Russia at war 1941-1945

Germany from these villages than from the towns; the food deliveries were rigorously exacted, and the peasants said that in fact the whole output of the kolkhoz was taken by the Germans, and they themselves had to live on whatever their "individual" plots yielded; however, in summer, most of the perishable fruit and vegetables were left to them, too, as the Germans did not have enough transport to take them away. The

Germans had made vague promises of splitting up the land among the peasants after the war, but there were few illusions on that score.

This part of the Ukraine had been treated as an important source of food for Germany.

Even so, the area under cultivation was only eighty percent of pre-war; but even this was better than the country round Kharkov, where I had been in the previous summer, and

where only forty percent of the land had been cultivated. About two months before the Germans left, they started taking much of the livestock to Germany. This, of course, created much anti-German feeling. Even so, and even despite the deportations, many

peasants were aloof and seemed indifferent to what was happening; it was clear that the Soviets—or "the Reds", as the peasants here called them—would have a job to develop a proper "soviet-consciousness" among these people. As Kampov said: "They lived reasonably well under the occupation; for the sly Ukrainian peasant is the greatest

virtuoso in the world at hiding food. He always hid it from us; you can imagine how

much better still he hid it from the Germans! And now that the Germans have

disappointed them, they hope that maybe we shall scrap the kolkhozes. But we won't... "

Ukrainian Deportees

Nearly four million Ostarbeiter from the Soviet Union—most of them from the Ukraine

—were deported as slave labour to Germany; and, in the Ukraine, this was No. 1

grievance against the Germans. Not only the deportations themselves but, even more so perhaps, the way in which they were carried out.

In Uman, I had long talks with two local girls, Valya and Galina, who had managed to return from deportation. Valya, a dark little girl of twenty, must have been pretty only two years before, but now was broken, and looked like a frightened little animal. To get away from Germany she had put her hand under a flax-cutting machine and had all four fingers cut off.

"On February 12, 1942, at two in the morning, the Ukrainian police came, followed by some German gendarmes in green uniform, and I was taken away under escort to School

No. 4. From there, together with a lot of other girls, we were taken at 5 a.m. to the railway station, and packed into goods wagons—seventy of us...

"After a very long journey we got to some town, where we were put in a camp, all the women were made to strip and were sent to be deloused. Then, before reaching Munich, we were taken to a village called Logow. There we lived in a camp, until a manufacturer arrived, and he took us all to a flax-combing factory. We lived there in a barracks

attached to the factory—it was really a sort of camp too. A little farther away, lived some French and Belgian war prisoners; and in another part of the camp were some Polish and Jewish girls. I stayed in this place seven and a half months. We got up at five in the morning, and, without food, we went on working till two in the afternoon. Then we

would get two spoonfuls of boiled turnip and a slice of bread, which included sawdust and other substitutes. After that another shift came on, and it worked until eleven or twelve o'clock. For an evening meal we received three or four small baked potatoes and a cup of ersatz coffee; that was all the food we ever got.

"The Germans in the factory were very brutal. I was once beaten by a German woman. It was when I told her that the machine was out of order. She slapped my face and punched me, as if it was my fault. Another time when the machine went wrong, the foreman also hit me, saying I was a 'verdammte Bolshevik'. He hit and hit me again, and I cried.

"There was so much flax-dust in the place, they had to keep the electric light on all day. It was a terribly depressing place. We received no money at all. I was so sick of all this, of the dust, and the bad food, and the beatings, and my clothes that were all going to pieces, because they would not give us any work clothes, and all the insults, and all the