was going to get worse.
At the Barrikady he peered from an observation post and saw the chaos of iron rods and semifinished gun barrels lying about the railroad yards. While he stared in fascination, a German combat group advanced across open ground to take one of the factory halls. They crawled up to the doors and the windows, threw hand grenades and ran inside. Binder waited to see what would happen, but no one came out.
When he got back to his own sector he met Lieutenant Colonel Codre, who asked him his opinion of the situation at Stalingrad.
“The same as yours,” Binder grunted. He now knew, as Codre had for weeks, that what was going on in Stalingrad was totally futile.
Hersch Gurewicz would have agreed. Finally released from the 1 hospital after his awful experience on the road to Sety in August, he had walked into Stalingrad on a footbridge and gone directly into a trench south of the tractor plant. Almost immediately the lieutenant was ordered to mount an attack, and as he ran across an open stretch of ground, a German loomed in front of him with a bayonetted rifle. Gurewicz shoved his pistol in the man’s face and fired. Mortally wounded, the German fell forward and imbedded the bayonet in the palm of Gurewicz’s left hand.
After what seemed a long time, the German slid to the ground and died. Gurewicz pulled his hand off the bayonet and walked off to a field hospital for more surgery. While he recuperated there, he met a nurse, fell in love and slept with her frequently. Returned to his own company, Gurewicz met her whenever she made rounds on the battlefield. Their fragile relationship made life bearable for both of them.
He had not seen her for several days when he received an urgent summons to go to an aid station at the edge of the Volga. The nurse had been hurt and was asking for him. Gurewicz scrambled out of his trench and ran to the river.
She had stepped on a land mine and lay before him, swathed in bandages. He stared at the cot, wanting to scream but unable to make a sound. She was just a torso. Both of her arms and legs had been blown away and she was dying. For long minutes Gurewicz looked at the mummified thing he had embraced and loved. Then he turned and stumbled back to his hole near the tractor factory.
Unlike Hersch Gurewicz, some Russians in Stalingrad never paused to reflect on the daily slaughter. They regarded the appalling butchery as a punitive crusade, a purgative.
Commando captain Ignacy Changar, a curly-haired, longnosed twenty-one-year-old, had come into the city to do the job he knew best, killing Germans. Changar was an expert guerrilla fighter and preferred to work with a knife—a technique he had perfected in the forests of the Ukraine, where he spent months during the first year of the war. There he had seen the Germans at their worst and the experience affected him deeply.
Once, at the edge of a village, he watched from a tree line while two German soldiers accosted a woman, pushed her and demanded she give up her cow. When she said that other Germans had already taken it, they shoved her again. She continued to protest and the soldiers picked up her baby, grabbed a leg each and ripped the child apart.
In the woods, the stunned Changar had cursed and raised his rifle, but a companion knocked it down and warned him not to reveal their position. During the next months, as Changar retreated across Russia, the tormented cries of that bereaved woman followed him and, by October of 1942, he was killing Germans for the sheer pleasure of it.
For ten days now he had been involved in a bizarre contest. Ordered to occupy a half-demolished building west of the Barrikady Plant, he had led fifty men into it only to find a sizable German force entrenched in a large room across a ten-foot-wide hallway.
The corridor was impassable. No one on either side dared mount a rush, and Changar tried to estimate the size of the opposition. From the babble of voices, he judged it sufficient to hold him in check.
Days went by. Food and ammunition were passed in through the windows. Changar assumed the Germans were doing the same so he ordered special equipment: spades, shovels, and 170 pounds of dynamite.
The Russians broke through the concrete floor and started a tunnel. Digging two at a time, they slowly worked a passageway under the corridor. To mask the noise of the tools, they sang songs at the top of their voices. The Germans also burst into song from time to time, and Changar immediately figured the enemy was planning to blow him up, too.
On the eleventh day, Changar ordered a halt to further excavation. After carefully placing the dynamite at the end of the tunnel, he cut and lined a fuse along the dirt passage up into the main room.
The Germans were singing again, and someone on the other side of the hall had added a harmonica as accompaniment. While his men sang a last lusty ballad, Captain Changar lit the fuse and hollered to the two men still in the hole to “run like hell.”
With the fuse sputtering, everyone tumbled out the low windows and scattered hastily across the yard, but the explosion came too quickly. It picked them up and hurled them down again with stunning force. The shaken Changar looked back to see the strongpoint rising slowly into the air. It expanded outward, then broke into hundreds of pieces. A huge ball of fire catapulted up from the debris.
He rose and called for his men. Only two had failed to get clear, the men who had been in the hole. Changar realized he had cut the fuse too short and he worried about the error until the next day, when he went back to examine his handiwork. He counted three hundred sixty legs before he lost interest and left, satisfied that the 180 dead Germans were a partial payment for his error.
Further south near the Red October Plant, sniper Vassili Zaitsev stalked the front lines. By now he had killed nearly a hundred Germans and had been decorated with the Order of Lenin. His fame was spreading to all parts of the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, his students had amassed a formidable number of victims. Men like Viktor Medvedev and Anatoli Chekhov made the Germans afraid to lift their heads during daylight hours. And sharpshooter Tania Chernova now fired a rifle with unerring accuracy. Almost forty Germans had died in her sights, victims she continued to refer to as “sticks.” But Tania still had much to learn.
In the top story of a building, she settled down behind piles of bricks to monitor enemy traffic. Several other student snipers joined her as she waited for hours, tracking Germans who scurried back and forth between trenches. Tania and her squad followed each one with scopes zeroed in on heads and hearts. But no one fired, because Zaitsev had told them to wait for his approval before revealing their position.
Tania seethed at the order. Filled with disgust at having lost so many “sticks,” she fidgeted at the window and cursed the delay. When a column of German infantrymen suddenly burst into the open, she screamed: “Shoot!” and the room blazed with gunfire. Tania pumped shot after shot into the gray green uniforms and counted seventeen dead men sprawled on the pavement. Exultant, she sat back and exchanged congratulations with her friends.
But they had missed some Germans, who crawled back to their lines with exact coordinates of Tania’s ambush. In minutes, a succession of shellbursts blew the building in on the Russians. Tania left the dead and ran out to tell Vassili Zaitsev what had happened.
When he heard the distraught girl’s story, Zaitsev slapped her across the face with all his strength, berated her for her stupidity, and told her that she alone was responsible for the deaths of her friends. Stricken with guilt and afraid of Zaitsev’s wrath, Tania cried for hours.
In downtown Stalingrad, the static war continued, and outside Jacob Pavlov’s stronghold, decomposing bodies attested to his ferocious defense of the apartment house he had entered a month earlier. The Germans left him alone for short periods but they always came back, so in between battles, he set up an artillery spotting post on the fourth floor, protecting it with snipers who worked during daylight hours to keep the Germans down and nervous. On all battle maps at Sixty-second Army Headquarters, the house in no-man’s-land was now referred to as “
