Russia at war 1941-1945

In one of the few bigger buildings (patched up by the Germans since 1942) I saw the

Mayor of Sebastopol, Comrade Yefremov; he had been mayor during the siege of 1941-

2. Now, he said, the streets were deserted because the people living in the outskirts had not yet lost the habit of looking upon this as verboten territory. The soldiers also had gone, except for some Black Sea sailors manning the antiaircraft guns. For the last two years, these men had been day-dreaming of the day when they would stand again on

guard at Sebastopol... The famous Naval Museum had, in the main, survived the siege, but all its exhibits had been taken away to Germany by the Organisation Rosenberg "with the Wehrmacht's permission", as a notice inside said. It was written in German, Rumanian, Tartar and Russian, Russian coming last.

30,000 civilians had survived the 1941-2 siege of Sebastopol, but some 20,000 were

deported by the Germans or shot as suspected soldiers in disguise; and 10,000 had been allowed to stay in Sebasto-' pol, or rather in its northern suburbs. Yefremov also alluded to the Crimean Tartars, who had played a particularly cruel game in hunting down

disguised Russian soldiers. Altogether, the Tartars' record was as bad as could be. They had formed a police force under German control and had been highly active in the

Gestapo...

Chersonese was gruesome. All the area in front of the Earth Wall and beyond was

ploughed up by thousands of shells and scorched by the fire of the katyusha mortars.

Hundreds of German vehicles were still there, or were being carted away by Russian

soldiers. The ground was littered with thousands of German helmets, rifles, bayonets, and other arms and ammunition. Some of this stuff was now being piled up by Russian

soldiers assisted by meek German war prisoners who looked almost happy to be alive.

There were also numerous German guns around, and a few heavy tanks—but only few,

for the Germans had either lost or evacuated the rest of them long before.

Over the ground were also scattered thousands of pieces of paper —photographs,

snapshots, passports, maps, private letters—and even a volume of Nietzsche carried to the end by some Nazi superman. Nearly all the dead had been buried, but around the

shattered lighthouse dead Germans and rafts were bobbing in the water, as it beat against the tip of the Chersonese Promontory—bodies of men who had tried to escape on the

rafts. They were some of those 750 SS-men who had made a last stand around the

lighthouse, and would not surrender. And here, among these dead bodies, on the water-edge, was another weird shape: something that looked like a skeleton with only a few rags still clinging to it: and one of the rags still had white-and-blue stripes: the telniashka (singlet) of a Black Sea sailor. Was he one of those who, nearly two years before, had fought here to the last—just like these Germans—on this very Chersonese Promontory,

and had been left here on this desolate spot, to rot away unburied?

Around the lighthouse, the blue sea was calm, and perhaps, not very far away some rafts were still drifting over the sea, with desperate men clinging to them, drifting over waters where only three years before, the pleasure steamers still cruised between Odessa,

Sebastopol and Novorossisk. Of the three, only Odessa still looked like a city.

Novorossisk, like Sebastopol, was also a heap of ruins.

My last night in the Crimea, I spent in the midst of the rich juicy green steppe. It had rained heavily during the previous evening and throughout the night. I was billeted in the clean little Tartar cottage; there was an old man there, and an old woman, and their son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They had, behind the house, a large vegetable garden, all their own; the vegetables were coming up luxuriantly, and beyond the vegetable plot were

immense fields of green wheat. But the Tartar family were morose and frightened,

scarcely said a word, and the woman claimed to be very ill. The land had been intensely cultivated. The Germans, still hoping until April to hold the Crimea, had encouraged the Tartars to sow and plant wherever possible, and the Tartars had worked hard.

I remember the look of fear that came over the old man when a Soviet officer knocked on the door in order, as it turned out, merely to billet me on him.

The 500,000 Crimean Tartars were, before long, to be deported en masse—women, children and all—to "the east" for having collaborated with the Germans. The Crimea was eventually turned over to the Ukrainian SSR, and nothing more was said of the

Tartars, even though Mr Khrushchev was to be very indignant about the "racialist" and

"un-Leninist" mass deportation of other entire nationalities. But the Crimean Tartars (or the Volga Germans, for that matter) were not mentioned, and they were never allowed to return.

Chapter V THE LULL BEFORE D-DAY-STALIN'S