Russia at war 1941-1945

She was small and perky and fair, with the perfect comedian's face, with lively blue eyes and a little turned-up nose. She laughed a great deal, but it was not a kindly laugh; she was a mimic and satirist. She wore a pale-blue dress and a cocky little hat with a feather.

She was about thirty, and physically slightly faded, which was not surprising after all she had gone through. She had been an actress before the war in the First Kolkhoz Theatre in Kiev, where she played small parts in Ukrainian peasant comedies. She quoted a few bits from her parts, but never got very far with them... "Oh dear, I've just forgotten everything", she said, "It seems such ages ago since I was an actress in Kiev... An actress", she repeated with a bitter little laugh. "Being a putzfrau (charwoman) is now more in my line of business. My husband used to be one of the stage managers at the

theatre. Now he's somewhere in the Red Army. I haven't heard from him for years... He's from Uman."

Galina Ivanovna had been in Germany, and her story is the story of millions of Europeans

—with variations. "The real trouble", she began, "started here in Uman when a German called Graf Spretti arrived here in February '42 to recruit labour.

[He is mentioned in the Nuremberg Trial as one of Sauckel's recruiting officers.]

The Germans announced a big meeting at the Cinema. A lot of us went there, just to see what it was all about. So Spretti said: 'I want you people of Uman to go voluntarily to Germany to help the German army.' And he promised us the moon. But we had a fair idea of how much such promises were worth, so we said: 'But what if we don't want to go? '

Then Graf Spretti gave us a dirty look and said: Tn that case you will be politely

requested to go all the same.' That was on February 10 and two days later they started rounding up people in a house-to-house search—the police, armed with rifles, would go from one house to the other and collect the younger people. We were taken to a big

school, and at five o'clock in the morning we were taken to the railway station; we were put in railway carriages, and these were locked up. Some of the people had some food with them, and it was shared. We were told that we'd be fed at Lwow, but when we got there, we were given nothing at all, not even water.

"We stopped there at the railway station for a whole night, and then we went on to Przemysl. At Przemysl the Germans unlocked the carriages, and started examining our

luggage."

"What kind of carriages were they?" I asked.

"What kind?" she said, almost surprised at my question. "Just ordinary goods carriages; we all sat or lay on the floor; there were no benches. There were about sixty or seventy people to a carriage. Anyway, as I was saying, they came to examine our luggage at

Przemysl. 'What do you want all this luggage for?' the Germans said. 'There's any amount of stuff you can buy in Germany—fancy taking all these filthy clothes to Germany.' So they took away nearly all the clothes we had, and all the heavier luggage, and left us with just small bundles... "

The whole journey, which lasted a month, was a nightmare. In a camp near Przemysl,

where they were kept for a fortnight, they were given hardly any food. Several of the girls fell ill, and a few died. Then, in Western Germany, they were taken to another camp; here at least there were some Britis;h and French prisoners who would throw them some food over the fence.

"The friendliness of the English and French", Galina said, "cheered us up a little bit. They would throw us bits of chocolate and some kind of wafers—very nice they were, with

sweet little seeds inside them. We always thought the English, French and Russians were all very different people, but it turned out that we are all much the same. Only the Germans are different.

"And then, women and factory managers, and all sorts of people arrived one day at the camp. We were lined up in the snow—four rows of us—and these people kept walking

up and down and inspecting us. So two hundred of us were picked by one of the factory managers, and we were taken by train to a barracks, with barred windows—the place was inside the factory grounds in a small town near Ulm. We were received there by a bunch of gendarmes, who said: 'Aha, Kommunisten' '. This place was much worse than the other camp. Before going to work we stayed in the barracks for three days, with only raw

turnips and raw potatoes to eat, and one only nibbled at it, it was no use trying to eat a lot of the stuff... But at least there were bunks of sort to sleep on—hard and filthy, but still bunks...

"Later, they began to heat the stove, so we were at least able to cook what little food there was. On the fourth day we were taken to work. It used to be a hat factory; now they made helmet linings, or rather the sort of caps worn under the helmet. They made them of