‘Strong nerves and iron tenacity are the best guarantees for succeeding in this world.’ On a shelf with illustrated magazines there was a plastic puppy with its paw raised in something approximating to a ‘Heil!’ Posters with similar puppies hailing Hitler were to be seen on the walls of houses and in shop windows.
Not far from us was an airfield that provided our communications link with Moscow. The planes of Front Commander Marshal Zhukov were always parked there at the ready. From time to time senior figures on their way to the airfield to fly to Moscow would drop in on us, as, indeed, did emissaries of Moscow arriving at the front. On one occasion we had a phone call from front headquarters to warn us that a Yugoslav general on his way to see Stalin would stop with us for a time before leaving for Moscow.[1]
We were all feeling a sense of great responsibility. I was entrusted with receiving the general, that is, giving him lunch and looking after him because it was believed that, as a Muscovite, I would know about that sort of thing.
Cooking a respectable meal with the assistance of our neighbour, Ewa, who looked after the kitchen for us, was not a problem. Serving it properly was more challenging. We Muscovite children of the first five-year plans, of the rolling five-day working week when not everybody had the same day off, barely knew what a family meal was. When the seven-day week was restored, with Sundays off for everyone, our fathers got home from work, as was expected, after midnight, devotedly giving their all to their jobs. It was a rare Sunday when they were to be found at home. As for the war… barely a month had passed since everyone had their personal spoon tucked into the top of their boot.
In short, I had scant knowledge of how to serve a meal properly. I was also bewildered by the abundance in the sideboard of our ‘working apartment’ of knives and forks of varying calibre and shape, and all manner of smaller items of unknown purpose. Zhenya Gavrilov, a bright-eyed headquarters messenger, walked behind me, dragging a rigidly starched bedsheet along the floor and rigorously polishing with it the wine and vodka glasses and anything else I found in the dining room and kitchen that we could use. For better or worse the table was laid, my superiors inspected it and found my improvisations convincing.
The Yugoslav general was a big man of indeterminate age, in a baggy, tawdry uniform, with a straight parting in his barely greying dark hair. He seemed not to notice the elaborate setting of the table in his honour. His manner was very formal, either because that was natural to him or because he had got into the habit of being reserved. He unintentionally mortified me when, taking his napkin out of its silver ring, he stopped short and looked closely at the German monogram on it. I do not know what he was thinking, but I scolded myself. To hell with all their napkins and napkin rings, their monograms and all their other flim-flam.
The general seemed to be eating and drinking more out of politeness than because he was hungry, although he had only just got out of a German concentration camp where he would have known all about hunger. In addition, he was distracted from eating by the conversation. There was none of the usual military spiritedness in the gaze of his light grey eyes, which was slow and gentle, at times alert, at times remote. Our common language was German. As I translated what he was telling us, he looked silently and in a friendly way at everybody sitting at the table, nodding slightly. In part he knew individual words in Russian, and there were also many that were cognate with his language.
As a Yugoslav general, our guest had long been held in a special concentration camp for prominent military and political figures captured by the Germans. René Blum, the son of the sometime French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, was there, as was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son. The Yugoslav general spoke very warmly about him and how he had comported himself in the camp. The Germans gave Yakov no peace, constantly threatening him, trying to get something from him, to get him to do something, but he behaved impeccably and with dignity. The general was transferred to a different camp, and there heard the news that the Germans had dealt with Yakov Dzhugashvili and he was no longer alive.[1] This was reported to Stalin and he ordered the Yugoslav general to be brought to him.
A general in a tattered uniform, liberated from a concentration camp; his closeness to the captured Yakov Dzhugashvili; the fact that Stalin wanted to see him and would perhaps that very evening hear from him what he was telling us now, could not but excite his listeners’ curiosity. We bade him a warm goodbye when he and the individuals accompanying him got into a car to be driven to the airfield.
I never heard another word about him and know nothing of his fate. Stalin tended to be hard on witnesses. I was left with a liking for the general, and remember his eyes, the eyes of a man who had been through a lot, spent a lot of time thinking, and who had perhaps already resigned himself to something.
From the day the Yugoslav general appeared there began an increasing number of incidents, circumstances and events that reached all the way to Stalin. Marshal Zhukov’s pilots dropped in on us for tea and to kill time. They were so good looking, each more handsome than the one before, and they brought news of Moscow, the city so dear to us. Hearing that I lived in Moscow on Leningrad Highway, they volunteered to look up my family. ‘We’ll be going past your door,’ they said. Planes were landing at that time on the Leningrad Highway, where the air terminal is now. But I no longer had any family for them to look up: my father had left my mother, and guests would not be welcome. ‘Okay, then, let’s grab Ewa and take her for a spin round Moscow. We’ll bring her back tomorrow.’ They would have, too. They were very dashing.
All the time at the front people had joked and got up to pranks with great gusto. They had been scathing, cheery, flamboyant. Here, though, everything was different. We were hanging about as if we were less involved with the war. It really was difficult to know whether we were fighting or not. Now and again our lads would loose off some shots, but in an offhand sort of way. The citadel did not snarl back. Were the Germans all dead? Were they hiding? Or were they saving their shells to fight back when our troops mounted their assault? All was quiet. It was a long time since any German planes had come to drop supplies.
The workplaces of our cryptographer and myself, with their associated equipment, were in the third room of the apartment, a pink bedroom.
We had pink wallpaper and a fluffy pink double bedspread, rolled up but abandoned at the last moment. The cryptographer now slept in the double bed. In place of a chandelier, an open, upside-down pink umbrella was playfully attached by its handle to the ceiling. In this spacious room with two windows, the cryptographer and I were allocated our separate spaces on opposite walls: the man was after all working with codes that had to be kept secret from everyone. I, far more modestly, was working with a dictionary, sifting through that postbag of German letters or newly acquired documents, and a typewriter. The cryptographer did not say much: he was always wearing a headset and always had a cigarette in his lips, the ash from which he periodically tapped off on to the carpet. He and his secrets were not, however, so hermetically sealed off from me that I did not know a coded message had been sent ‘upstairs’ to the effect that the gold in the German bank had been found not to have been evacuated.
Each of the apartment’s three rooms was kitsch in its own way. Either that, or its German cosiness only seemed obnoxious and vulgar to us in our state of homelessness. You tried not to look in the corner where scattered children’s toys had been swept off the pink carpet. You tried not to, but you did peep, and might even find yourself looking rather closely and working out from the toys what the age of their owner must have been: just over one year old, probably. The, probably folding, cot that had stood there – there was nowhere else for it – had been taken with them. There were no other clues. But those colourful toys: the blow-up animals and wooden blocks, the plastic rings and rattles… but that’s enough of that, because first, before this baby was born, its parents had kicked a Polish family out of their own apartment. In the apartment opposite, across the landing, where other staff members now worked and slept, there had also been Polish people living before the Germans arrived.
1
Naturally nobody told us his name at the time. In writings about the war it is sometimes given as Stefanović.
1
Yakov was shot at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Stalin refused a German proposal to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus, taken captive at Stalingrad, remarking that ‘You do not exchange a marshal for a soldier.’ Yakov was particularly depressed by Stalin’s statement, broadcast over the camp radio, that ‘there are no Russian prisoners of war, only traitors to the Motherland’. He effectively committed suicide in 1943 by refusing to return to his hut and running into the camp’s death strip, where he was shot by a guard. Website Khronos, quoted in ‘Dzhugashvili (Stalin) Yakov Iosifovich 1908–1943’,