Russia at war 1941-1945

except for very limited quantities drawn from Artesian wells inside the city. The normal supply of water came from the Dniester, thirty or forty miles away, and the mains had been blown up. Now, as during the two months' siege in the grim autumn of 1941,

Odessa was relying on its own wells. At the Hotel Bristol, where we stayed, the washing ration was one bottle per day.

This Bristol Hotel, a great big absurd-looking building with ornate caryatids going three storeys up, was in Pushkin Street, and all its windows were broken. It had two hall

porters, an old man with a black beard, a former Odessa docker or bendyuzhnik, with a gruff voice and loud ugly laugh, and his assistant, a little old man with a grey barbiche and a leer. The two of them would stand on the pavement outside, and, watching the

Odessa girls in their light dresses walk past in groups of four or five, they would make lewd remarks, and the little man with the grey barbiche and the leer would then tell remarkable anecdotes, for instance about two girls who were living in the same house as himself, and of how the one specialised in Rumanian, and the other in German officers, and how they would compare notes.

No inhibitions here. This was Odessa with its perpetual whiff of the underworld, which recalled the glories of Isaac Babel's Benya Krik, the king of the Odessa gangsters, and which even a hundred years of Soviet rule may never quite eradicate.

It wasn't quite the Odessa one had known in the past. For one thing, it was an Odessa without Jews, and they had been an essential part of the Black Sea port—they and the Armenians and Greeks and other Mediterranean or quasi-Mediterranean fauna.

But there was still the Odessite who, whether he was Ukrainian, or Russian, or

Moldavian, was Odessite first and foremost, speaking a jargon of his own, with his own idiom and his own accent. Obviously, many of them took like a duck to water to the

seemingly easy-going life of Antonescu's Odessa, with its restaurants and black market, its brothels and gambling dens, lotto clubs and cabarets, and its semblance of European culture, complete with opera, ballet and symphony concerts.

There were the Siguranza, the Rumanian secret police, and the Bolshevik underground—

literally underground in the Odessa catacombs—and the Jews, many thousands of whom

had been murdered by the Rumanians; but the occupation (or rather, annexation) régime was different in many other ways from the German occupation régime I had seen in cities like Voronezh, Orel or Kharkov.

While the Axis's prospects of winning the war seemed good, the Rumanians were

planning to turn Odessa into a sort of brighter and better Bucharest. Not only were there the restaurants, and shops and gambling dens, and the solemn appearance of Antonescu in the former Imperial Box at the Opera, but there was a serious attempt to convince the people that they were, and were going to remain, part of Greater Rumania. Unlike the Germans in occupied cities, the Rumanians did not close down either the University or the schools; school-children had to learn Rumanian, and university students were warned that if they did not learn Rumanian within a year, they would be expelled—though after Stalingrad the Rumanians were no longer insistent on this point. They continued to

distribute a Rumanian geography book, translated into Russian, which demonstrated that practically the whole of southern Russia was, "geopolitically", part of Rumania and was largely inhabited by descendants of the ancient Dacians. Those who could prove any

Moldavian blood were promised various privileges: to have a Jewish grandmother was

dangerous, but to have a Moldavian grandparent was like a title of nobility.

There was one aspect of Odessa which was not to be found in any of the German-

occupied cities. Odessa was full of young people. It was a happy fluke: the Rumanians had regarded "Transniestria" as part of their country, and its inhabitants as future Rumanian citizens. No doubt, after Stalingrad, they were no longer so sure about keeping Odessa, but the fiction still had to be kept up. Therefore, the great majority of young people in Odessa were not deported to Germany, or anywhere else. Nor had they been

called up into the Rumanian Army, since they were totally unreliable from the Rumanian point of view. Only during the last few weeks, when the Germans had taken over, were some unlucky Odessites deported to Germany; but most had dodged deportation, thanks, partly, to the Soviet underground.

During those first days of the liberation, there were still plenty of signs of the Rumanian occupation régime that had lasted for two-and-a-half years.

All down Pushkin Street (spelled Pušchin on the white-and-blue Rumanian street plates that were now being taken down) and the other famous acacia-lined Odessa streets,

named after the city's 18th century French founders (Richelieu, De Ribas, Langeron)