[烛光生存狂]-【卫国战争老兵回忆】尼古拉·奥布雷恩巴

http://www.iremember.ru/content/view/13/75/lang,en/

In square helmets, with their sleeves rolled up, with sub-machine guns in their hands, Germans walk in a line from the village, firing periodically, and here and there our soldiers climb out of their hiding places. Leshka (Lesha, Leshka are short forms of the name Alexei - trans.) falls on top of me:

"They're really close!"

We hide our rifles under the straw, and then we can already hear above us:

"Rus! Los, los!"

Germans laugh and send us to a group of our soldiers, standing at a distance with two guards.

We stood in front of a village house, into which groups three-four men were brought, then, after they had been let out, a new party of POW's was taken inside. They were searched inside the house, if anyone had weapons and to see what papers each had.

I entered the house. Fresh yellow straw was lying on the floor, one of the windows was covered with a blanket, there were about five Germans in the room, among them a young junior lieutenant. They made us take off our knapsacks, gas masks, and put them on the table, then started combing through them thoroughly. One of the soldiers found a small piece of salo (salted pork fat - trans.) in my sack, all covered with crumbs, but he took it away, as well as a piece of sugar left over from my savings for a rainy day.

Looking through my medic's bag, Germans didn't take anything, but, finding a jar of honey with a label from some medicine, spun it in their hands for a long time, smelled it, but then decided it was also some medicine and threw it back inside the bag. One German was already taking a belt with Caucasian brass off my trousers, a gift from my brother-in-law, and was trying it on himself, saying: "Souvenir, souvenir, gut..." I realized that they were taking anything they liked from us, and this pettiness amazed me: how could a soldier take away a piece of sugar, a chunk of salo, a clean handkerchief from another soldier?

And then a red-haired freckled feldwebel pulled out the album with my drawings of the military life from the gas mask bag, saying "kunstmaler, kunstmaler", and started looking through it. Everybody put aside our knapsacks and also started looking, pointing fingers, laughing merrily. The lieutenant took away the album, looked it over, and asked from his questionnaire:

"Where from?"

I replied:

"Moskau, kunstmaler Akademie."

Then an idea struck him. Opening the album on a blank page, he stuck his finger there, then pointed at himself, and kept saying:

"Zeichnen, zeichnen portrait."

I took out a pencil and started sketching his portrait. The Germans and our prisoners froze with tension, started watching. In five minutes everyone recognized the lieutenant and started talking: "Gut! Prima!.." I tore out the page with the sketch and gave it to the lieutenant. He examined it thoughtfully, put it in his pocket.

...The fourteenth day of captivity. Holm-Zhirkovskiy. After a ten day stay behind the barbed wire where they were accumulating prisoners from the 350 thousand that had been encircled by the Germans at Viazma in October of '41, they started leading us west along a highway. During these ten days they gave us neither water nor food, we were sitting under the open sky. First snow fell in the beginning of October that year, it was a cold, dank weather. Here, for the first time we saw how healthy men died of hunger.

We are walking on the Warsaw highway for the fourth day toward Smolensk, with stops in specially furnished pens, enclosed by barbed wire and guard towers with machine gunners, who illuminate us with flares through the entire night. Next to us stretches a column of wounded prisoners -- in regular carts, two-wheeled carts, and walking. The tail of the column, spreading from hillock to hillock, disappears into the horizon. In places of our stops and along our entire route thousands of those dying from hunger and cold remain. Those still alive are finished off by soldiers with SMG's, a guard kicks a fallen prisoner and, if he can't get up in time, fires his gun. I watched with horror how they reduced healthy people to a state of complete helplessness and death. Every time before we set out guards with truncheons formed up on two sides, then a commanded sounded:

"Everybody run!"

The crowd ran, and at the same time blows rained on us.

A run of one-two kilometers, and then another command:

"Stop!"

Breathless, hot, sweat covered, we stopped, and they would keep us like that in the cold, penetrating wind for an hour, under rain and snow. These exercises were repeated several times, as a result only the hardiest men set out on the march. Many of our comrades remained lying, single dry shots rang out -- they were finishing off those who couldn't get up.

Sometimes they herded us to the sides of the road, this was done with the purpose of clearing mines; anti-personnel mines exploded, but our weight was not enough for anti-tank mines, and when they would drive German vehicles through a path thus cleared, they often blew up.

Our column stopped because a German car had just exploded, I took out my notepad and started making sketches. Suddenly a cavalryman rode up to me and raised his whip, but fortunately a colonel riding in an open car called him back. He called me to himself, asked what I was doing. I said I was an artist, drawing. He looked at the sketches and said:

"Not allowed. You cannot draw dead German soldiers."

I dived into a crowd of prisoners walking through the mined roadside, they wouldn't search for me there.

...Melting snow and pale sunset, tall embankment, black silhouettes of people building a bridge can be seen on it, the bridge takes shape with its supports resembling the skeleton of a huge fish. We arrived to Yartsevo, the column of prisoners pulls into the area enclosed by barbed wire, on the territory of a former brick factory. It's divided into compartments with guard towers on thin posts, a machine gunner on every one -- the towers look like spiders.

I carried the bag with bandages, cotton, manganese on my shoulder through the entire march. My two comrades, Sasha (Sasha, Sashka are short forms of the name Alexander - trans.) Lapshin and Alexei Avgustovich, and I, students of the Moscow Art Institute, were medics. An idea came to us to be assigned to a hospital for wounded prisoners. We left the column and explained our request to a guard, he called a polizei and sent him to get a doctor. We stood and waited, a stream of exhausted people was filing past us, they were walking trying to keep their legs from spreading apart. Finally the doctor, also a POW, came. In response to our offer he said that he had more doctors than was necessary, much less medics. But suddenly, as if remembering something, he offered us the barrack for the seriously wounded. We agreed gladly.

The polizei led us through several zones enclosed by barbed wire to a wood shed. It had already become dark outside. A large man opened the door for us, he was an orderly there. After letting us inside, he immediately shut the door. We couldn't see anything in the dark, but the stench of rotting flesh struck us. We pressed ourselves to the wooden wall, its holes let in fresh air and pale light. The orderly was looking at us with unconcealed hostility, but I couldn't understand his displeasure. Finally he said:

"There is nowhere to sleep. Doctors don't come here. All these wounded are beyond hope."

Shaken by his cruel bluntness, he didn't even lower his voice, we remained silent.

"They are doomed anyway," he began anew. "What are you going to do here anyway?"

Then I declared decisively:

"We'll do anything to ease these people's suffering and, in general, anything in our power. We'll spend the night here and get to work tomorrow."

The bunks were three-tiered. A passage seventy or eighty centimetres wide stretched through the entire length of th

新用户注册返回首页
首页上一页下一页尾页页次1/1 转到第页