The colonel told Zhenya to go up to the translator’s room and see if there was any literature there in Russian. The impatient writer followed him up the stairs, and there the literature lay, on the wide, deep sill of the window at which the SS officer used to sit.
My diary entry reads: ‘On 28 March, visit from so and so, who helped himself to my Bunin and Tsvetayeva.’
My resentment and indignation were such that I could write nothing more. A few days later I again wrote in my diary, ‘On 28 March, visit from so and so…’: exactly the same entry.
I would probably not have felt so intensely about this if I had known that for me the war would not be ending in Poznań, and that destiny was about to move me to the very epicentre of events as it did.
Our troops, having overcome what the Germans had supposed to be their impregnable defences on the River Oder, were by this time already fighting on the plateau near Berlin. How eager we were to be there and not in Poznań! At last an order was received that we should all return to our units.
When I heard the news, I ran outside, round our house and turned in at the gate. It was late, but in the courtyard I could see the black silhouettes of our cars and, under one of them, the bright light of a torch shining on and off.
I called to Sergey. The hand holding the torch appeared from beneath the car, and then Sergey, our driver, emerged wearing the dark blue Gestapo uniform he used as his overalls. I advised him that we were leaving for Berlin, and that he was to have the cars ready for six in the morning. Sergey put out the torch and we stood silently in the dark.
Who in those days was not only too eager to get to Berlin? Of course, Sergey was too, but we had been stationed in Poznań for over two months, a lifetime during a war, and Sergey, after a whirlwind romance with a Poznań girl, had contrived to marry her secretly in church. Ever since there had been a slightly crazy, mischievous expression on his likeable, thoughtful face.
He wiped his hands on the Gestapo uniform, clicked his cigarette lighter – his broad, Slavic face paled, he frowned and said, lighting a cigarette: ‘Ah, wszystko jedno – wojna!’ What can you do about it? That’s war! It was something you often heard in Poznań at that time.
At dawn we prepared to leave and, just before we did, I observed the customary moment of reflection before setting out on a journey. I went to the front garden of our house and was suddenly transfixed by the sight of the apple tree, alive with white blossom, by a square of bare, damp earth through which, here and there, delicate young blades of grass were sprouting, and by the sight of last year’s leaves decomposing underfoot. A gusting breeze brought such a sense of spring in the air.
Along the street on his bicycle, clad in black, came a chimney sweep, complete with his top hat, stepladder and brush slung over his back. The feeling of safety, which had been becoming oppressive with its overtone of stagnation and a kind of emotional turmoil, gave way to a sense of melancholy now at having to leave.
Sergey cast a farewell glance at the old Molotov saloon painted a ghastly, muddy, camouflage colour, with an unbroken red edging the length of its bodywork and on the wheel rims, which he had constantly retouched. He had driven this battered, bullet-scarred car for the first four years of the war. Now he drove out to the roadway in his new baby – a captured, highpowered Ford 8 he had rescued from a ditch near Poznań and lovingly repaired. His fresh black paint had run and grey showed through in places, but the bodywork and the wheel rims sported the same ostentatious red edging. He was incorrigible.
Next Vanya came out to the road, a taxi driver from Riga, brought against his will by the Germans to work in Poznań. He was shivering in a short, once dapper but now bedraggled, suede jacket, and inspected the Ford approvingly. Unfastening his shoulder strap, Sergey took a flask of vodka and presented it to him.
Sergey looked first at one then at the other side of the street A lone figure was conspicuous on the pavement, a girl in a short checked skirt, with large legs and a scarf on her head. She was watching tensely as we prepared to leave. The cars were already moving off. Sergey said quietly, ‘Go home. Why do I have to say it. For heaven’s sake, idz do domu.’
She turned and walked slowly away, turning to look back again and again. Sergey stood there, unable to move, then straightened the folds of his tunic under his belt and yanked the car door open.
With the flask tucked under one arm, Vanya the taxi driver smoothed his sparse fair hair with the other and waved us goodbye. The Ford’s wheels screeched furiously, but the engine immediately settled down and we drove smoothly on our way. I was sitting behind Sergey. To either side of the street a white surf of apple trees in bloom was foaming. The city was waking. The girl directing traffic at the city gate gave a signal and the barrier floated up. A schoolboy with a satchel on his back came out of a house and politely took off his little kepi to wish us, ‘Dzień dobry’.
The car emerged onto the highway to Berlin. Sergey lowered the window and took off his cap.
4
Last Days: Berlin, May 1945
‘Deutschland liegt im Herzen Europas.’ Germany lies at the heart of Europe. So we had been informed with admirable accuracy yet, at the same time, poetically, by our school textbook.
Beyond Birnbaum there was a checkpoint with a large, hastily knockedtogether archway and a sign reading, ‘This was the German border.’ Everyone passing along the highway to Berlin at that time read also a second inscription, scrawled in tar in huge, uneven letters by a soldier on the nearest ruined house: ‘Take a good look: this is fucking Germany!’
That soldier had been marching towards this place for four years. Fires, ruins: the war had come back to haunt the land from which it had sallied forth. The wind ruffled sheets and towels on fences and trees, the white flags of surrender. Somewhere far beyond the uncultivated fields peaceful windmills rose like a mirage.
An old, small, half-ruined town. The war had moved on and here, muffled, barely audible, life was pulsating. At the crossroads, opposite the grey house of the Dachdeckermeister (roofer), a lad in a sheepskin jacket bawled from a large poster, ‘Fire into the lair of the beast!’
Boys wearing white armbands were climbing over a wrecked Opel on the pavement, which had lost its wheels. They were evidently playing at war. There were many townspeople, burdened with bundles, pushing laden prams, and one and all, adults and children, were wearing white armbands on their left sleeves. It was completely unexpected for me that the whole country had put on white armbands to indicate surrender, and I do not recall reading about it anywhere else.
Beside the road on the outskirts of the town an elderly man was digging his garden. We stopped and went into his house. His wife, evidently accustomed by now to such guests, offered to warm coffee for us.
In this small house, perched by the roadside of war, the kitchen was cosy and dazzlingly clean. On the shelves there was a dauntless parade of beer mugs. The porcelain skirts of an artful-looking lady crouching on the sideboard billowed upwards. This merry little trinket was a wedding present given to our hostess thirty-two years before. Two terrible wars had raged, but the porcelain coquette had survived in one piece, along with the inscription on her apron: ‘Kaffee und Bier, das lob’ ich mir.’ Coffee and beer, I hold them dear.