we found that practically all the machinery was made in America, and we were told that the assembly line and the assembly method had been laid out by American engineers and technicians. And it is reasonable to believe that these technicians knew what they were doing and would remember, so that if there were any malice in America toward this plant in the way of bombing, the information must be available. And yet to photograph the plant was taboo. Actually we did not want photographs of the plant. What we wanted were photographs of the men and the women at work. Much of the work in the Stalingrad tractor factory is done by women. But there was no hole in the taboo. We could not take a picture. The fear of the camera is deep and blind.
Also we could not find out the number of units per day that were turned out, for this would be contrary to the new law, which makes the divulgence of industrial information treason equal to the telling of military information. However, we could find out percentages. We were told that the factory was only two per cent be-low pre-war production, and if we had wanted to, I suppose, we could have found out what pre-war production was, and thus estimated the number of tractors that were coming off the line. The finished machines are standard, and only one type is made. They are heavy-duty machines, not very large, but capable of doing any ordinary farm work. They are not stream-lined or prettified, and there are no extras. We were told that they are very good tractors, but they are not made for looks, for there is no competition. One manufacturer does not compete with another by the use of eye-pleasing forms. And it was in this place that the workers built tanks while the shells tore through the buildings and destroyed the factory bit by bit. There was a kind of terrible allegory in this factory, for here, side by side, were the results of the two great human potentials: production and destruction.
When Capa cannot take pictures he mourns, and here very particularly he mourned, because everywhere his eyes saw contrasts, and angles, and pictures that had meaning beyond their meaning. He said bitterly, 'Here, with two pictures, I could have shown more than many thousands of words could say.'
Capa was bitter and sad until luncheon, and then felt better. And he felt still better in the afternoon when we took a little riverboat and went for an excursion on the Volga. It is a lovely, wide, placid river at this time of year, and in this place, and it is the road for much of the transportation of the area. Little tugs, barges loaded with grain and ore, lumber and oil, ferries and excursion boats, cruised about. From the river one could see as a whole the destruction of the city.
On the river there were huge rafts with little towns built on them, sometimes five or six houses, and little corrals with cows, and goats, and chickens. These rafts had come from the far northern tributaries of the Volga, where the logs had been cut, and they moved slowly down the river, stopping at cities and towns that have been destroyed. The local authorities requisition the logs that are needed. In every place where they stopped, the requisitioned logs were cut loose and floated ashore, so that as the rafts moved down the river, they diminished gradually in size. But the process takes so long that the crews who live on the rafts have set up tiny townships on their rafts.
The life on the river was very rich, and it reminded us of Mark Twain's account of the Mississippi of his day. Little side-wheelers rushed up and down the river, and a few heavy, clumsy boats even moved under sail.
We went close to one of the big log rafts, and we saw one woman milking a cow in a little corral, and another hanging out washed clothes behind her house, while the men were cutting loose the logs which would be floated ashore to help in the rebuilding of Stalingrad.
Mr. Chmarsky's gremlin really worked overtime in Stalingrad. First it had been the motion-picture company, and then the factory, and even with the little boat excursion his gremlin was busy. We had wanted a small light boat, in which we could move rapidly up and down, arid what we got instead was a large cruiser-like boat of the Russian Navy. And we had it all to ourselves, except for its crew. We had wanted a boat with shallow draught, so that we could move close to the shore, and instead we had a boat which had to stand offshore, because it drew too much water. We had to maneuver among small canoe-like boats, in which whole families brought their produce to the markets of Stalingrad, their tomatoes and their piles of melons, their cucumbers and their inevitable cabbages. In one market at Stalingrad there was a photographer with an old bellows camera. He was taking a picture of a stern young army recruit, who sat stiffly on a box. The photographer looked around and saw Capa photographing him and the soldier. He gave Capa a fine professional smile and waved his hat. The young soldier did not move. He gazed fixedly ahead.
We were taken to the office of the architect who was directing the plans for the new city of Stalingrad. The suggestion had been put forward that the city be moved up or down the river, and no attempt be made to rebuild it, because the removal of the debris would be so much work. It would have been cheaper and easier to start fresh. Two arguments had been advanced against this: first, that much of the sewage system and the underground electrical system was probably still intact; and second, there was the dogged determination that the city of Stalingrad should, for sentimental reasons, be restored exactly where it had been. And this was probably the most important reason. The extra work of clearing the debris could not stand up against this feeling.
There were about five architectural plans for restoring the city, and no plaster model had been made yet because none of the plans had been approved. They had two things in common: one was that the whole center of Stalingrad was to be made into public buildings, as grandiose as those projected at Kiev-gigantic monuments and huge marble embankments with steps which would go down to the Volga, parks and colonnades, pyramids and obelisks, and gigantic statues of Stalin and Lenin. These were painted, and in projection, and in blueprints. And it reminded us again that in two things the Americans and Russians are very much alike. Both peoples love machinery, and both peoples love huge structures. Probably the two things that the Russians admire most in America are the Ford plant and the Empire State Building.
While a little army of architects works on the great plans for rebuilding Stalingrad, it also works on little things, on schools and the restoration of villages, and on the design of tiny houses. For the city is being rebuilt on its edges, and thousands of small houses are going up, and many apartment houses are being built on the outskirts of the city. But the center is being left for the time when the plans for the public city can materialize.
We spoke to the chief architect about the people we had seen living underground, and living in bits of ruins, and we asked why they were not on the edge of the city, building houses for themselves.
He smiled very understandingly and he said, 'Well, you see these people are in the cellars of the buildings they once lived in, and there are two reasons why they do not want to move, and why they insist that they will not move. One is because they like it there, because they have always lived there, and people hate to move from the things they are used to, even when they are destroyed. And the second reason has to do with transportation. We have not enough busses, we have no streetcars, and if they move they will have to walk a great distance to get to work and to get back, and it seems just too much trouble.'
And we asked, 'But what are you going to do with them?'
He said, 'When we have houses for them to move into, we will have to move them. We hope by that time to have the busses, the streetcars, and the methods to get them to and from their work without a great deal of effort.'
While we were in the architect's office an official came in and asked whether we would like to see the gifts to the city of Stalingrad from the people of the rest of the world. And we, although we were museum-happy, thought we had to see them. We went back to our hotel to rest a little, and we had no sooner got there when there was a knock on the door. We opened it, and a line of men came in carrying boxes, and cases, and portfolios, and they laid them down. These were the gifts to the people of Stalingrad. There was a red velvet shield, covered with a lace of gold filigree from the King of Ethiopia. There was a parchment scroll of high-blown words from the United States government, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was a metal plaque from Charles de Gaulle, and the sword of Stalingrad, sent by the English King to the city of Stalingrad. There was a tablecloth with the embroidered names of fifteen hundred women in a small British town. The men brought the things to our room because there is no museum yet in Stalingrad. We had to look at the giant portfolios, wherein were written in the windiest of language greetings to the citizens of Stalingrad from governments, and prime ministers, and presidents.
A feeling of sadness came over us, for these were the offerings of the heads of governments, a copy of a medieval sword, a copy of an ancient shield, some parchment phrases, and many high-sounding sentiments, and when we were asked to write in the book we hadn't anything to say. The book was full of words like 'heroes of the world,' 'defenders of civilization.' The writing and the presents were like the gigantic, muscular, ugly, and stupid statuary that is usually put up to celebrate a very simple thing. All we could think of were the iron faces of the open-hearth men in the tractor works, and the girls who came up from holes under the ground, fixing their hair, and of the little boy who every evening went to visit his father in the common grave. Arid these were not silly, allegorical figures. They were little people who had been attacked and who had defended themselves
