Enemy at the Gates

destroying his last chance to see the child. He eased the pistol back in the holster.

The Germans found him in the high grass. “Ruki verkh!” they shouted; he raised his hands meekly in surrender. They took his wallet and ring, but they did not abuse him and he rode away from the battlefield on top of a German tank. Tomskuschin was not afraid. In fact, he felt invigorated. He had a dream to realize someday, back behind the Urals where little Vladimir watched for his return.

In the aftermath of the battle around Ostrov, the German Sixth Army counted its booty: “more than fifty- seven thousand prisoners, more than one thousand tanks destroyed.”

As a result, General Paulus saluted his men with a special message: “The Russian Sixty-second Army and great parts of the First Tank Army are destroyed….Thanks to a brave advance… the possibility of this victory was set… We proudly think of the fallen… on to the next task set by the Fuhrer….”

Despite the fantastic success of Paulus’s forces in crushing the last Russian resistance west of the Don, the most immediate danger to Stalingrad was the Fourth Panzer Army, which was swinging northeast to join the assault on the city. Any advance they made would be along a major highway and rail line, and they had no rivers to cross.

It was logical then, that the commander of the Fourth Panzer Army, horse-faced “Papa” Hoth, should relish his new assignment. His scouts had already worked their way to within twenty miles of Stalingrad’s outskirts and with luck, Hoth hoped to beat Paulus into the city. Even the latest intelligence reports of stiffening Soviet resistance at the low range of hills crossing the railroad and highway near Abganerovo just south of the city did not worry him. He was confident he could not be stopped.

Most of the Russian stragglers retreating toward Stalingrad would have agreed with this estimate of the situation. Disillusioned, desperate, they had been reduced to fighting each other for scraps of food and water— especially water, which was scarce on the barren steppe. At precious watering holes they found another enemy had been there before them: the Kalmucks, natives to the region and intensely anti-Communist, had thrown dead animals into the wells. The poisoned water quickly killed unwary drinkers.

One retreating Russian soldier, curly-haired Lt. Hersch Gurewicz, forgot his thirst as he dove into a ditch for the third time that day. The Stukas were back, like prehistoric birds, circling impudently, searching for carrion below. Gurewicz was exhausted. Chased by the Germans for more than a year, he had begun to wonder where it would all end. Just twenty-one years old, a native of Mogilev near the Polish border, he had first joined the Red Army in 1940 during the war with the Finns. Then, his mother had been a Communist party member, working for the military. His father taught violin at the Rimsky-Korsakov School of Music in Mogilev. The German invasion had brought death to both his mother and sister, who were tracked down and slain as partisans; his father and brother disappeared into the army and Hersch had been unable to locate them since.

Now in the ditch fifty miles southwest of Stalingrad, Gurewicz was a hardened veteran. He could tell by the sound of a shell whether it was close or meant for someone behind him; he knew the exact moment to run for cover when bombers began to hurtle down out of the sun. He knew other things, too, like the price of desertion. He had seen the “Green Hats” of the NKVD instilling their special brand of discipline. The NKVD first appeared on the battlefield in July when Joseph Stalin made the Red Army a scapegoat to appease public indignation and fear about the German advance across the steppe. Stalin’s Order Number 227 had unleashed a reign of terror. At countless roadblocks, the Green Hats inspected papers, asked curt questions, and shot anyone suspected of running from the front. Thousands of corpses lined the roads as a warning to those contemplating such desertion.

Gurewicz had seen mounds of bodies at the checkpoints, but they did not shock him for he had seen worse. The previous winter, fighting as a partisan, he had entered the town of Rudnia just after the Germans left. The body of a woman lay in the street. She was blonde, young, and must have been pretty, but her arms, extended upward, had no hands, and her legs had been cut off above the knees. Someone had slit her torso from navel to crotch with a knife or bayonet. Around the corpse stood a crowd of people crying loudly. One man spoke up in trembling indignation.

“This was our schoolteacher,” he said, weeping. “She taught our children.”

His stomach churning, Gurewicz had turned away.

Once when the Germans caught him, he had learned of their savagery firsthand. Trapped in an ambush, he was marched for miles with a rope around his neck as an object lesson to villagers. A sign pinned to his chest read: “I am a Russian Partisan.” Later, at Gestapo headquarters, he passed into the hands of specialists, two blond officers in black uniforms, who pulled him into a room where another partisan had been strapped onto a table. While Gurewicz watched, a German turned a lever and the table moved apart in sections like a rack. A terrible scream burst from the man’s throat and his leg bones snapped through his skin. The lever turned again and his arms ripped apart in jagged tears. When the man fainted, his torturers shot him dead.

Gurewicz then went to his own chamber of horrors, where he was pushed into a chair and his head was forced back. An interrogator hovered over his face and slowly threaded a thin wire up his nose. While Gurewicz tried to retch, the wire entered his lung, jerked horribly and he fell unconscious.

He awoke lying in the snow, his hands tied to a horse’s tail. He dimly heard someone shouting, then a slap and the horse reared and galloped off at full speed. Snow flew in his face. He gasped for breath. The horse bucked through drifts and smashed Gurewicz into the ground again and again. His head cracked against something solid, he felt a searing pain, then nothing.

Incredibly, he regained consciousness between the crisp sheets of a hospital bed in Moscow. He was alive only because his partisan comrades had followed him to Gestapo headquarters and ambushed his tormentors. Yet every night in the weeks that followed, Gurewicz dreamed of wires and broken bones and a schoolteacher with severed limbs. The nightmares always left him spent and fearful. But through it all, he never broke and cried.

Returning to duty he became an officer in the Red Army, and went to an advanced infantry training school at Krasnodar in the Caucasus, at that time far behind the front lines. But the summer of 1942 quickly brought German tanks to the edge of the city and forced Gurewicz and his fellow students into an authorized retreat to the Volga. Now on the dusty road to Sety, he cringed as the Stukas nosed over into their dives. The concussions from explosions swept over him and pounded the breath from his body. One blast caught a cadet out in the open and ignited Molotov cocktails that were strapped to his back. A human torch, the soldier danced convulsively, his back exploding in brief orange puffs as the gasoline fed on his body.

Ignoring the planes, Gurewicz ran from the ditch to help. Kneeling over the charred, sizzling body, he saw a monstrous sight: the man’s chest had burned away, exposing the entire rib cage and his furiously pumping heart. The man he once had known was no longer recognizable. His face had melted. Gurewicz stared in horror. Another bomb exploded nearby and there was a sharp pain in his back. But he remained kneeling beside the blackened lump in the road until the heart contracted one last time, and stopped.

Only then did he leave what remained of his friend. Bleeding heavily from his own shrapnel wounds, he went on to Sety for first aid and then rode an ambulance through Stalingrad to a recuperation center across the Volga. As his back healed slowly, he began to badger doctors about releasing him to active duty. They told him to be patient. The summons would some soon enough.

To save his southern flank, Yeremenko ordered his retreating soldiers to hold at Abganerovo, while he reinforced them with whatever fresh troops he could find. The last antitank guns that he could locate on August 9 were ordered to dig into the hills overlooking the highway and the railroad; fifty-nine tanks were sent on a suicidal attack. It was not much of a holding action, Yeremenko knew, but it might at least buy a day’s time.

Meanwhile, along his Don River flank to the west of Stalingrad, the bridge at Kalach was the key to the situation. Thus, Col. Pyotr Ilyin received orders directly from Yeremenko to hold or destroy the bridge. The men of Ilyin’s 20th Motorized Brigade were hollow-eyed with fatigue. Running low on both guns and ammunition, they dug in at an orchard on the outskirts of Kalach and listened quietly as Ilyin explained that they were to be a rear guard. Ilyin tried to assure them that other Russian divisions would protect their flanks, that with this added support they could hold their position on the river. Few men in the brigade believed him, and he was thankful that none of them deserted that first night.

Across the Don all was silent. From their positions on the low, flat east bank, Russian soldiers could not see past the lip of the three-hundred-foot bluff across the river that was controlled by the Germans. Ilyin sent scouts across the river where they trained binoculars on enemy troop concentrations, and for several days an uneasy quiet