And the ex-POWs of the camp, those who could hold weapons, climbed up on the tanks and went into the battle for Küstrin. Sinyakov organized a field hospital in the camp at the tank crews’ request: their rear lines had fallen behind during their rapid advance. Georgiy Fedorovich did more than seventy operations on wounded tank-men over several days. And back then, in the camp, immediately after the liberation he brought my Party membership card and decorations and handed them over to me…
35. The SMERSh
I am careful with my memory — generally I try not be carried away by recollections. Memory is memory and life is life. Nevertheless, I have to tell my grandchildren and great-grandchildren the truth. That truth that when the fighting near Küstrin had died down and the rear lines had caught up, all of us survivors, now ex-prisoners of the Küstrin camp, were ordered to walk to the city of Landsberg — for a check-up. I could barely walk, but there was a horse-driven waggon on the road, and Doctor Sinyakov talked a coachman into giving me a lift to the nearest town, to where the soldier was heading. Georgiy Fedorovich told me to wait for them by the first building at the entrance to the town. The soldier helped me: he lifted me off his wreck, took me to the proper place, helped meto sit down. But I didn’t have to wait long. As soon as I had sat down on a bench, an officer with a sabre and two soldiers with submachine-guns on both his sides came up to me. “Who are you?” I explained: “Doctors are coming to pick me up shortly. They will assist me in getting to the town for a check-up”. “You know, we should feed you! You must be starving!” I thought it was a bit strange. He was behaving in an unpleasant, affected way. And he also had quite a ‘professional-looking’ face. And they lifted me up under the arms, took my straw handbag and off I strode through the prostrate German town. The dashing officer was in front of us, and the two soldiers were holding me under the arms… I plodded along and the tears were running… I was wearing the jacket ‘cut to the latest Warsaw fashion’, that gift from the British POWs. On the jacket were my two Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Star, the medals ‘For Valour’ and ‘For the Defence of the Caucasus’: the Party membership card was in my breast pocket. My hair, singed by the fire, had just begun to grow out and that was why I’d covered my head with the warm scarf — it was a gift from the Yugoslav peasant from the Banat province — Zhiva Lazin.
So I walked through the town — in such a uniform, slippers made of trenchcoat smooth woolen with red stars on the toes, escorted by a ‘guard of honour’. “Soon you will have a dinner and everything else!”
I was brought to a commandant’s office — to a Soviet officer who was a town major. Without hesitation, with no particular formality or interrogation of a ‘suspicious person’ he ordered me shoved into a vehicle, and then under a reinforced escort carried to the SMERSh Counter-espionage Section of the 32nd Rifle Corps of the 5th Shock Army. There I was ‘billeted’ on a trestle-bed in the watch-house and brought some kind of thick broth. Hitlerite POWs were downstairs in the basement, and I, thank God, was not with them but above them. As airmen say, I ‘had an altitude gauge’…
The very first night two soldiers with submachine-guns took me for an interrogation. I had to walk up a very steep stairway to the first floor of the building adjacent to the watch-house. My legs were not very responsive, the thin skin that had just appeared on the burns was cracking. The crooks of my arms and knee-joints were stinging and bleeding. But if I tried to stop — a soldier would push me in my back with his submachine-gun…
I was led into the room which was lit brightly. The walls were covered with paintings; a large carpet was placed on the floor. There was a major sitting behind the desk. He had benevolent looks — but he started by taking away my awards and the Party membership card. For a long time he did now allow me to sit: all that time he spent studying the items with such attention — using a magnifying glass. I thought I was just about to collapse but held on by drawing on some remaining strength, and kept asking for permission to sit down. At last the Major gave permission. I thought that no force would tear me off the chair now! But no, the ‘benevolent’ major suddenly barked:
“Get up!”
I sprang to my feet. And so they started, the questions rained down upon me: “Where did you take the decorations and the Party membership card from? Why did you give yourself up? What was your mission? Who gave you the mission? Where were you born? Who is your contact?”
The major kept asking me these and other questions in that order or mixed up, right up until morning. Whatever I said, he shouted the same thing: “You’re lying, you German shepherd!”
This was to go on for ten nights in a row! They escorted me to the toilet. Food was brought to me once a day at the same place — the watch-house, on the trestle-bed… I was snubbed with the dirtiest words… My name was forgotten: I now was ‘the Fascist Shepherd’.
I cannot forget how after the war was over I told about my ‘stay’ with the SMERSh to Petr Karev — the former commander of our regiment. It was the first time I ever talked to somebody about it — and I was crying almost hysterically And then Petr yelled:
“And you did what?! Why didn’t you remind him about flying reconnaissance missions in 1941 — on an unarmed U-2?! When in the same year your U-2 plane was set on fire, shot down by the German fighters — but being scorched with fire, you delivered the orders to our troops! And wasn’t it ever worse? All you have passed through? We took Kovel, Lutsk, Warsaw… Why didn’t you, a Sturmovik pilot, throw something at the mug of that scoundrel rear trooper!?..”
Karev angrily axed the air with his hand and suggested: “Let’s drink, Anya Egorova. Let’s have our ‘frontline 100g ration’!”
On the tenth day of my stay with the SMERSh I ran out of patience. I rose off my trestle-bed and without saying a word moved towards the door. . I made it to that wide stairs and rushed to the first flour — straight for that major.
“Freeze, you whore! I’ll shoot!” That was a ‘fine hint’ a guard gave, rushing towards me. But I kept going up the stairs almost at a run. Where did I gain the strength for that? I think in the 18th century the Englishman John Bradman remarked: “Beware the anger of a patient man”. How right was he…
I flung the door open and from the doorway shouted (or was it that it only seemed to me that I was shouting?): “When will you quit taunting me?.. Kill me, but I won’t let you taunt me!”
I came back to my senses lying on the floor on the carpet. There was a glass of water next to me, but no one was in the room. I quietly sat up, drank the water, somehow dragged myself to the divan standing by the far wall, and sat down. Then the door opened and Major Fedorov entered. By that time I already knew his surname.
“Have you calmed down?” he asked politely.
I didn’t reply.
“Nine days ago the former POWs of the Küstrin ‘SZ’ camp — the doctors — were looking for you. They wrote all they knew about you. How you were captured, how you behaved and how they’d been treating you. They requested you be allowed to go with them to the Landsberg camp for a check-up, but we couldn’t do that then. It looked too suspicious — to preserve your decorations in such a hell. And moreover — to keep the Party membership card! To cut it short, you are now free to go. You are considered as being checked. If you want, stay with us and we will find you a job…”