The friend wrote that her lover, Vassili Zaitsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, had died in an explosion during the final weeks of fighting around the Red October Plant. The news drove Tania into acute depression. As days passed, her physical strength improved greatly but doctors noticed that she rarely exhibited interest in anything around her. Instead she just stared for hours into space as though trying to recapture a lost moment.
At another hospital, Lt. Hersch Gurewicz clumped about on his artificial leg and tried to get a new assignment in the Red Army. Told that he would have to be discharged for medical reasons, Gurewicz wrote directly to Stalin, begging for reconsideration. The letter won a reprieve and Gurewicz found himself a mail censor with a Polish contingent heading west toward the Ukraine. Gleefully, the lieutenant packed an extra wooden leg and headed back to war.
Several hundred miles to the north, guards at a railroad station in the Ural city of Novosibirsk gently wrapped their arms around the bandaged figure of Commando Capt. Ignacy Changar as he stood singing on the station platform. Transferred from a hospital in Moscow, Changar had gotten so drunk on the train ride that he had no idea where he was supposed to be.
Admitted to a military hospital, Changar began to flirt with the nurses, particularly one young girl who came from Kiev. When he asked repeatedly for her, she went to him wondering why such an old man would be interested in her. She had no idea that Ignacy was just twenty-one, because he now had snow-white hair.
What of the German Sixth Army? Swallowed up on the steppe, it had disappeared into the wastes of Russia and no one in the German High Command had witnessed its going. In the last days of the battle, Paulus had allowed several squads of men to make a break toward the west. But they all had been captured or killed by alert Red Army units.
Other Germans had also left on their own. Quartermaster Karl Binder took a group with him as far as Karpovka, thirty miles west of Stalingrad before the enemy surrounded him and forced his surrender.
Lt. Emil Metzger hid in a bunker in the vain hope that the Russians would leave the area and allow him to slip off at night toward the Don. But the Russians fired bullets down a ventilation pipe and wounded Emil in the right heel. Finally driven into the open by grenades, he walked off to prison camp with blood sloshing around in his boot.
Two Germans actually reached friendly lines. In late February, a Corporal Neiwig staggered into a command post of Army Group Don nearly 150 miles west of the
On March 1, Pvt. Michael Horvath walked into German positions near Voronezh, far to the west of Stalingrad. Captured on January 31, he had been shipped off to another front as an interpreter for Russian intelligence officers. Therefore, Horvath could add little information to what was known about the Sixth Army since the day of its capitulation. The German High Command and the German people were unable to tell how Paulus and his troops were faring in Russian hands.
The field marshal and his generals were, at that moment, living in relatively comfortable quarters near Moscow. But the men Paulus believed would be guaranteed food and medical care were dying in great numbers on the icy steppes.
Thirty miles northwest of Stalingrad, at Kotluban, a group of Russian nurses heard the German prisoners coming long before they saw them. They listened in astonishment to the mournful groaning as lines of soldiers crept over the horizon and shuffled through snowdrifts toward them. Lowing like cattle, the Germ ans were a procession of rags and dilapidated earmuffs, blanketwrapped feet, and faces blackened by beard and frost. Almost all of them were crying, and the nurses felt an instinctive wave of sympathy for them. Then the Russian guards hoisted rifles and fired indiscriminately into the columns. As the victims fell down and died, the rest of the Germans plodded along, at a half mile an hour, and the nurses shook their fists in outrage at their own soldiers.
Quartermaster Karl Binder was in another of these processions. Marching toward Vertaichy on the Don he flinched at every shot, and at each dull whack of a rifle butt crashing down on a skull. Hundreds of bodies lay beside the trail, freshly killed Germans, Russian women and children dead for weeks, Soviet and German troops mutilated in months-old battles.
At villages along the march, civilians broke into the lines to rob the prisoners of lighters, fountain pens, and fieldpacks. His hands blue from the cold, Binder plunged on and tried to distract himself by thinking of his family safe at home in Germany.
Emil Metzger had already walked more than a hundred miles to a train that took him to the foothills of the Urals in Siberia. Besides the bullet still in his heel, Metzger had fallen victim to typhus and, by the time he reached a straw cot in a primitive barracks, was close to death. Handing his pictures of Kaethe to a chaplain he said: “Give these to my wife if you get back.” Then
In the morning, Emil woke to an unreal silence. Nearly everyone in his barracks had perished during the night. Suddenly ashamed of his own willingness to give up the struggle, the lieutenant vowed he would survive. From that moment on, he ignored his fever and ate anything the Russians offered, though the food “was like eating his own gall.”
The German Sixth Army was scattered to more than twenty camps stretching from the Arctic Circle to the southern deserts.
One train carried thousands of Germans from the Volga to Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. Inside each car, stuffed with one hundred or more prisoners, a macabre death struggle ensued as the Germans killed each other for bits of food tossed to them every two days. Those closest to the door were set upon by ravenous soldiers in the rear; only the strongest men survived the weeks-long trip. By the time the train reached the Pamir Mountains, almost half its passengers were dead.
Other Germans remained in Stalingrad to help reconstruct the city they had devastated. Typhus swept their ranks and in March, the Russians dug a ditch at Beketovka and dumped nearly forty thousand German bodies into a mass grave.
Cpl. Franz Deifel, who had thought of killing himself in January, survived the plague and now picked up the bricks of Stalingrad. In March, Deifel heard a whistle from the tractor factory as the Russians ran the first train around that massive plant’s convoluted rail system. Later that month, Deifel also saw his first butterfly of the spring. A blaze of yellow and orange, it flitted nervously from ruin to ruin in the glorious sunlight of a cloudless day.
But for more than five hundred thousand other Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Rumanians, the Russian winter had been a harsh, unfair struggle. During a single, three-month span—February, March, and April of 1943— more than four hundred thousand of them had perished.
In many cases, the Russians let them starve to death. Every third day, Red Army trucks unloaded heads of cabbage, loaves of frozen bread, even garbage for the prisoners to eat. At Tambov, Krinovaya, Yelabuga, Oranki, Susdal, Vladimir, and other camps, the inmates fell upon the food and beat each other to death for scraps.
Other prisoners, more intent on survival, took matters into their own hands, especially in camps where military self-discipline had broken down. At Susdal, Felice Bracci first noticed it when he saw corpses without arms or legs. And Dr.’ Cristoforo Capone found human heads with the brains scooped out, or torsos minus livers and kidneys. Cannibalism had begun.
The cannibals were furtive at first, stealing among the dead to hack off a limb and eat it raw. But their tastes quickly matured and they searched for the newly dead, those just turning cold, and thus more tender. Finally they roamed in packs, defying anyone to stop them. They even helped the dying to die.
Hunting day and night, their lust for human flesh turned them into crazed animals and, by late February, they
