We had to hold on with both hands while our bus bumped and leaped over the country. We seemed to go on endlessly across the steppe, until at last, over a little rise, we saw Stalingrad below us and the Volga behind it.
On the edges of the city there were hundreds of new little houses growing up, but once in the city itself there was little except destruction. Stalingrad is a long strip of a city along the bank of the Volga, nearly twenty miles long, and only about two miles wide in its widest part. We had seen ruined cities before, but most of them had been ruined by bombing. This was quite different. In a bombed city a few walls stand upright; this city was destroyed by rocket and by shell fire. It was fought over for months, attacked and retaken, and attacked again, and most of the walls were flattened. What few walls stand up are pitted and rotted with machine-gun fire. We had read, of course, about the incredible defense of Stalingrad, and one thing occurred to us in looking over this broken city, that when a city is attacked and its buildings knocked down, the fallen buildings offer fine shelter to the defending army-shelter, and holes, and nests out of which it is almost impossible to drive a determined force. Here, in this raving ruin, was one of the great turning points of the war. When, after months of siege, of attack and counterattack, the Germans were finally surrounded and captured, even their stupidest military men must have felt somewhere in their souls that the war had been lost.
In the central square were the remains of what had been a large department store, and here the Germans had made their last stand when they were surrounded. This is where Von-Paulus was captured and where the whole siege crumbled.
Across the street was the repaired Intourist Hotel where we were to stay. We were given two large rooms. Our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster, and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places. During the time we were in Stalingrad we grew more and more fascinated with this expanse of ruin, for it was not deserted. Underneath the rubble were cellars and holes, and in these holes many people lived. Stalingrad was a large city, and it had had apartment houses and many flats, and now has none except the new ones on the outskirts, and its population has to live some place. It lives in the cellars of the buildings where the apartments once were. We would watch out of the windows of our room, and from behind a slightly larger pile of rubble would suddenly appear a girl, going to work in the morning, putting the last little touches to her hair with a comb. She would be dressed neatly, in clean clothes, and she would swing out through the weeds on her way to work. How they could do it we have no idea. How they could live underground and still keep clean, and proud, and feminine. Housewives came out of other holes and went away to market, their heads covered with white headcloths, and market baskets on their arms. It was a strange and heroic travesty on modern living.
There was one rather terrifying exception. Directly behind the hotel, and in a place overlooked by our windows, there was a little garbage pile, where melon rinds, bones, potato peels, and such things were thrown out. And a few yards farther on, there was a little hummock, like the entrance to a gopher hole. And every morning, early, out of this hole a young girl crawled. She had long legs and bare feet, and her arms were thin and stringy, and her hair was matted and filthy. She was covered with years of dirt, so that she looked very brown. And when she raised her face, it was one of the most beautiful faces we have ever seen. Her eyes were crafty, like the eyes of a fox, but they were not human. The face was well developed and not moronic. Somewhere in the terror of the fighting in the city, something had snapped, and she had retired to some comfort of forgetfulness. She squatted on her hams and ate watermelon rinds and sucked the bones of other people's soup. She usually stayed there for about two hours before she got her stomach full. And then she went out in the weeds, and lay down, and went to sleep in the sun. Her face was of a chiseled loveliness, and on her long legs she moved with the grace of a wild animal. The other people who lived in the cellars of the lot rarely spoke to her. But one morning I saw a woman come out of another hole and give her half a loaf of bread. And the girl clutched at it almost snarlingly and held it against her chest. She looked like a half-wild dog at the woman who had given her the bread, and watched her suspiciously until she had gone back into her own cellar, and then she turned and buried her face in the slab of black bread, and like an animal she looked over the bread, her eyes twitching back and forth. And as she gnawed at the bread, one side of her ragged filthy shawl slipped away from her dirty young breast, and her hand automatically brought the shawl back and covered her breast, and patted it in place with a heart-breaking feminine gesture.
We wondered how many there might be like this, minds that could not tolerate living in the twentieth century any more, that had retired not to the hills, but into the ancient hills of the human past, into the old wilderness of pleasure, and pain, and self-preservation. It was a face to dream about for a long time.
Late in the afternoon Colonel Denchenko called on us and asked if we would like to see the area of the fighting for Stalingrad. He was a fine-looking man, with a shaved head, a man of about fifty. He wore a white tunic and belt, and his breast was well decorated. He took us around the city and showed us where the Twenty-First Army had held, and where the Sixty-Second Army had supported it. He had brought the battle maps. He took us to the exact place where the Germans were stopped, and beyond which they had been unable to move. And on the edge of this line is Pavlov's house, which is a national shrine and will probably continue to be one.
Pavlov's house was an apartment building, and Pavlov was a sergeant. Pavlov with nine men held the apartment house for fifty-two days against everything the Germans could bring against it. And the Germans never took Pavlov's house, and they never took Pavlov. And this was the farthest point of their conquest.
Colonel Denchenko took us to the edge of the river and showed us where the Russians had stood and could not be dislodged under the steep banks. And all about were the rusting ruins of the weapons the Germans had brought to bear. The colonel was a Kiev man, and he had the light blue eyes of the Ukrainians. He was fifty, and his son had been killed at Leningrad.
He showed us the hill from which the greatest German drive had come, and there was activity on the hill, and tanks were deployed on the side hill. At the bottom were several rows of artillery. A documentary film company from Moscow was making a history of the siege of Stalingrad before the city is rebuilt. And in the river a barge was anchored. The picture company had come down from Moscow on the river, and they lived on the barge.
And now Chmarsky's gremlin got to work again. We said we would like to take photographs of this motion picture while they were making it.
And Chmarsky said, "Very well, tonight I will call them and find out if we can get permission."
So we went back to our hotel, and as soon as we got there we heard the artillery firing. In the morning when he telephoned that phase of the shooting was all over and we had missed it. Day after day we tried to take pictures of this refilming of the siege of Stalingrad, and every day we missed it through one accident or another. Chmarsky's gremlin was working all the time.