Russia at war 1941-1945

On that night of the 17th, the narrator was wandering along a road; two or three thousand motor vehicles were burning; it was important not to let the Germans have them. That night, too, he saw a group of ten senior officers also walking towards Lokhvitsa (where there was believed to be a gap in the ring)—he recognised among them the Commander

of the Front, General Kirponos.

Not until several years later did I learn that he shot himself that night—or it may have been the following night, having refused to fly off in a plane that had been sent for him with great difficulty... His remains have since been reburied in Kiev. With him also died a member of his war council, Burmistrenko, who had been the Second

Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP before the war.

[It is curious to note that, according to the official History Kirponos was "killed"; there is no mention of his suicide.]

On the following morning, the narrator and three other soldiers, seeing German tanks approaching, hid in an overgrown ravine. But the Germans noticed them, and proceeded to machine-gun the bottom of the ravine. One man was killed, but the three others

surrendered. (The thought of suicide crossed the narrator's mind, but no more.) A German soldier, a decent and pleasant fellow at first sight, slapped their faces, and ordered them to empty their pockets. Closely followed by a tank, they had to run to a village called Kovali. By the end of the day, 10,000 prisoners were assembled there.

On the following morning, the "Commissars, Communists and Jews" were summoned to come forward, after the arrival of some fifteen SS-men in black uniforms and with skulls on their caps. Some three hundred came forward, were stripped to the waist and lined up in the yard. Then the interpreter, a young man, speaking with a strong Galician accent, shouted that some must still be hiding; and anyone who denounced a Communist,

Commissar or Jew could take his clothes and other belongings. "And, among ten

thousand men, you will always find a dozen or two such people; it may not be a high

percentage, but there it is. Such people do exist, and always will." So, in the end, four hundred were shot, being taken away ten at a time, and ordered to dig their graves.

They all died silently, except one, who uttered heart-rending screams, as he crawled at the SS-men's feet: "Don't kill me! My mother is a Ukrainian." One of the SS-men kicked him in the face, and knocked his teeth out, and he was hauled off to the

execution ground, his bare feet dragging through the dust.

The surviving war prisoners were marched first to one camp, and then to another, and the soldiers—"decent-looking, ordinary chaps, perhaps German working-men"—

automatically shot any stragglers, or anyone falling down by the road-side. The rest of the story is one of such constant starvation, cold and humiliation that the prisoners rapidly lost all human semblance and human dignity. The narrator and two other men succeeded in escaping—but they were the lucky exceptions.

Chapter IX THE EVACUATION OF INDUSTRY

The evacuation of industry threatened by the German invasion had been one of the Soviet Government's major concerns almost since the moment the war had begun. During the

very first days of the war two important industrial centres were lost: Riga and Minsk; but there was nothing of outstanding industrial importance in Lithuania, the rest of Latvia, Belorussia, or the Western Ukraine. The great industrial areas of the European part of the Soviet Union threatened by the invasion, or, at any rate, by destruction from the air, were the whole of Central and Eastern Ukraine—including the Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk,

Krivoi Rog, Mariupol and Nikopol areas, and the Donbas—and secondly, the industrial

areas of Moscow and Leningrad.

Whether or not the Soviet Government believed, in the early weeks of the war, that the Germans would reach Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, or the Donbas, it very rightly

decided, there and then, to take no chances, and laid down as a firm principle the