the glow in the sky could again be seen and occasional gunfire was heard. Then suddenly there was the whistle of shells passing over our house. We felt the explosions quite close by. The shells had fallen right in the middle of the half-tracks, which burst into flames, and the ammunition loaded on them started to explode.
I clambered on to the fence and with thumping heart watched the Germans rushing about in the light of the fire till at one point they scattered, falling to the ground and hiding in trenches. The shells were exploding in the fire, throwing up clouds of sparks and sending pieces of shrapnel hissing through the air. It made the same sort of din as a bombing raid. I then realized that the man I had seen the day before must have been a scout who had sent back the exact position of the half-tracks, and I was amazed at the accuracy with which the shells were aimed—there were only two of them.
The Germans started towing the half-tracks out of the school yard. The children’s handicraft centre had caught fire from the flying shells. I ran and told my mother all about it; she put a scarf over her head and we hurried down to try and help the old folk, but met them coming towards us on the street.
Alexandra and Mikolai had been sitting in the cellar when they had realized that the place was on fire. The old lady had led her husband outside and then rushed back into the building, but was only able to pick up a saucepan, a kitchen knife and some spoons in the passage-way. And there she was, leading Mikolai with one hand and carrying an aluminium saucepan in the other.
The handicraft centre burnt like a torch all night, and we had no need of any other light. We were now four: the old folk had no choice but to stay close to us. By now we assumed that our own Grandpa had already perished. But in fact he hadn’t: at the time he was sitting in the sewer pipes, which he knew so well.
Friday, November 5th
Titus had put on weight. I used to sleep in the hole under the house, and he would come at night and lie on my chest which gave me nightmares all night. I would drive him away, but, fat and heavy as a little pig, he would insist on crawling back to keep himself warm.
The number of rats and mice in the empty houses had increased enormously. Titus went round the barns hunting them and when he had nothing else to do he slept. He was the only one for whom the approach of the front line was an advantage. But he was lonely, because there was not a cat or a dog left anywhere in the neighbourhood.
I was awakened in the morning by the sound of gunfire. Again the dive-bombers came over in waves. It was a repetition of what had happened on November 3rd, but with a difference.
The Germans’ nerves couldn’t take it. At the first sound of a plane they just scattered wildly. The dive-bombers flew low over the ground and did their job with complete impunity, as if they were spraying the fields with weed-killer.
Once again the gunners were summoned by a messenger, and again they departed for Pushcha-Voditsa. The half-tracks which had escaped destruction were moved away from the school. In the middle of the day some other gunners set up a gun in the vegetable garden and started firing across the embankment. They fired so many shells, it seemed as if they were trying to over-fulfil some quota, but they ran shamelessly in all directions at the sound of a plane. Without showing myself I observed them carefully through a hole in the fence: watching them load, shoot the bolt, and seeing the ringing, golden shell-cases shoot out. I thought to myself as soon as you’re out of the way those shell-cases will be mine.
The firing of that gun and of the other ones around now bothered me no more than the noise of a tram. When the ‘Black Deaths’ came over it was worse, but I would always manage to dive in somewhere, and later I would creep out, examine the freshly-made craters and note with astonishment that our house was still undamaged.
I came across Titus in the barn, taking no notice whatsoever of the war. I picked him up, half asleep, and carried him in my arms to the trench, where I made him comfortable on a sack. He went on sleeping calmly, not even twitching an ear when there was an explosion.
My mother didn’t keep fussing me or trying to stop me going out to see what was happening. In the end she was completely confused: how could you tell where you might be hit—everywhere was dangerous. I would run into the trench, and meet her going the other way, from the trench to the house; it was both funny and sad; everything was a matter of luck. She began to take this so much for granted that when, later, I walked boldly in among the minefields and started taking the fuses out of bombs and setting off explosions, she didn’t scold me and gave up trying to stop me. It was as though after a life constantly imbued with fear something in her had snapped. She had known practically nothing else throughout her life. I was all she had, and she had worried so much about me in the past, had been through so much, there seemed to be no end to the causes for worry—and now it seemed as though this had turned into its very opposite. If it hadn’t, no ordinary being could have stood it.
Old Alexandra and Mikolai refused point-blank to go into the trench. They stayed in the house and I acted as a runner between them and my mother. The old folk took the spring mattress off the bed, leant it up against the stove and covered it with the eiderdowns to make a sort of lean-to inside the room. They crept underneath it and sat there huddled up together. I used to go in and pull the eiderdown aside, saying:
‘Still alive in there?’
‘Still alive, son, thank the Lord!’ Alexandra would reply. ‘Is your mother all right?’
‘Everything’s in order; it’ll soon be time to eat!’
Old blind Mikolai, who had very sensitive hearing, would say:
‘Here they come, here they come, two planes flying over …’
I would not be able to hear anything at all, but Alexandra would seize my hand and say:
‘Come on, come in here out of the way!’
I would scramble into their ‘shelter’ and, sure enough, two planes would skim over the roof and we would hear the sound of little shells exploding.
‘Now they’re dragging the gun away,’ Mikolai announced.
I rushed out into the yard and found he was right: a half-track was towing the gun away. I was delighted and set off to gather up the shell-cases, but only stamped my foot in anger: the beastly Germans had gathered up every single one and taken them away.
Suddenly I saw Alexandra and Mikolai running as fast as they could across the garden to the trench. She was dragging him along by the hand, but the old chap couldn’t keep up and was waving his stick in the air.
‘The Germans are there, the Germans!’ Alexandra cried.
A number of shiny limousines were driving into our yard. Signal troops were already running around, undoing rolls of red wire. The general was back. The yard filled with officers, messengers galloped up, and the general shouted down the telephone. I thought: our house is no better than the others now, and in any case you won’t be staying here long.
‘You still alive?’ Shura called out through a window.
‘Where’s the front line?’ I asked.
‘Nobody knows! Oh, what a fright we had,’ she said, her eyes goggling. ‘Soviet tanks appeared in the middle of the night, all with their headlights on and their sirens going, making a terrible, heart-rending howl. There were hordes, simply hordes, of tanks and nothing stopped them. And then the fire and the howling and death all round. The Germans were scared out of their wits—ran about like mice. How we managed to get out of it I don’t know. They’re clearing out of Kiev. Right away. They can’t hold it. The general’s shouting at them now to blow up the bridges and burn everything down. The final round-up and the fire-raisers will come along right behind us. Run and tell your mother! Go and hide somewhere.’
‘Where can we hide?’
‘I don’t know: try and find somewhere.’
I moved away from the window and decided not to say anything to my mother about it, because there was nowhere to run to anyway.
I could make out the figures of German soldiers running along the embankment, setting up machine-guns and taking up position at them. The sound of firing from heavy guns and machine-guns reached us from Pushcha-Voditsa. I awaited the final round-up.
A CHAPTER FROM THE FUTURE
1. Whereabouts Not Known
One day at the beginning of December I went with some other boys to Pushcha-Voditsa to collect some grenades and find some explosive.
The forest was sadly mutilated and many of the trees were down. Beneath the fir trees and among the bushes stood the remains of heavy guns, burnt-out half-tracks, tanks without their turrets and stacks of unused shells and mortars. And there were masses of corpses everywhere. Somebody had already been dealing with them: their clothes had been removed and they were piled up in heaps about ten feet high—pyramids of dead, naked Germans, grey-blue in colour, and decomposing despite the cold weather.
[In one village the children used the naked corpses as toboggans, sitting on them two and three at a time and sliding down on them. A stiff, blue-grey corpse with glassy, unseeing eyes becomes as hard as rock in a severe frost. But the frost was only slight at the time, and the heaps stank unbearably.]
One of the dead men had red hair. I could see only half the face, but I could have sworn it was old Franz. I couldn’t be absolutely sure, however; we didn’t go right up to them and turn them over because of the smell, and what did it matter anyhow? I suppose there are many families in Germany who still do not know where and how their menfolk perished. If these lines should ever come to the notice of the children of a missing officer, Franz, from Hamburg, a red-headed, middle-aged gunner, who had taken part in the invasion of Poland and Norway and the capture of Paris, and who had fought with Rommel in Africa, they may now know that their father died in that way in the Soviet Union, along with thousands of other fathers, and that he lay, grey-blue, on a pile of corpses throughout the winter of 1944, to be pushed into the ditches and trenches and covered over with earth in the spring.
The trees in the forests grew again, and today you would never recognize those places.
2. An Essential Scrap of History?
As they retreated, the Germans managed to capture Bolik and carry him off with them. He escaped and turned up again a couple of days after Kiev had been liberated. None of his family were left and his home was wrecked, so he lived with us and with our next door neighbour. Then he was called up into the army. So Bolik went off to fight at the front like a real soldier; I reckoned that there he would at last get his hands on a machine-gun.
He next appeared some time in the autumn of 1944, looking the same as ever: rather lanky, with a prominent forehead, but more erect and manly. He even had a rank—he was a corporal. He had spent seven months on the Finnish front where he had fallen into some water and been frozen and had lain sick for a long time in a village. Now there was something wrong with his lungs and heart, and he had been sent to Kiev for treatment. He was thin and pale, the sort of person about whom they say that a puff of wind would blow him over.
‘How was it? What did you do? Where were you?’ I showered him with questions. ‘How did you fight?’
Sadly he dismissed my question with a gesture, saying:
‘Yeah … in the medical corps, behind the lines.’
‘What about the machine-gun?’
‘I never got one. I only took pot-shots at planes with a rifle. That was a waste of bullets …’
I just couldn’t recognize Bolik, he was so pensive and remote. He’d been to the war and didn’t want to talk about it.
‘They gave me a medal,’ he said casually.
‘Show me!’
‘It’s at home.’
We were standing in our courtyard and it was a cold, grey day. My grandfather (who had also survived) came along and looked in astonishment at Bolik. Then he said:
‘So you’re back?’
‘Yeah, I’m back …’
‘Well, just look what’s happened to you! The same would have happened to Tolik if he’d been a bit older.’ Grandpa eyed Bolik closely, and then said: ‘You know, young man, you’re in a bad way. You’re going to die.’
‘Ha, ha!’ replied Bolik.
‘You’ll see,’ said Grandpa and, with a gesture of his hand, went into the house.
We stayed there, silent, flabbergasted.
‘Stupid old man,’ said Bolik.
’Don’t you take any notice of him; the old chap has been quite potty since the war,’ I said. ‘Let’s go: I’ve got a whole library in the barn; I’ve been going around everywhere again with a sack gathering books together.’
Proud of my rich store of books, I showed Bolik the stained but perfectly readable volumes of travel and Wellsian science fiction and copies of Technology for Young People. But he looked at them only absent-mindedly; he just couldn’t stop worrying.
‘No, he’s not right in the head. How could he say a thing like that? Silly old man!’ he muttered.
A few days later Bolik was taken away to a sanatorium in Pushcha-Voditsa. I was pleased for him, because the sanatoria in Pushcha-Voditsa were good and it was always difficult to get into them, but the most important thing was that there he would have enough to eat.
At that time I got completely taken up with my work at school, became interested in mathematics, sat for hours at night working out theorems and rarely gave much thought to Bolik. So it came as a complete surprise to me when my mother ran into the room one day and exclaimed sorrowfully:
‘Go and take leave of Bolik. He’s being buried today!’
The funeral passed down the street outside. Bolik’s uncle walked in front, carrying a little cushion with the single medal on it. Then there were two or three wreaths, followed by the lorry bearing the coffin and about a dozen people bringing up the rear. The coffin was open.
My friend Bolik lay there, his face yellowish, his hands folded awkwardly on his chest, and dressed in a smartly pressed suit. Aunt Nina, his mother, was sitting next to him on the back of the lorry, very small and doubled up, and same yellow colour as her son, from whom she never took her eyes.
There were pot-holes in the road opposite our house; the lorry swayed as it went over them, and Bolik’s mother swayed too, hanging on tightly to the side of the coffin. I supposed she couldn’t walk, and that was why they had put her on to the lorry.
There was some confusion in my mind; I can’t quite explain it. As the lorry was passing our gate a multitude of thoughts flashed through my head, not too clearly and in batches. How had my grandfather known that Bolik was going to die? People said: ‘He has the stamp of death on his face.’ Had Grandpa seen the stamp? And what did it look like, anyway? Why hadn’t they succeeded in curing him in such fine sanatoria, and why had nobody told me he was dead, and why hadn’t I been called to him when he lay at home? I knew where they were going to bury him: in the Kurenyovka cemetery, next to the grave of his grandfather, Kaminsky, the Pole. I knew the spot very well, because it was where my grandmother was buried. In a few days I would go down there. But I didn’t want to go there at that moment. I just wanted to see Bolik and remember him.
Swaying slightly, he sailed past me with his mother, quite close, so that I had a good look at him. My mother was urging me on, and saying in a tearful voice:
‘Go on, go on, say good-bye to Bolik.’
But I stood my ground, silent, stubborn. The procession went slowly on, down towards the market, and I simply watched it till it disappeared.
Bolik had gone away.
3. A Million Roubles
[It was not under German but under Soviet rule that I first saw people being hanged. Several gallows were erected in the squares of Kiev, each with from five to eight ropes. They hanged Ukrainians and Russians who had been collaborating with the Germans and who had not managed to escape. They were driven up on an open lorry, the ropes were put round their necks, the back of the lorry was thrown open and the lorry would drive away, leaving them dangling and swinging about on the end of the ropes. Some of them shouted and struggled a good deal until the lorry moved off, and showed they didn’t want to die. Afterwards they hung there, stiff and still, some with quite calm expressions, others with their heads twisted to one side, their blue tongues sticking out. They were left hanging there for a long time, as a lesson to everybody.
All prisoners of war who survived the German prison camps were sent off automatically to camps in Siberia as traitors who had surrendered to the enemy and not fought to the death. The famine continued even after the war, but then embraced the country districts as well. Then in 1948 a campaign against the Jews was started. Not being Jewish or prisoners of war or collaborators with the Germans, my mother and I found ourselves in the category of those who ‘had lived in occupied territory’, and from then to the end of our lives that fact immediately put all the questionnaires we filled into the third category. It was to cause me a great deal of unpleasantness and a lot of explaining in the future.]
