Russia at war 1941-1945

passages; emergency food stores, artesian wells and arms dumps. A few thousand people may well have stayed in the catacombs during the last few critical weeks; but the claims made to me by the partisan chiefs that the Odessa underground had killed "hundreds of Germans", that it had prevented them from destroying the whole of Odessa (it had not stopped them from destroying the harbour and practically all the factories) had a certain histoire marseillaise quality. It is perhaps significant that serious Soviet post-war studies of the war say very little of the "catacomb partisans", and certainly do not describe them as a major underground army which (as the partisan chiefs claimed on April 14, 1944)

"could have occupied Odessa and thrown out the Germans if the Red Army had not

arrived in time". Such boasts were wholly unsubstantiated.

I saw many war prisoners that week at Odessa, among them, the Slovaks and the

Alsatians who had joined the partisans. They were in fine fighting spirit, especially the Slovaks, and also some Poles, and they were typical of the Occupied Europe during those days— typical of its rapidly rising hopes. The Rumanian war prisoners were all down-at-heel, both physically and morally, and one of them, when asked what he had done during the war, jovially declared that he had been a deserter for three years. Another was a cheery Bucharest taxi-driver, who said he hoped King Carol and Madame Lupescu— a very good woman, he said—would come back, because in their days life was gay and there was a lot of business for taxi-drivers. And the question they were all asking—

hopefully—was "Has Bucharest been taken yet? "

The Germans, however, sulked, and few would commit themselves to saying Hitler had

lost the war. They seemed, in fact, rather proud to think that nearly all the Germans had managed to get out of Odessa before it was too late.

The centre of Odessa had in the main survived, though most of the factories in the

suburbs had been destroyed. But life—a new Soviet life—was already beginning to take shape here and there. At the Vorontzov Palace—now again the Pioneers' Palace—whose

glass dome had been shattered by a Russian shell that was aimed at the port—children were invited to register again.

The matron of the Pioneers' Palace was indignant. "Such barbarism," she said. Alexeanu had lived here in grand style with his mistress, and, not unnaturally, he had "restored" the Palace, according to his own taste, and had given the Empire drawing room with the

chandeliers new cream-coloured walls. "And the cream-coloured paint," she said, "is smeared over the mural of the pre-revolutionary squalor in which the children of Russia had then lived; and, similarly, on the opposite wall Alexeanu has destroyed forever the beautiful mural painting of Comrade Stalin clapping his hands as the happy Soviet

children dance round him."

I was to see Odessa again, nearly a year later, in March 1945. By then it had become the port of embarkation for thousands of British, American, French and other prisoners of war, who had been liberated by the Red Army in Poland, Silesia, Pomerania and East

Prussia. They were living in barracks, school buildings, and in villas near the Arcadia Beach. Sailors, British and American mostly, were dancing and drinking hard among the dusty palm trees of the lounge of the Hotel de Londres, now de-mined (it was roped off during my first visit). Food was scarce—even at the Hotel de Londres—and Odessa had a hungry look, much leaner than in 1944. There were still no buses or trams, and the

market looked poverty stricken. Banditry was rife. Shady characters were slinking about the streets at dark, and robberies and murders were a nightly occurrence. Were they using the catacombs now—to dodge the Russian police? The port, it is true, was working, and pale, yellow-skinned German prisoners were clearing away the rubble. Much of the

wreckage had indeed been cleared, though only a small part of the port was usable, with one American and one British transport moored to the quay, and the breakwater was still smashed in two places. Hundreds of British or French or American P.O.Ws. would march joyfully through the wrecked dockland of Odessa to the ship that was awaiting them; they would jeer at the Germans, and the Germans would make philosophical remarks to each

other about the changing fortunes of war, or merely glare disconsolately.

I wondered then why Odessa was scarcely being restored at all, and why food and living conditions generally were harder than they were in so many other liberated cities. Was not Odessa, I wondered, being indirectly punished for that relatively easy time it had had in the Transniestria days, and for the eagerness with which so many of its citizens had entered into the spirit of night-clubs, bodegas and black-marketing? Not out of real disloyalty, but rather out of an innate and frivolous liking for petty business.