In the afternoon we walked across the square to a little park near the river, and there under a large obelisk of stone, was a garden of red flowers, and under the flowers were buried a great number of the defenders of Stalingrad. Few people were in the park, but one woman sat on a bench, and a little boy about five or six stood against the fence, looking in at the flowers. He stood so long that we asked Chmarsky to speak to him.
Chmarsky asked him in Russian, "What are you doing here?"
And the little boy, without sentimentality, in a matter-of-fact voice said, "I am visiting my father. I come to see him every night."
It was not pathos, it was not sentimentality. It was simply a statement of fact, and the woman on the bench looked up, and nodded to us, and smiled. And after a while she and the little boy walked away through the park, back to the ruined city.
In the morning, when breakfast came to our room, we thought some major insanity had taken place. Breakfast consisted of tomato salad, pickles, watermelon, and cream soda. But it was not an insanity, it was just a normal Stalingrad breakfast. We did manage to get the cream soda changed to tea. And after a while we even grew to like tomato salad for breakfast. After all, what is it but solid tomato juice? But we never quite got used to the cream soda.
The square in front of our hotel was very broad, and it was surrounded with wrecked buildings. On one standing wall there was a loud-speaker which played from early in the morning until late at night. It broadcast speeches, and news reports, and there was a great deal of singing. And it played so loudly that we could hear it with the covers over our heads. It played so loudly that it nearly burst its own diaphragm, and often we wished it would.
We wanted to see and photograph the famous Stalingrad tractor factory. For it was in this factory that the men had continued to build tanks when the Germans were firing on them. And when the Germans got too close, they put down their tools, and went out and defended the factory, and then went back and continued working. Mr. Chmarsky, wrestling manfully with his gremlins, said he would try to arrange it for us. And in the morning, sure enough, we were told that we could go to see it.
The factory is on the edge of the town, and we could see its tall smokestacks as we drove out toward it. And the ground around it was torn and shot to pieces, and the tractor factory buildings were half in rum. We arrived at the gate, and two guards came out, looked at the camera equipment Capa had in our bus, went back, telephoned, and immediately a number of other guards came out. They looked at the cameras and did more telephoning. The ruling was inflexible. We were not even allowed to take the cameras out of the bus. The factory manager was with us now, and the chief engineer, and half a dozen other officials. And once the ruling
was accepted by us they were extremely friendly. We could see everything, but we could not photograph anything. We were very sad about this, because in its way this tractor factory was as positive a thing as the little farms in the Ukraine. Here in the factory, which had been defended by its own workers, and where those same workers were still building tractors, could be found the spirit of the Russian defense. And here, in its highest and most overwhelming aspect, we found the terror of the camera.
Inside the big gates the factory was a remarkable place, for while one group worked on the assembly line, the forges, the stamping machines, another crew was rebuilding the ruins. All buildings had been hit, most of them deroofed, and some of them completely destroyed. And the restoration went on while the tractors came off the line. We saw the furnaces where the metal is poured, and big pieces of German tanks and guns being thrown in for scrap. And we saw the metal come out through the rollers. We saw the molding, and the stamping, and the finishing, and the grinding of parts. And at the end of the line the new tractors, painted and polished, rolled out and stood in a parking lot waiting for the trains to take them out to the fields. And among the half-ruined buildings, the builders, the workers with metal and brick and glass, rebuilt the factory. There had been no time to wait until the factory was ready before starting production again.
We do not understand why we were not permitted to photograph this factory, because as we walked through we found that practically all the machinery was made in America, and we were told that the assembly line and the assembly method had been laid out by American engineers and technicians. And it is reasonable to believe that these technicians knew what they were doing and would remember, so that if there were any malice in America toward this plant in the way of bombing, the information must be available. And yet to photograph the plant was taboo. Actually we did not want photographs of the plant. What we wanted were photographs of the men and the women at work. Much of the work in the Stalingrad tractor factory is done by women. But there was no hole in the taboo. We could not take a picture. The fear of the camera is deep and blind.
Also we could not find out the number of units per day that were turned out, for this would be contrary to the new law, which makes the divulgence of industrial information treason equal to the telling of military information. However, we could find out percentages. We were told that the factory was only two per cent be-low pre-war production, and if we had wanted to, I suppose, we could have found out what pre-war production was, and thus estimated the number of tractors that were coming off the line. The finished machines are standard, and only one type is made. They are heavy-duty machines, not very large, but capable of doing any ordinary farm work. They are not stream-lined or prettified, and there are no extras. We were told that they are very good tractors, but they are not made for looks, for there is no competition. One manufacturer does not compete with another by the use of eye-pleasing forms. And it was in this place that the workers built tanks while the shells tore through the buildings and destroyed the factory bit by bit. There was a kind of terrible allegory in this factory, for here, side by side, were the results of the two great human potentials: production and destruction.
When Capa cannot take pictures he mourns, and here very particularly he mourned, because everywhere his eyes saw contrasts, and angles, and pictures that had meaning beyond their meaning. He said bitterly, "Here, with two pictures, I could have shown more than many thousands of words could say."
Capa was bitter and sad until luncheon, and then felt better. And he felt still better in the afternoon when we took a little riverboat and went for an excursion on the Volga. It is a lovely, wide, placid river at this time of year, and in this place, and it is the road for much of the transportation of the area. Little tugs, barges loaded with grain and ore, lumber and oil, ferries and excursion boats, cruised about. From the river one could see as a whole the destruction of the city.
On the river there were huge rafts with little towns built on them, sometimes five or six houses, and little corrals with cows, and goats, and chickens. These rafts had come from the far northern tributaries of the Volga, where the logs had been cut, and they moved slowly down the river, stopping at cities and towns that have been destroyed. The local authorities requisition the logs that are needed. In every place where they stopped, the requisitioned logs were cut loose and floated ashore, so that as the rafts moved down the river, they diminished gradually in size. But the process takes so long that the crews who live on the rafts have set up tiny townships on their rafts.
The life on the river was very rich, and it reminded us of Mark Twain's account of the Mississippi of his day. Little side-wheelers rushed up and down the river, and a few heavy, clumsy boats even moved under sail.