Then he told the complicated story of how Orel has been almost completely surrounded by August 3, and how, finally, in the early hours of August 5, the Russians broke into Orel.
Our broadcasting armoured car, playing the International and The Holy War and
The Little Blue Scarf, was among the first to break into the city; it had a tremendous effect on the population, who poured into the streets, even though the fighting was still going on. The Germans were still using mobile guns and tanks against us, and their tommy-gunners in the attics also bothered us a great deal. General Gurtiev
was killed by one of them. Delayed action mines were still exploding, and in the
midst of all this din, the loud-speaker was bellowing its patriotic songs. It was not till the next day that the tommygunners were all wiped out, though a few may still be in hiding. And there may still be hundreds of delayed-action mines at Orel, though
we've already picked up 80,000 in the area. That's why no troops are stationed in Orel yet...
Yes, I drove into Orel on the morning of the 5th. You can imagine the dawn, and the houses around still blazing, and our guns and tanks driving into town, covered with flowers, and the loud-speaker bellowing The Holy War, and old women and children running among the soldiers, and pressing flowers into their hands and kissing them.
There was still some firing going on. But I remember how an old woman stood at
the corner of Pushkin Street, and she was making the sign of the Cross, and tears were rolling down her wrinkled face. And another elderly woman, well-educated
judging by her speech, ran towards me and gave me flowers, and threw her arms
round my neck, and talked, and talked and talked; through the din I couldn't hear what she was saying, except that it was about her son who was in the Red Army.
Now there's heavy fighting going on at Karachev. We have some British and
American tanks there, but not many. The German air force is again very active,
making a thousand sorties a day. What they are fighting is much more than a
rearguard action, now that we are pushing on to the Dnieper.
*
Orel had been liberated only five days before, but already the Soviet authorities were fully established here. Most public buildings had been destroyed, but in a small house in a side street, Comrade M. P. Romashov, Partisan chief of the area, and Hero of the Soviet Union, was installed as president of the Provincial Executive Committee. He had many stories to tell of partisan warfare, of battles with punitive expeditions, and of partisan raids on columns of civilians who were being driven west. The partisans would kill the German escort, and the civilians would then scatter through the forests.
A check-up was going on among civilians at Orel, and party members especially had to account for their behaviour during the twenty months of occupation. Orel had been
captured on October 2, 1941 by Guderian's tanks with such suddenness that many people had been trapped. On Romashov's desk I saw a note, written in an illiterate hand by a woman who said that she—a member of the Communist Party—and her two children had
been trapped here on October 2, and that, to keep herself and her children alive, she had had to take a job as a cleaner at a German office.
They looked, from a distance, like soft greenish-brown rag dolls lying over the parapet of a trench from which they had been exhumed. Two Russian officials were sorting out
skulls, some with bullet-holes at the back, others without. From the trench came a
pungent mouldy stench. The rag dolls were bodies dug from trenches outside the large brick building of Orel Prison. Two hundred had been exhumed, but, judging from the
length and depth of the trenches, there were at least 5,000 more. Some of these "samples"
were women, but most were men; half of them were Russian war prisoners who had died
of starvation or various diseases; the rest were soldiers and civilians who had been shot through the back of the skull. Many of them had been killed at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays or at 10 a.m. on Fridays; methodically, the Gestapo firing squads would visit the prison twice a week. Besides these, many others had been murdered at Orel; some had been publicly
hanged as "partisans" in the main square.
*
One day at Orel I went to a charming old-time house, with classical pillars and an
overgrown garden, which had once belonged to a relative of Turgeniev's. Turgeniev
himself had often lived here, and this was obviously, in his mind, the scene of The Nest of Gentlefolk. The place could have scarcely changed since the 1840's, when the good and saintly Liza decided, in this very house, to retire to a convent since happiness in this world had been denied her.
The house had been the Turgeniev Museum, and I talked to the old man who was still in charge. He had been in the Gestapo prison for three months, and had heard the volleys on those Tuesday and Friday mornings. Both his assistants at the Museum had been shot as
"communist suspects".
The old man—whose name was Fomin—spoke of the fearful famine in Orel. For a long
time no food at all, not even the tiny ration of bread, had been given to the people. As you went along the streets in the winter of 1941-2, you would stumble over people who had collapsed and died. That winter, with great difficulty, he and his wife had bartered what possessions they had for some potatoes and beetroot. What later helped people to survive was their vegetable gardens.
Ten thousand books of the Turgeniev Library, he said, had been taken away by the
Germans and many other exhibits—Turgeniev's own shotgun, for instance—had simply
been looted. However, he said, thank God, the house had survived. Turgeniev's country house, at Spas Lutovino, between Orel and Mtsensk, had been burned down.
One night at the gorsoviet (town soviet), with a starry sky outside and a red glow of burning villages in the west, Karachev way, I met a strangely assorted pair—a local
doctor and a local priest.
Dr Protopopov who, with his little beard and pince-nez, looked like something out of Chekhov, told how in spite of everything, the Germans allowed him to attend to the sick and wounded Russian war prisoners. It was a nightmarish story of starvation and neglect, which only he and a few devoted assistants had tried to remedy in a small way, by
collecting food from the local population—even though they had less than nothing to
spare—and by smuggling it into the hospital. Some of the severely ill prisoners, were moved by the Germans in horse-sleighs, at the height of winter, to another hospital, many miles away. The Russian staff had protested in vain, and had wrapped as many of the
men as possible in blankets. But nearly half of them died during the journey. That other
"hospital", from what he had heard, was little better than a death-camp, anyway.
The priest was a grubby old man of seventy-two, very deaf, with a white beard and a
silver chain and cross, who said that if many Russians worked for the Germans, it was only because they would have died of hunger otherwise. He was allowed to visit the
Russian war prisoners; they were being starved; on some days, twenty or thirty or forty would die. But after Stalingrad the Germans had begun to feed them a little better; and then started urging them to join the Russian Liberation Army.
He said that, up to a point, the Germans had encouraged the churches: it was part of their anti-communist policy. But in reality it was the churches which had unofficially