During the night a herd of cows was being driven east along a dark road. Cars coming the other way, driving slowly without lights, turned on their headlights, startling the cows which, dazzled, bumped into each other and found themselves with no room to move. Among their black and white coats were flashes of ginger from Russian or Byelorussian cows that had been rustled by the Germans and brought back to their Reich. Cars hooted, the beams from their headlights sought a path through the panicking herd, a whip whistled, lights danced in the cows’ huge eyes. For some reason it was frightening.
Soon people began to forget the enemy in the citadel; the liberated city had better things to think about. General Chuikov’s army had allocated units to storm it and moved on. Red Army troops were already advancing beyond the borders of Brandenburg and Pomerania. At this time I was still assigned to a Smersh group subordinate to front headquarters that had remained in Poznań.
Forty kilometres from Poznań, to our rear, in a shtetl away from the highways of the war, there was, we learned, a camp for captured Italian generals. We went to take a look. The German guards had fled before the Red Army arrived, and 160 Italian generals, now unguarded by anyone, just carried on living in the camp. Not long ago they had been fighting us, but after the coup in Italy, the German command summoned them from the front for a supposed meeting and promptly declared them prisoners of war. In the changed situation, they found themselves as confused as the Italian soldiers we had liberated in Bydgoszcz. How would we regard them: as prisoners of the Germans or as our recent enemies?
We drove past the barbed wire. Emptiness. Several huts. Two men sawing a log. We approached and, when they saw us, they stopped sawing. Two weary, elderly men, two pairs of eyes looked gloomily and expectantly towards us. We said hello in German. One man, dark-skinned with heavy folds on his face, with a bright woollen scarf round his neck, nodded silently. He was in the uniform of an Italian general. The other talked to us. This was Specialist Leader Walther Treublut, a German interpreter and the only member of the German camp administration to have remained at his post. He was bareheaded, grey-haired, and had a pointed nose. His upper lip was drawn inwards.
Our colonel went round the huts, accompanied by Walther Treublut, and informed the Italians, with Sonderführer Treublut translating, that they were free and, as soon as the situation at the front allowed, would be assisted to return home.
Some time later, when the weather was warmer, when the food supplies in the camp ran out and the generals had set off back to Italy, I was to talk to Walther Treublut again, after he was arrested one night in the city park where he was sleeping on a bench.
Having bade farewell to the Italian generals and not knowing what to do, he headed for Poznań, went to the house where he had lived for several years, but found that it was once more occupied by the Polish family who had lived there before being expelled during the occupation. Not wanting to get on the wrong side of anybody, he lay down on a bench in the park, because he was very tired and hungry.
I asked him why he had not fled with the camp administration and guards. He shrugged and did not reply. Then he told me about himself. He was born and lived in Reval, now Tallinn. He owned a chemical laboratory that manufactured perfume products, which he sold through his father’s chemist’s shop.
He suffered from pulmonary disease and, travelling in Italy, met a girl in the village of Domaso on Lake Como. They had known each other for only five days, and the Italian girl knew not a word of German while Treublut knew barely five words in Italian. When he got home to Reval, he swotted up on Italian, sent a stream of postcards to Domaso, and finally offered his hand and his heart to the beautiful Nereida Betetti. Their wedding took place beside Lake Como, and Treublut took his Italian bride to Reval and Estonian citizenship.
‘In German literature much was written about the faithfulness of German women and the frivolity and duplicity of French and Italian women, but I was very happy in my marriage.’
Soon the policy of ‘repatriation’ of Germans began, and he found himself in Poznań where, on this bridgehead, National Socialism blossomed in all its glory. The authorities would not register his daughter, because he had called her Fiametta.
He stopped. His eyes were dilated and motionless. He knew nothing about his family and was indifferent to what fate might hold in store for him now. He was infinitely tired of living in this world of Nazism and war.
The Poznań citadel was taken on the eve of 23 February, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the establishment of the Red Army. It seemed a significant gesture on the part of history, of which there were many on our path to victory. From the records of our interrogation of the German officers, I was able to piece together the last hours of the commander of the citadel, Major General Ernst Gonnel. He gave the order to surrender, arranged for it to be communicated to the troops, and spent the rest of the night in an armchair in the large vaulted underground hall of the citadel. He still had radio communication with the German high command, but was in no hurry to make his report.
When it was dawn, Gonnel went upstairs and headed to the southern gate, which had been designated in the capitulation terms as the point of surrender. Here, during the night, the soldiers under his command had been gathering, making no secret of wanting to get as close as possible to the gate. It was worse than he had imagined. They were no longer subject to his inexorable will and when, at the hour appointed, the gates were opened, they turned into a rabble as he watched, worn down by hunger and thirst, flinging their rifles in a heap, raising their hands above their heads, and rushed past, pushing Gonnel aside, taking no notice of him. It might have struck him that this was how he took the salute at the last parade of his troops. It lasted a long time, because the remnants of many other units had ended up in the citadel under his command. When the last stretchers with the wounded lurched through the gate, he hastily unfastened his holster, put the pistol to his temple and fired.
The surrendering troops, headed by the fortress commander, Major General Ernst Mattern, straggled in a long, glum column through the streets of Poznań. Among the ranks, tin trunks were visible above their heads where staff officers were carrying the papers of their headquarters. Those at the head of the column were already behind barbed wire, in a camp where only recently Russian prisoners of war had been confined, while those at its tail straggled through the city for a long time yet, exhausted and hungry.
To this day I preserve three blue invitation cards: to a service of thanksgiving, a parade, and an evening of celebration.
The service took place on Wednesday 7 March 1945 in the market square. There, before an altar, shoulder to shoulder, were ranks of Polish soldiers. Closer to it were the Sisters of Mercy in their white headgear. Carpets hung from every balcony. Men and women came running up the street. The voices in the square were raised in unison, and high up to the lowering sky there rose a solemn hymn of praise, thanksgiving and faith. Women with babies in their arms came out onto the balconies to join their voices to the singing.
Later, also in the market square, there was a parade. The commander-in-chief, General Michal Rola-Żymierski, reviewed a march-past of troops on the paving in front of the tribune. Beside him stood his tall, lean chief of staff, General Wladyslaw Korczyc. Banners fluttered. A dark red banner with a cow’s head and crossed poleaxes was borne by a man with a ginger moustache and a kerchief round his neck, the standard-bearer of the Guild of Butchers. The banner of the Polish Workers’ Party was carried by an old man in blue spectacles. Up there, by the tribune, a young man in a worn grey coat, raised a microphone to his lips and, removing his hat while the national anthem was played, gave a running commentary.