The art historian Nikolai Punin made his last siege-winter diary entry on 13 December, sitting in his dark room overlooking the Sheremetyev Palace. Earlier, he had written of his longing that the churches be opened and filled with prayers and tears and candles, making ‘less palpable this cold iron matter in which we live’. Now, he likened Stalin to the jealous Old Testament God:
And everything is simple; no one says anything in particular. They don’t talk about anything except ration cards or evacuation. They simply suffer and probably think, like I do, that maybe it’s not their turn yet.
I feel the loneliness most of all at night, and the senselessness of petitions and prayers, and sometimes I cry quietly. . And there is no salvation. And one can’t even be imagined, unless you give in to daydreams. ‘We turned our backs on Him,’ I think, ‘and He on us.’
Part 3. Mass Death: Winter 1941–2
I think that real life is hunger, and the rest a mirage. In the time of famine people revealed themselves, stripped themselves, freed themselves of all trumpery. Some turned out to be marvellous, incomparable heroes, others — scoundrels, villains, murderers, cannibals. There were no half-measures. Everything was real. The heavens were unfurled and in them God was seen. .
Dmitri Likhachev
Death certificate, December 1941. The cause of death is given as ‘dystrophy’, a euphemism for starvation.
10. The Ice Road
Lieutenant Fritz Hockenjos was thirty-two years old and commander of a
He entered the Soviet Union on 24 November in a heavily laden troop train. His first view of it, from the flat-bed carrying the train’s anti-aircraft guns, was of the wide arable fields of Lithuania. ‘Here is a landscape after my own heart! No barbed-wire fences or telegraph poles — just freedom and space!’ Stopping at a country station to feed and exercise their horses, the soldiers were quickly surrounded by a friendly crowd of gawky teenage boys and women in felt boots and coloured headscarves: ‘They all spoke a little German, joked with us. . A lively barter trade began, and when the band got out and struck up a waltz, it wouldn’t have taken much for the soldiers to start dancing with the girls, who looked as if they wouldn’t have minded.’ The next day they stopped at Riga, where they saw their first Russians — prisoners of war working on the railway track under a Latvian auxiliary:
They wear rags and have starved, blank faces. They look so hungry you think they’re going to collapse at any moment. They came up to the train and started begging — I shrink from the comparison but there is no other — like animals. Our soft-hearted boys handed them bread, but the Latvian drove the poor devils off with the butt of his rifle. As they trotted away between the tracks they picked up sausage skins, bits of bread and cigarette butts, frantically stuffing everything into their mouths. The Latvian explained that in his camp about fifty prisoners die every day from hunger or illness, or are shot while trying to escape. But he also told us that the Bolsheviks, as they retreated, took with them half of Riga’s children and sixty percent of the people of Dunaburg [today’s Daugavpils]. All this chilled us; here in the East there’s a damned hard wind blowing.
On the night of the 26th they reached the barbed wire and wooden watchtowers of the pre-1939 border with Russia itself. ‘I was sitting by the window and blew on the frost-covered glass so as to be able to see out. . In the pale moonlight I could see heather, moorland, felled forests, untilled fields, undergrowth.’ From now on, the train had to be blacked out at night, and its wheels defrosted with blowtorches after every halt. Outside, the landscape remained ‘always the same, always comfortless’:
A few stunted willows and birches; otherwise, white monotony. A herd of small dark huts huddle forlornly; dark forests circle the horizon; it snows a little. We were stuck on an open stretch for several hours. Thickly wrapped figures were working on the tracks — women and old men. They looked up as we passed, but it was as if they didn’t see us. Only the children waved or begged for bread — ‘Pan [Sir], gib Brot!’ they shouted. These were the first words we heard from Russians, and we were to hear them again and again.
On 28 November Hockenjos and his men disembarked from the troop train and took to the roads, which was already seething with soldiers, horses and long columns of prisoners. Pushing their heavily laden bicycles into a freezing wind, they crossed the River Volkhov on a pontoon bridge, passed through the ruined town and castle of Gruzino, then on from village to overflowing village looking for regimental command, which they eventually found ‘squeezed into one small, smelly hut — staff officers, clerk, cartographer, messenger, telephone operator and radio operator all in one room’. Their own billet for the night was a cottage with a peasant woman and her three children. The family were not, the mother made haste to explain, Russians, but Latvians, descendants of Baptists exiled by the tsars for refusing to serve in the army. ‘In 1938’, Hockenjos gathered, ‘the Soviets had come and taken all the men, and sent them to a labour camp near Archangel. We promised that when we found her husband there we would send him home. Adolf Hitler — who she recognised on a stamp — would put everything right!’
After supper their hostess played chorales on a harmonium, in return for which the young Germans showed her their family photographs, and amused the children by demonstrating the workings of their ink pens, pocket alarm clocks and the dynamo lamps on their bicycles. ‘I asked her about “Kolchos, Komsomol and Komissar”; no — in the town there were no Party members and no commissar, but there was a
The next day the bicycle unit moved on to the village of Rakhmysha, eight kilometres behind the front line and its final destination. ‘We have been given’, Hockenjos wrote that evening,
a typical Russian hut, so sour-smelling that we almost reeled straight back out again. The walls are papered with old newspapers — against cockroaches, as we soon discovered. A table, a bench, a bed behind the stove and two pictures of saints are the only furnishings. The only metal objects are the stovepipe and the
