our honeymoon, in 1919. It was the capital of East Prussia – a land of dark forests, crystal lakes, sand dunes, white skies, and Teutonic knights who built a fine old medieval city with a castle and a cathedral and seven good bridges across the River Pregel. There was even a university founded in 1544, where the city's most famous son, Immanuel Kant, would one day teach.
I arrived there in June 1944. As part of Army Group North. I was attached to the 132nd Infantry Division. My job was to gather intelligence on the advancing Red Army. What type of men? What condition? How well armed? Supply lines – all the usual stuff. And from the German civilians who fled their homes ahead of the Russian advance, the intelligence I had was of well-equipped, ill-disciplined, drunken Neanderthals who were bent on rape, murder and mutilation. Frankly, a lot of this seemed like hysterical nonsense. Indeed, there was a lot of Nazi propaganda to this effect that was designed to dissuade everyone from surrender. And so I resolved to discover the true situation for myself.
This was made more difficult when at the end of August the Royal Air Force bombed the city to rubble. And I do mean rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed. All of the public buildings lay in ruins. So it was a while before I was able to verify the reports of atrocities. And I was left in no doubt as to the truth of these when our troops retook the German village of Nemmersdorf, about a hundred kilometres east of Konigsberg.
I'd seen some terrible things in the Ukraine of course. And this was as bad as anything we'd done to them. Women raped and mutilated. Children clubbed to death. The whole village murdered. All seven hundred of them. You've got to see it to believe it, and now I believed it and I could have wished I didn't. I made my report. The next thing, the Ministry of Propaganda had it and were even broadcasting parts of it on the radio. Well, that was the last time they were honest about our situation. The only part of my report they didn't use was the conclusion: that we should evacuate the city by sea as soon as possible. We could have done it, too. But Hitler was against it. Our wonder weapons were going to turn the tide and win the war. We had nothing to worry about. Plenty of people believed that, too.
That was October 1944. But by January the following year it was painfully clear to everyone that there were no wonder weapons. At least none that could help us. The city was encircled, just like at Stalingrad. The only difference was that as well as fifty thousand German soldiers there were three hundred thousand civilians. We started to get people out. But in the process, thousands died. Nine thousand died in just fifty minutes when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustoff outside the port of Gotenhafen. And we kept on fighting, not because we obeyed Hitler, but because for every day that we fought, a few more civilians managed to escape. Did I say that was the coldest winter in living memory? Well, that hardly helped the situation.
For a short while the artillery and the bombing stopped as the Ivans prepared their final assault. When it came, in the third week of March, we were thirty-five thousand men and fifty tanks against perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand troops, five hundred tanks and more than two thousand aircraft. Me, I was in the trenches during the Great War and I thought I knew what it was to be under a bombardment. I didn't. Hour after hour the shells fell. Sometimes there were as many as two hundred and fifty bombers in the sky at any one time.
Finally, General Lasch contacted the Russian High Command and offered our surrender in return for a guarantee that we would be well treated. They agreed and the next day we laid down our arms. That was fine if you were a soldier, but the Russians were of the opinion that the guarantee had never applied to Konigsberg's civilian population, and the Red Army proceeded to exact a terrible revenge on it. Every woman was raped. Old men were murdered out of hand. The sick and wounded were thrown out of hospital windows to make room for Russians. In short, the whole Red Army got drunk and went crazy and did what it liked to civilians of all ages before finally they set on fire what remained of the city and their victims. Those they didn't kill they let fend for themselves in the countryside, where most of them starved to death. There was nothing any of us in the army could do about this. Those who did protest were shot on the spot. Some of us said this was justice – that we deserved it for what had been done to them – and this was true, only it's hard to think of justice when you see a naked woman crucified on a barn door. Maybe we all deserved crucifixion, like those mutinous gladiators in ancient Rome. I don't know. But every man who saw that wondered what lay in store for us. I know I did.
For several days we were marched east of Konigsberg, and as we walked we were robbed of wedding rings, wristwatches, even false teeth. Any man refusing to hand over an object of value in a Russian's eyes was shot. At the railway station we waited patiently in a field for transport to wherever we were going. There was no food and no water and all the time more and more German soldiers joined our host.
Some of us boarded a train that took us to Brno in Czechoslovakia, where at last we were given some bread and water; and then we boarded another train, headed south-east. As the train left Brno we caught sight of the city's famous St Peter and Paul Cathedral, and for many men this was almost as good as seeing a priest. Even those who didn't believe took the opportunity to pray. The next time we stopped we got out of the cattle cars, and finally we were given some hot soup. It was the thirtieth of April 1945, twenty days after our surrender. I know this because the Russians made a point of telling us the news that Hitler was dead. I don't know who was more pleased to hear this, them or us. Some of us cheered. A few of us wept. It was the end of one Hell no doubt. But for Germany and us in particular, it was the beginning of another – Hell, as it really is, perhaps, being a timeless place of punishment and suffering and run by devils who enjoy inflicting cruelty. Certainly we were judged by the book that was open; that book was Mein Kampf, and for what was written in that book we were all going to suffer. Some more than others.
From that transit camp in Romania – someone claimed it was a place called Secureni, from where Bessarabian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz – there was another train travelling north-east, right through the Ukraine, a country I had hoped never to see again, to a stop in the middle of nowhere where MVD guards drove us from the cattle cars with whips and curses. Standing there, faint from lack of food and water, blinking in the spring sunshine like unwanted dogs, we awaited our orders. Finally, after almost an hour, we were marched along a dirt road between two infinite horizons.
'Bistra!' shouted the guards. 'Hurry up!'
But to where? To what? Would any of us ever see home again? Out there, so far away from any sign of human habitation, it seemed unlikely; even more so when those who had only just survived the journey found they could walk no further and were shot where they fell at the side of the road by mounted MVD. Four or five men were shot in this way like horses that had outlived their usefulness. No man was allowed to carry another, and in this way only the strongest of us were permitted to survive, as if Prince Kropotkin had been in charge of our exhausted company.
At last we arrived at the camp, which was a selection of dilapidated grey wooden buildings surrounded by two barbed- wire fences and remarkable only because next to the main gate was the surviving steeple of a non- existent church – one of those sharp, metallic-roofed Russian church edifices that looked like some old Junker's Pickelhaube helmet. There was nothing else for miles around – not even a few huts that might once have been served by the church to which the steeple had once belonged.
We trooped through the gate under the silent, hollow eyes of several hundred men who were the remains of the Hungarian Third Army; these men were on the other side of a fence and it seemed we were to be kept separate from them, at least until we had been checked for parasites and diseases. Then we were fed, and having been pronounced fit for labour I was sent to the sawmill. I might have been an officer but no one was excused work, that is no one who wanted to eat, and for several weeks I spent every day loading and unloading wood. This seemed like a hard job until I spent a whole day shovelling lime. Returning next day to the sawmill, half-blinded by the stuff blowing in my face, and with blood streaming from my nose, I told myself I was lucky that a few splinters in my hands and a sore back were the worst I had to suffer. In the sawmill I befriended a young lieutenant called Metelmann. Really he was not much more than a boy, or so it seemed to me; physically he was strong enough but it was mental strength that was needed more, and Metelmann's morale was at a very low ebb. I'd seen his type in the trenches – the kind who awakes every morning expecting to be killed, when the only way of dealing with our predicament was to give the matter no thought at all, as if we were dead already. But since caring for another human being is often a very good means of ensuring one's own survival, I resolved to look after Metelmann as best I could.
A month passed. And then another. Long months of work and food and sleep and no memories, for it was best not to think about the past, and of course the future was something that had no meaning in the camp. The present and the life of a voinapleni was all there was. And the life of the voinapleni was bistra and davai and nichevo; it was kasha and klopkis and the kate. Beyond the wire was the death zone and beyond that there was another wire, and beyond that just the steppe, and more of the steppe. No one thought of escape. There was
