D
ECEMBER 17.The ambulance frequently has to take detours en route to Morosovskaya. In the north the Soviets are said to have broken through another front line, this one manned by the Italians. They are reportedly on their way south. Gunfire can still be heard in the distance. I am not particularly concerned as I’m not in action and I consider my surroundings only from the viewpoint of someone who is bedridden. If no one disturbs me, I’ll be asleep either in the ambulance or, later on, in Morosovskaya. I’m catching up on the sleep I missed out on over the last several weeks. Because my leg, in its cast, doesn’t need any particular medical attention, I’m only woken up when they serve me my meals or when I have to take a tablet. . .18 December. I don’t count the days any more, so I don’t know how long I’ve been in Morosovskaya in this blissful sleep when I’m suddenly rattled by high fever. I am given several injections and I hazily seem to understand that I am being loaded into an ambulance train together with several other wounded. The fever increases and terrible pictures form in front of my eyes, causing me to cry out, whimper and shudder.
Slowly my surroundings come into focus and I recognise that I am lying on the top of a two-tiered white bed in an ambulance train. A young blonde nurse with a red cross on her cap is standing next to my
bed and is softly singing Christmas carols. Some of the wounded are
accompanying her in their raw voices.
The rhythm of the wheels is changing and is being converted into a hard, threatening hammering. The sound reverberates painfully in my head. I close my eyes and press my forehead on to the frosty window. It does not cool me down but instead causes the frost patterns on the window to melt.
A cool hand is laid across my hot temple, wet with perspiration, and a soft voice says a few calming words. As if coming through a veil, I recognise the young nurse. She gives me two tablets and helps me to swallow them. Thereafter I fall asleep exhausted, but I don’t have any dreams.
26 December. During the afternoon of the second day of Christmas I am once more able to think straight. On my bed are my Christmas presents, still unopened. I’m surprised at the generous contents of the gifts they are the sorts of things which we for months had to do without. Plenty of cigarettes are included. I light one and discover that it tastes good; this is a sign that I am more myself again. But it is still a while before I can really understand where I am and that I have also survived the blood poisoning which the medic back at the kolkhoz told me I could
expect.
My neighbour, who lies in the top bunk across the aisle from me, has just awoken and greets me with a friendly remark: ‘Ah, just risen from the dead? I’m glad you’re finally awake, my friend!’
I smile at him and see that he is holding his right arm out like a wing. Later I learn that the soldiers call it a ‘Stuka’, because the arm is held in a track, in plaster and at an angle which resembles that of the wings of a Stuka dive bomber. This treatment is generally used when the arm has suffered a break caused by a gunshot wound. I assume my new friend has such a break.
He tells me that we stopped in Stalino yesterday and that we offloaded some slightly wounded soldiers. Only the seriously wounded and fever-stricken were left in the beds. The empty beds are, however, already filled up again.
‘We are now travelling homewards,’ he tells me happily. ‘Over
Krakau to Schlesien, and from there I will soon be home.’ ‘Where is home?’ I ask him.
‘In Marienbad, in Sudetenland,’ he tells me with obvious pride .Then he describes the place for me, making it sound as if it were the most beautiful speck of dirt in the world, and I feel an urge to pay a visit some time. I have no idea that, at the close of the war, I would actually be drawn to this idyllic health resort. This conversation with my bunk- mate undoubtedly influenced my ending up in a military hospital there, after my sixth and last injury.
‘Where were you wounded?’ I ask.
‘In Stalingrad, on 10 December,’ he says, and I can see how his face twitches. The word ‘Stalingrad’ suddenly hangs heavily in the room. Most of the wounded come from Stalingrad or, like me, from the edge of the Don or Tschir pocket.
‘Was really just lucky to get out of there. Now it’s supposed to be bloody difficult.’
‘Why’s that?’ I ask, as I’ve not heard anything about the situation there for days.
‘ Because the prospects for those left in the pocket have now become very black,’ remarks another patient lying in a bunk somewhere beneath us. ‘The last hope—that Hoht with his tanks was going to break through the pocket—has now gone up in smoke as well. They need him elsewhere.’
Others now decide to get involved. They complain bitterly about the top brass. One says angrily that they should all go to hell. No one disagrees, because everyone senses that he didn’t say this without good reason. He and some of the others were in the pocket themselves and
experienced first-hand how they were given hope and had promises made to them that they would be got out—that is, until it was too late
and they realised that the Sixth Army in Stalingrad was, in fact, to be
sacrificed.
Only a very small number of them had the good fortune to be flown out in the nick of time because of their injuries. This is now supposed to be pretty nearly impossible, they say. One soldier with a bandage round his head, and who only can see out of one eye, ridicules the latest Army radio report, which plays down the disaster in Stalingrad and refers to the defeat of the Sixth Army in a highly stylised propaganda report about the willingness of the German soldier to make a heroic stand.
Not everyone is as strong, and many are unable to hide even their everyday fears. The chap under my bunk must come into this category, because ever since I woke up he has been whimpering non-stop. Out of curiosity I lean over the edge of the bunk and see that his left arm and shoulder are bound into a sort of a ‘ Stuka’ cast. I can’t recognise his face. His whimpering is incessant and never ends. It really gets on everyone’s nerves—in particular, it disturbs the seriously wounded men who are trying to get some sleep.
Finally it gets too much for the soldier with the headband and one eye. He turns to the whimperer and angrily tells him off: ‘For God’s sake stop that bloody whimpering .'You’re driving us all mad with your constant groaning!’
The fellow does not react in the least: on the contrary, he seems to get worse. We manage to get rid of him in Krakow when he is offloaded with some other men.
123 28 December. As soon as the beds have been freshly made up, others are carried in. The following day I arrive at my destination. I am offloaded in Bad Salzbrunn, near Hirschberg, at the foot of the
29 December—20 January 1943 .After we are led through the delousing chamber we are laid on clean beds in a newly established military hospital. The rest of my stay here passed so quietly and uneventfully that I hardly have any memory of it. It went out of sight about as fast as the over-ripe Harz cheese that they placed in our dish on the night stand as our ration every other day.
My notes were reduced to comments about the head doctor with the pointed head and protruding frog eyes. After cutting up my plaster cast he told me he suspected me of shirking my duty and pretending to be wounded. Old Frog Eyes even asked me how come I had the leg placed in a cast. He messed around with my louse-bitten and dirty leg for a long time and brusquely ordered me to stand up and not to pretend to be wounded. He even threatened to write a report to the court martial and growled something about malingering, cowardice in the face of the enemy and so on.
But it was very odd—even I couldn’t find any traces of my wound, and I couldn’t locate the exact point where the splinter had entered my leg. The pea-sized, light red scar could just as easily have been taken for one of the many abrasions caused by the lice and which covered the entire leg.
The x-ray photographs finally exonerated me. I watched how the frog-eyed military doctor stared at the clearly visible jagged splinter in total disbelief, looking as though his goggle eyes would pop out of his head at any moment. A head doctor had absolutely no need to apologise to a mere Landser, but he mumbled something about the fact that there
were always some among the wounded who would deliberately injure themselves or think up all sorts of other tricks to get themselves out of front-line duty. During the ensuing therapy I discover that the splinter Riesengebirge. I say my goodbyes to my bunk-mates, who are being taken further on.
doesn’t cause me any problems, so I consider it to have been a lucky
Heimatschuss,and one which, with God’s help, saved me from an awful fate.
Here in the hospital we learned that supplies for Stalingrad could no longer be got through by air, neither could the wounded be flown out. Thus the fate of the Sixth Army was as good as sealed. We just could not grasp the fact that there really was no way of bringing out the men Adolf Hitler had stationed there to create ‘Fortress Stalingrad’. We wondered whether we would ever find out how and why this catastrophe came about in the first place.
21 January. I am discharged from the hospital and get my convalescent leave. I’m going home at last! But inside I’m not as free and un encumbered as before. I can’t wipe away what I have experienced with a mere wave of the hand: my skin is simply not thick enough.
As I walk through the streets of our village I am barely noticed .Well, why should I be?There are soldiers all over the place and there are many among them that I don’t know. An ordinary soldier with a Bronze Wound Badge is too unobtrusive to be of interest. You get one even for a small splinter under the knee.
It’s only a few acquaintances who ask about front-line duty. When I tell them about it, they become curious, but not one of them believes what I say. The truth would devastate them, because, as far as they are concerned, German soldiers conform to what they hear every day in the Army reports—they are heroes who only storm forward! If they fall, it is only during an attack or through defending. They never give up an inch ground unless for tactical reasons they are given orders to fall back. Just look at Stalingrad—there’s the proof!
The problem with leave is that it passes far too quickly. Now I have to return to the camp at Insterburg, first to the convalescent company.
14 February. I have arrived at Insterburg. On the way to the orderly room I run into the relaxed atmosphere of the company in the shape of several inebriated soldiers. They welcome me as a newcomer with a ‘Hello’, although we don’t actually know each other. The Obergefreiter, or ‘Head Snorter’ as he is called here, slaps me on the shoulder and offers me a slug of juniper brandy, which I down while holding my breath.
As I leave the orderly room where I reported in, I accidentally bump into a large aluminium urn filled with coffee that a soldier is carrying. The boiling hot liquid splashes over my neat leave uniform. I stare angrily at the steaming wet spot on my trousers while the man who was carrying it yells at me, ‘You silly sod! Are you blind?’
I am absolutely dumbfounded! The ever-hungry Hans Weichert is standing in front of me, large as life! I haven’t seen him since Rytschov, and I’d felt certain he was either missing or dead. Before I can say anything he slaps me on the shoulder.
‘Welcome to the land of the living!’ he says.
I can still remember him as a skeleton when, on 13 December, he leapt up and ran out in front of me over to the hill under violent tank fire.
I learn how Warias and Weichert are still on convalescent leave, having just left hospital .They both begin their leave tomorrow. We have a lot to catch up on, but it is too noisy here and we look for a table in the canteen.
In the canteen Warias, as if by magic, produces a bottle of East Prussian ‘Bear Catcher’. It is a tasty drink made from honey and alcohol, like a liqueur, which I prefer to the unpleasant juniper brandy.
‘Where do you think I got that from?’ he asks, suppressing a grin in his freckled face.
‘I suspect that you will tell me in a minute.’
‘I got it from the blonde waitress in the Tivoli!’ he smiles proudly. I’m surprised.
‘Then I assume that I don’t need to pass on your regards, like you asked me to when I was injured? And I reckon you will not want to buy me a round like you promised?’
‘No, no! What do you take me for?What Helmut Warias promises, he delivers! ’ The tall Warias taps himself on the chest. ‘But first you must allow me to go on leave.’
We change the subject and talk about our experiences. I go first, and explain about my wound and about the incident with Old Frog Eyes, the doctor in the military hospital. Then Weichert relates how, after a terrible dash across the Don with two others, he got lost in the snow haze and first thing the next day bumped into a retreating group made up of supply personnel from a Luftwaffe unit. After other men from
various decimated units joined up with them it was ‘Stop’, and they were sent into the trenches. He was wounded somewhere south of Tschir at the beginning of January—‘Shot through the thigh, with bone damage,’ says Weichert. The convalescence took a long time owing to complications caused by the wound constantly festering. Warias tells us that he was with a combat group until the middle of January. The group had slowly been retreating south, at the same time delaying the enemy. On 17 January 1943 he was wounded near Konstantinovka on the Don when a grenade splinter caught him in the throat. We can see a deep scar under his left ear.
‘And what has happened to Grommel and Seidel?’ I ask.
Well, yes, he was with Seidel for a while, he says. But at the end of December a grenade ripped away both his feet. ‘He slowly bled to death before our eyes.’ Warias tells us quietly. Then he is silent. We give him time to recover, but after he has had a chance to drink two more glasses °f‘Bear Catcher’ I raise the question of Grommel again. My guess is that he also has fallen.
Warias nods and closes his eyes. ‘When and how did it happen?
‘ A couple of days after you were wounded. Near NishneTschirskaya.’ 127
I can see little Grommel with his pale face and sad eyes in front of me. He couldn’t open fire on the enemy and as I watched him he would simply close his eyes when he pulled the trigger. Why he acted like this I will probably never know.
Warias must have been reading my mind. He lays his hand on my arm. ‘Yes, I knew about that as well. But a few hours before he died he confessed to me that his religion forbade him to shoot people. In front of God we are all brothers, he said to me.’
‘But he was no coward: he saved my life and those of others before he died,’Warias continued. ‘I will never forget that.’
‘It was during the fighting west of Nishne Tschirskaya, where the day before we had fought back an enemy attack. During the night the weather changed, and we were exposed to a heavy snowstorm. So we didn’t realise the Russians were attacking until they actually stormed our positions. Thank goodness we had some tanks in support, which immediately fired on the attackers. But some of the Russians had already reached our trenches, and one big bull of a bloke sprayed us with his Kalashnikov like a madman. Suddenly he bent over and aimed his sub-machine gun directly at me and the others. I could already feel the hot rounds pumping into my body, then some chap standing next to him jumped up and walloped him in the chest with his rifle butt. The Russian keeled over and his Kalashnikov started to go off. The entire string went into this man’s body and he immediately fell back into the trench.
‘We immediately shot the big Russian bully, but, since the fighting was still going on, no one could concern himself about the fallen. We couldn’t make out who it was because of the driving snow. It was only after we had beaten off the attack that we saw that it was our own little Grommel who had saved our lives. His body was literally riddled with bullets, and he was of course stone dead. When we pulled back we carried all the dead bodies with us. Our little friend was buried with a lot of others in Nishne Tschirskaya at the same time.’
We all went quiet after this, each man left with his own memories. Pictures keep appearing in front of my eyes showing the many dead at the bridgehead on the Don and most of the comrades I knew closely and who were important to me. But death takes no account of friendship, nor of the feelings of the survivors.
2 May. Before I begin my travels I can sew on a Gefreiter’s stripe, along with which I receive a small increase in pay—although you can’t buy much these days. I spend the summer holidays in an Army convalescent home in Radom, Poland. The time passes pleasantly and I recuperate well. Before long it is the beginning of June 1943. The weather is