Fröhlich narrows his burning eyes. He recovers from the initial shock and runs out. Shooting is coming from all sides now – rifle fire and machine-gun bursts whipping down the street. Some people are cowering in the shelter of a wall; they brace themselves to make a run for it and then dash across the road. In mid-sprint, one of them suddenly leaps up like a rubber ball, flings his arms into the air and then swings them down between his legs and pitches forward like he’s doubling up with laughter. ‘Aieeeee!’ comes his shrill scream, ‘aiieeeee!’ Suddenly he straightens up, falls silent, and topples over like a felled tree.
Fröhlich is screaming too. He doesn’t know why, but he’s screaming all the same, wild as an animal. Swinging the machine-pistol in his hand, he bounds through the hail of bullets in long strides, falls over, picks himself up again and heads off, leaping over fences and through gardens until he finally pitches up, gasping for breath, in the lee of a wall.
Three walls without a roof, the ruins of a shed or a garage. Fröhlich suddenly registers that he’s not alone. They’re lying all around him in the rubble and snow. Ten, fifteen people. They fled here or were brought here some days ago, clearly. The house has collapsed on top of them. Now they lie here, abused and mutilated, struck down but not yet dead. Limbs bruised black and blue, a gangrenous or bloody pulp of fabric, flesh and bones. Heads drained of life like mouldering skulls or shapelessly swollen and looking like they have been eaten by leprosy. There’s a babel of slurring, whimpering, gurgling and moaning. One man’s laughing crazily to himself. Another has stood up. Two burning irises, framed in white, blaze at Fröhlich, and a skeleton’s hand reaches out to him.
‘Out there…’ – the words sound like they’re coming through a crackly tannoy – ‘round the corner… the Führer, with my wife… Tell them I’ll be along soon… Get going, will you!’
He sinks back with a gurgling sound. There’s a greenish froth around his mouth. Fröhlich feels someone tugging at his sleeve.
‘Please,’ comes a whisper, ‘please!’ He spins round and finds himself staring into an ivory-white face, grotesquely distorted like a carved carnival mask. A hand gropes at his pistol holster.
‘Have mercy!’ the voice whispers again. Fröhlich’s troubled gaze scans the body writhing in front of him. It’s incomplete, with nothing below the knees. The splintered bones poke out white from the tattered, blood-soaked, frozen trouser legs. Something inside Fröhlich snaps.
‘Help!’ he shrieks, reeling away. ‘Heeelp – Heeeelp – Heeeeeelp!!’
The air is crystal-clear and bitterly cold. A flak battery has taken up position beside the District Commander’s building. The commander of the battery is urged to take his unit elsewhere. He refuses indignantly. Orders are orders! The light from open fires flickers through the blind windows of the upper storeys and their sooty smoke rises steeply skywards. The visibility is good. The Russians concentrate their fire on the building, which is visible for miles around. All around it, bomb-bursts erupt, while artillery and tank shells and mortar rounds scar and pockmark the walls. Whole rooms and their occupants are blasted into the air. Fires break out repeatedly and are only extinguished with much effort. District Command Central Stalingrad is no longer a peaceful place, most definitely not! Alongside clouds of acrid smoke and a sulphurous yellow mist, the noise of moaning and screaming permeates the rooms and the icy corridors. In the long wooden shed in the courtyard, the bodies are now piled a metre and a half high.
Geibel lies in a room on the first floor. He’s running a fever and is delirious. He’s barely noticed that his dressings have been changed and that he’s getting regular meals: a thin broth of horsemeat, and one time a kind of porridge made from wheat and corn syrup. He has no inkling that he is one of the ‘chosen ones’, those fortunate few on whom the doctors (simply in order to have something to do and to displace their own fears) are still bothering to operate. With feverish eyes, he looks about in confusion and babbles incoherently when the orderlies come to take him down to the room where the surgeon has set up a makeshift operating theatre. He lies on a wooden table, anaesthetized by ether. And so he fails to notice the massive blast that suddenly rips the wall away and showers the room with fragments of brick and shards of glass. He’s also oblivious to the plaster and mortar dust that covers his body, to the piercing cries of the wounded and to the surgeon collapsing beside him, moaning in pain.
When he comes around, he’s lying somewhere out in the corridor. Instead of having the bullet that was lodged in his femur removed, he’s now picked up some more injuries: a large piece of shell has torn his hip, while his face and arms are peppered with some smaller shrapnel. He’s now no longer one of those ‘with good prospects’. In fact, things aren’t looking too rosy even for them any more. For the surgeon has lost both of his hands in the explosion. With his bleeding stumps of arms, he has himself now unexpectedly joined the category of hopeless cases. No one sees this as clearly as he does. He begs to be injected with an overdose of morphine to end it all. The other doctors discuss the matter but come to no firm conclusion. And eventually the disabled doctor who cannot even dispatch himself is forgotten about. They’ve got other worries.
For the Russians are now only just a few hundred metres away. Red Cross flags are hung out. Will the Russians take any notice of the symbol? The whole place is alive with feverish tension. Red Army soldiers have occupied the building opposite, and are firing across the courtyard with a heavy machine gun. But they aren’t shooting at the building or at the people who have gathered in front of it in a state of high anxiety.
Then they advance up the street in their white winter camouflage suits. But as they draw near, the colonel surgeon is nowhere to be found. The Russians demand that the building be cleared. With the help of the lightly wounded, the orderlies get everyone out who is still mobile to some extent. There are only a few such patients left. Those in the densely packed corridors who get trampled to death by them as they make their way out are the lucky ones, as soon becomes clear.
Down on the street, the prisoners are being herded in lines to make their way into captivity. They are medical orderlies for the most part.
Corporal Herbert, who has hidden himself in a nearby cellar, emerges and runs along the crocodiles of men. He is looking for Geibel. He doesn’t find him. A Russian sentry forces him into line with the others. The only people left in the building now are those who can’t move. How many of them are there – five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand even? No one has any idea. In the cellars of Stalingrad, the paymasters are sitting burning banknotes, as per their orders. As they do so, they punctiliously strike through the relevant serial numbers on their lists. But no one is keeping tally of the numbers of wounded here.
Slowly the procession of prisoners begins to move. Herbert keeps looking around him. They’ve only marched a few hundred metres when bright flames suddenly leap from the building. Herbert lets out a scream and presses his fist to his mouth to stifle it.
The former commander’s headquarters was razed to the ground with all the severely wounded men inside.
Among the dead was Private Walter Geibel from Chemnitz. He hadn’t wanted to go to war. In fact, he’d never wanted to leave his little shop in Chemnitz at all. At the front, he’d only had a single goal in life – to see his wife again and his baby son, who’d been born during his absence. This one wish had also flitted through the feverish dreams and ramblings of his final days. But no one had enquired after his dreams. He’d just been a pawn in the hands of others. And quietly, dutifully and trustingly he’d died a horrific death, without ever knowing why.