In 1960, the very year when Shostakovich visited Dresden and, evidently feeling stifled by the dreamily mysterious forest all around, composed his unhappy Opus 110, Paulus’s memoir Ich stehe hier auf Befehl saw the light; but by then Liddell Hart had already published The German Generals Talk, so nobody paid much attention to this secondary effort, which was, after all, no more than the self-justification of a bookkeeper’s son. Thanks to the Cold War, Stalingrad had become an embarrassment to everyone concerned. Nonetheless, some of the victors conceded that this Paulus hadn’t been half bad at certain tactical operations involving armor. His son faithfully preserved, revised and elaborated these various defensive writings, but Dresden’s maples and lindens grew over the father’s memory like monuments. First the will, then the deed: In 1970, when the Stalingrad Tractor Works (now called the Volgograd Tractor Works) rolled out its one-millionth tank, Ernst Paulus followed our Führer’s wish at last, blowing off the skullcap in a grey and crimson shower. The last thing he saw, or seemed to see, was an army of white skeletons on that black day. ‣
ZOYA
The essential thing about anti-guerrilla warfare—one must hammer this home to everybody—is that whatever succeeds is right.
Zoya’s story has no beginning. Defined only by its end, which takes place not far westward of Moscow, in a village called Petrischevo, the tale projects itself backwards through predictable and possibly fallible contrasts into the sunny prewar collectivity for which Zoya chose to give her life. But what if she didn’t choose? The crime for which the Fascists condemned her—setting fire to a stables, in obedience to Comrade Stalin’s scorched earth policy—would surely have been followed up by grander salvoes had luck permitted. In brief, Zoya didn’t mean to die—at least, not then, not for a stables! But then, to how many has it been given to reckon at all, let alone to conclude: My death is a fair price to pay for this objective? The July Twentieth conspirators might have been thus satisfied, had they succeeded in their intention of assassinating Hitler. They didn’t, and got hanged with piano wire. General Vlasov, who fought first against Hitler, then against Stalin, met a kindred death. Was that “worth it”? What about the Berliners and Leningraders who died in air raids, or the soldiers on both sides who perished merely because their respective Supreme Commands from fear, vanity or incompetence forbade retreat? Or, to take the case still further, what about the random deaths that we die in peacetime? Looked at in this light, Zoya’s fate becomes supremely ordinary.
In those days, neutrality meant friendlessness at best, while allegiance to either side invited a capital sentence from the other. Moreover, these punishments usually visited themselves upon the innocent. For every German soldier killed by the Partisans, between fifty and a hundred civilian hostages got stood against the wall. Accordingly, it was no “traitor,” but a reasonable conclave of the villagers themselves, who went to report Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, member in good standing of the Moscow Komsomol, to the Field Police. If somebody had to go to the gallows for what appeared to have been a rash, even absurd action, then why not the perpetrator, who’d endangered them all without their consent? Indeed, they were just in time. The S.D. lieutenant sat looking out the window of what had once been the school. (He’d had the teacher hanged in the very first batch of hostages. One of her high heels fell off at the very end; he remembered that.) Making a vague gesture at the huts across the street, he said: Arrest all that scum.—Just then the delegation of villagers came in.
In a photograph which a peasant soldier, hopeful of sausage or a wristwatch, found on the body of a battle-slain Fascist, we see Zoya (whose nom de guerre was Tanya) with downcast head as she limps through the snow to her execution, wearing already the self-accusing sign around her neck. It is 29 November 1941. Her eighteenth birthday was in September. A crowd of young Germans escort her, gazing on her with the sort of lustful appraisal which is common currency in a dancehall.
Now she has arrived. The snow is hard underfoot. A dark oval wall of spectators—Fascists whose double columns of buttons gleam dully on their greatcoats; kerchiefed village women, whose faces express the same pale seriousness their grandmothers would have worn for any camera or stranger; small, dark, hooded children in the front row—encloses the scene. Beside the sturdy, three-legged gallows, which rises out of sight, a pyramidal platform of snow-covered crates allows one party, the hangman, to ascend, while a tall stool awaits the other. Zoya stands there between two tall soldiers. Clenching her pale fists, shaking her dark hair out of her eyes, she swings her head toward one of the soldiers, who draws himself up stiff and straight to accept her gaze. She says: You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.
Some say that it was General Vlasov’s soldiers who found her at the beginning of the Moscow counteroffensive the following month. I myself can hardly credit that, for Vlasov, who commands my sympathy, if not my imitation, would surely have hesitated to collaborate with the Fascists had he found such early and striking proof of their cruelty. No doubt he saw the final photograph (taken, so I’ve read, by the Pravda journalist Lidin), the one which presents to us her naked corpse in the snow, her head arched back as if in sexual ecstasy, her long-lashed eyes frozen tightly shut, her lips clenched, as if to protect her broken teeth, and that noose, now hard as a braid of wire cable, still biting into her neck, her face swollen with blood into a Greek mask. Perhaps Vlasov convinced himself that this image was a propaganda fake, or even that she could by some sufficiently draconian interpretation of military law have been construed to be a fifth columnist worthy of death.
It was the night before they retook Solnechnogorsk. Vlasov was pacing a riverbank like the frozen, snow-crusted defile between Zoya’s breasts. Beside him strode a scout who’d just returned from the Fascist lines. The two men had finished discussing the enemy dispositions. Now they were talking about Zoya.
What they did to her will make us all fight more fiercely tomorrow, I guarantee it, Comrade General.
So would you say that she distinguished herself?
Why, she’s a national heroine!
And that’s what’s strange. Why on earth would the Fascists want to give us a national heroine?