A photogenic old peasant, magnificently muscled and bearded, kept saying to everyone: As soon as the Communists are finished, we can all go back home.
You see my face, General? said a Polish colonel. With all due respect, when your Red Army captured me back in ’39, they knocked half my teeth out. I wouldn’t sign anything, so they propped my eyelids open on little sticks…
Frankly, I’m surprised to see you here, Vlasov replied. I was under the impression that the Fascists were liquidating the Polish officer class.
It’s not so simple. In fact… But there’s a compatriot of yours in our barracks; his name is Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky. He can explain it all to you…
Although it was this Boyarsky whose assurances finally persuaded Vlasov to sit down for discussions, first with the diplomat Gustav Hilger, then with Second Lieutenant Dürken direct from the OKW Department of Propaganda, and ultimately with Captain Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, without whom there might well have been no Vlasov Army, Boyarsky remained no more than the doorkeeper of fate.32 Much the same can be said of Hilger. But less than a week after that interview, Vlasov was summoned into Second Lieutenant Dürken’s presence. A guard led him toward the commandant’s office. And now from across the parade ground he already spied a man, a man pale and slender, sunken-eyed, narrow-lipped, with the white death’s head on his black collar-tab and an Iron Cross just below the throat; a man with a swastika on the breast-pocket, a man whose dreamily quizzical expression proclaimed him master of the world. Vlasov thought him one of the most sinister individuals he’d ever seen. During his various battles, breakouts and evacuations, he’d spied the corpses of Waffen-
-men, and only those; they never permitted themselves to be taken alive. There was a certain deep ravine near Kiev, called Babi Yar. Vlasov remembered it very well. He’d read in Izvestiya that a week or two after the zone fell into Fascist hands, Waffen-- men had machine-gunned thirty thousand Jews there, but the tale seemed implausible. He’d said to his wife: That sort of conduct would only interfere with the German war effort by turning people against them. Besides, what threat would unarmed Jewish families pose to the Wehrmacht? You know, when I was in Poland I found out that most of what Izvestiya said about class exploitation there was lies. The peasants eat better than we do…
I believe you, Andrei, she’d wearily replied. You don’t have to argue the matter with me. But please lower your voice; somebody might be listening…
No, General, they have their honor, Boyarsky had insisted in turn. There’s a positive mist of propaganda in this war; it obscures everything! I won’t deny that reprisals were taken against a few Yids right here in Vinnitsa, but their cases got thoroughly investigated beforehand. I’ve been told that they were all Stalin’s hangmen.
But women and children—
It wasn’t like you think. They’re all partisans! And it was humanely done. When the Jews saw how easy it was to be executed, they ran to the pits of their own free will. After all, have you been tortured here? If not, then how can you assume that they were coerced in any way? Just think about that. And these whom everybody keeps complaining about, they’re actually quite noble in their way. You know how an -man takes out one of our K.V. II tanks? I’ve seen it myself. First he shoots off a tread. Then he charges right up and plants a grenade inside the muzzle of the cannon! You have to admit—
Let’s be rational, Vlasov interrupted him. Nobody runs to get shot unless—
I know it’s hard to explain. So let me ask you something else: Do you want to live without hope?
I beg your pardon?
General Vlasov, until the war’s over we won’t be able to calculate the number of victims on both sides. But think back on the purges of ’37—
But—
Excuse me, General! Think back on the mass arrests, the horrors of collectivization, the disastrous and utterly unnecessary casualties of the Finnish War. How would you sum all that up?
In a quiet earnest voice Vlasov replied: Lack of realism.
(And indeed, it had always struck him as not only unrealistic but unreal. He seemed to see his wife, brown-eyed queen of his integrity, feebly rising up from her bed of illness to say: Can you be sure? Andrei, did you see Stalin’s men murder all those millions? Can you live with yourself if you’re wrong?)
All right, Boyarsky was insisting. And wouldn’t it be realistic to hope that the other side might be better? Because the side we come from is so impossibly evil—
As it turned out, the man with the white death’s head wasn’t Second Lieutenant Dürken at all, only a sort of doorkeeper. He inspected the pass which the guard presented, signed a receipt for Vlasov, and led him into a waiting room, where he indicated a bench. Both of them sat down. Feeling intimidated, Vlasov would not have launched any conversation, but his keeper kept looking him up and down with bemusement and finally said: General Vlasov, we have something in common. You survived and defended yourself in the Volkhov pocket. I myself was surrounded by your armies at Demyansk!
That would have been our Eleventh, our Thirty-fourth, and then our First Shock Army…
That’s correct. You commanded Second Shock Army, I believe?
I—yes.
Fanatical fighters! laughed the -man. You put a lot of pressure on us even after we forced you to the defensive!
Thank you…
Don’t be despondent, General. You may be a Slav, but I respect you as a man. Care for a smoke?
Yes, please.
I’m curious. A shock army is what exactly?
An instrument of breakthrough, Vlasov replied a little stiffly.
Ah. The Lieutenant is almost ready to see you. He didn’t have time to finish reading your file until now. He feels that preparation is especially important in a case like this.
What exactly do you mean?
The Lieutenant will see you now.
And he led Vlasov into a room which was painted white.
Second Lieutenant Dürken did not rise. Smiling, he said that he was quite ready to grant Vlasov’s men the status of semi-allies.
32
Accounts of his fate vary. The reader is invited to select one element from each of the following pairs: a bullet or a noose; the Germans or the Russians.