Enemy at the Gates (51 page)

In five months of fighting and bombings, 99 percent of the city had been reduced to rubble. More than forty-one thousand homes, three hundred factories, 113 hospitals and schools had been destroyed. A quick census revealed that out of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants of the previous summer, only 1,515 civilians remained. Most of them had either died in the first days or left the city for temporary homes in Siberia and Asia. No one knew how many had been killed, but the estimates were staggering.

In Dar Goya, the Fillipovs remained to mourn the irreparable loss of their cobbler son, Sacha. And behind General Rodimtsev's grain mill headquarters on the Volga bank, Mrs. Karmanova and her son, Genn, celebrated their freedom after months of hiding in trenches and snowholes. On Red Square, two little girls, separated since September, hopped over corpses to meet in a joyful embrace. Their innocent laughter, carrying far in the still air, brought smiles to Russian soldiers, who were tossing dead Germans onto a roaring bonfire.

The Russian Sixty-second Army began to leave the city for a wellearned rest on the eastern side of the Volga. Within weeks, the rejuvenated troops would follow Vassili Chuikov to other battlefields. But behind them, in hospitals across Russia, they left thousands of comrades from the darkest days in Stalingrad who would be fighting another kind of war, the struggle toward physical and mental recovery.

In a hospital bed at Tashkent, the tiny blond sniper Tania Cherriova, was slowly recuperating from the stomach wound that had nearly taken her life. She had borne well the news that the operation she had endured would prevent her from ever bearing a child. She had obeyed the doctors' orders to the letter and looked forward to a speedy release from confinement. But when she received a letter from a friend in the Sixty-second Army, her world fell apart.

The friend wrote that her lover, Vassili Zaitsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, had died in an explosion during the final weeks of fighting around the Red October Plant. The news drove Tania into acute depression. As days passed, her physical strength improved greatly but doctors noticed that she rarely exhibited interest in anything around her. Instead she just stared for hours into space as though trying to recapture a lost moment.

At another hospital, Lt. Hersch Gurewicz clumped about on his artificial leg and tried to get a new assignment in the Red Army. Told that he would have to be discharged for medical reasons, Gurewicz wrote directly to Stalin, begging for reconsideration. The letter won a reprieve and Gurewicz found himself a mail censor with a Polish contingent heading west toward the Ukraine. Gleefully, the lieutenant packed an extra wooden leg and headed back to war.

Several hundred miles to the north, guards at a railroad station in the Ural city of Novosibirsk gently wrapped their arms around the bandaged figure of Commando Capt. Ignacy Changar as he stood singing on the station platform. Transferred from a hospital in Moscow, Changar had gotten so drunk on the train ride that he had no idea where he was supposed to be.

Admitted to a military hospital, Changar began to flirt with the nurses, particularly one young girl who came from Kiev. When he asked repeatedly for her, she went to him wondering why such an old man would be interested in her. She had no idea that Ignacy was just twenty-one, because he now had snow-white hair.

What of the German Sixth Army? Swallowed up on the steppe, it had disappeared into the wastes of Russia and no one in the German High Command had witnessed its going. In the last days of the battle, Paulus had allowed several squads of men to make a break toward the west. But they all had been captured or killed by alert Red Army units.

Other Germans had also left on their own. Quartermaster Karl Binder took a group with him as far as Karpovka, thirty miles west of Stalingrad before the enemy surrounded him and forced his surrender.

Lt. Emil Metzger hid in a bunker in the vain hope that the Russians would leave the area and allow him to slip off at night toward the Don. But the Russians fired bullets down a ventilation pipe and wounded Emil in the right heel. Finally driven into the open by grenades, he walked off to prison camp with blood sloshing around in his boot.

Two Germans actually reached friendly lines. In late February, a Corporal Neiwig staggered into a command post of Army Group Don nearly 150 miles west of the
Kessel.
The sole survivor of a twenty-man group of escapees who had succumbed to the freezing cold, Neiwig knew little about the fate of the rest of his army. Within hours, as he tried to regain his strength from the trip, a Soviet mortar shell landed nearby and blew him to bits.

On March 1, Pvt. Michael Horvath walked into German positions near Voronezh, far to the west of Stalingrad. Captured on January 31, he had been shipped off to another front as an interpreter for Russian intelligence officers. Therefore, Horvath could add little information to what was known about the Sixth Army since the day of its capitulation. The German High Command and the German people were unable to tell how Paulus and his troops were faring in Russian hands.

The field marshal and his generals were, at that moment, living in relatively comfortable quarters near Moscow. But the men Paulus believed would be guaranteed food and medical care were dying in great numbers on the icy steppes.

Thirty miles northwest of Stalingrad, at Kotluban, a group of Russian nurses heard the German prisoners coming long before they saw them. They listened in astonishment to the mournful groaning as lines of soldiers crept over the horizon and shuffled through snowdrifts toward them. Lowing like cattle, the Germ ans were a procession of rags and dilapidated earmuffs, blanketwrapped feet, and faces blackened by beard and frost. Almost all of them were crying, and the nurses felt an instinctive wave of sympathy for them. Then the Russian guards hoisted rifles and fired indiscriminately into the columns. As the victims fell down and died, the rest of the Germans plodded along, at a half mile an hour, and the nurses shook their fists in outrage at their own soldiers.

Quartermaster Karl Binder was in another of these processions. Marching toward Vertaichy on the Don he flinched at every shot, and at each dull whack of a rifle butt crashing down on a skull. Hundreds of bodies lay beside the trail, freshly killed Germans, Russian women and children dead for weeks, Soviet and German troops mutilated in months-old battles.

At villages along the march, civilians broke into the lines to rob the prisoners of lighters, fountain pens, and fieldpacks. His hands blue from the cold, Binder plunged on and tried to distract himself by thinking of his family safe at home in Germany.

Emil Metzger had already walked more than a hundred miles to a train that took him to the foothills of the Urals in Siberia. Besides the bullet still in his heel, Metzger had fallen victim to typhus and, by the time he reached a straw cot in a primitive barracks, was close to death. Handing his pictures of Kaethe to a chaplain he said: "Give these to my wife if you get back." Then
he
lay down to die.

In the morning, Emil woke to an unreal silence. Nearly everyone in his barracks had perished during the night. Suddenly ashamed of his own willingness to give up the struggle, the lieutenant vowed he would survive. From that moment on, he ignored his fever and ate anything the Russians offered, though the food "was like eating his own gall."

The German Sixth Army was scattered to more than twenty camps stretching from the Arctic Circle to the southern deserts.

One train carried thousands of Germans from the Volga to Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. Inside each car, stuffed with one hundred or more prisoners, a macabre death struggle ensued as the Germans killed each other for bits of food tossed to them every two days. Those closest to the door were set upon by ravenous soldiers in the rear; only the strongest men survived the weeks-long trip. By the time the train reached the Pamir Mountains, almost half its passengers were dead.

Other Germans remained in Stalingrad to help reconstruct the city they had devastated. Typhus swept their ranks and in March, the Russians dug a ditch at Beketovka and dumped nearly forty thousand German bodies into a mass grave.

Cpl. Franz Deifel, who had thought of killing himself in January, survived the plague and now picked up the bricks of Stalingrad. In March, Deifel heard a whistle from the tractor factory as the Russians ran the first train around that massive plant's convoluted rail system. Later that month, Deifel also saw his first butterfly of the spring. A blaze of yellow and orange, it flitted nervously from ruin to ruin in the glorious sunlight of a cloudless day.

But for more than five hundred thousand other Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Rumanians, the Russian winter had been a harsh, unfair struggle. During a single, three-month span—February, March, and April of 1943—more than four hundred thousand of them had perished.

In many cases, the Russians let them starve to death. Every third day, Red Army trucks unloaded heads of cabbage, loaves of frozen bread, even garbage for the prisoners to eat. At Tambov, Krinovaya, Yelabuga, Oranki, Susdal, Vladimir, and other camps, the inmates fell upon the food and beat each other to death for scraps.

Other prisoners, more intent on survival, took matters into their own hands, especially in camps where military self-discipline had broken down. At Susdal, Felice Bracci first noticed it when he saw corpses without arms or legs. And Dr.' Cristoforo Capone found human heads with the brains scooped out, or torsos minus livers and kidneys. Cannibalism had begun.

The cannibals were furtive at first, stealing among the dead to hack off a limb and eat it raw. But their tastes quickly matured and they searched for the newly dead, those just turning cold, and thus more tender. Finally they roamed in packs, defying anyone to stop them. They even helped the dying to die.

Hunting day and night, their lust for human flesh turned them into crazed animals and, by late February, they reached a savage peak of barbarism. At Krinovaya, an Italian Alpini soldier raced across the compound to find his priest, Don Guido Tuna.

"Come quickly, Father," he begged. "They want to eat my cousin!"

The startled Tuna followed the distraught man across the compound, past quartered stomachs, headless cadavers, arms and legs stripped of flesh and meat. He arrived at the barracks door to see madmen smashing at it with their fists. Inside was their quarry, shot and mortally wounded by a Russian guard. The cannibals had followed the trail of warm blood to the door and now tried to pound it down to get at the terrified man.

The sickened Tuna screamed at the cannibals, telling them theirs was a heinous crime, a blot on their consciences, and that God would never forgive them. The flesh-eaters slunk back from the door; a few begged the priest for forgiveness. Father Tuna went inside to the dying soldier and heard his last confession. When the boy begged the priest to save him from the cannibals, Tuna sat beside him in his final moments. The cannibals left his corpse alone. They had thousands more to choose from.

In another barracks at Krinovaya, two Italian brothers had sworn to protect each other from cannibals in case death separated them. When one brother succumbed to illness, the cannibals crowded around the fresh corpse. The other brother straddled the dead man's cot, and warned off the jackals hovering around the bed. During the long night he stood guard while the cannibals urged him to let them take care of the victim.

As dawn approached, they increased their verbal assault, telling the brother it was pointless for him to stay any longer. They even offered to bury the body for him. As he weakened, they moved closer to the bed and gently picked up the corpse he had sworn to defend. Exhausted from his vigil, the surviving brother threw himself on the floor and began to howl hysterically. The experience had driven him insane.

The Russians shot every cannibal they caught, but faced with the task of hunting down so many man-eaters they had to enlist the aid of "anticannibalism teams," drawn from the ranks of captive officers. The Russians equipped these squads with crowbars and demanded they kill every cannibal they found. The teams prowled at night, looking for telltale flickers of flame from small fires where the predators were preparing their meals.

Dr. Vincenzo Pugliese went on patrol frequently and, one night, he turned a corner and surprised a cannibal roasting something on the end of a stick. At first it looked like an oversized sausage, but then Pugliese's trained eye noticed the accordion-like pleats on the object and with a sickening start, he realized that the man was cooking a human trachea.

Prisoners who refused to eat human flesh used other tricks to survive. At Krinovaya, a group of Italian entrepreneurs retrieved excrement from huge latrine ditches and with bare hands picked out undigested corn and millet, which they washed and ate. German prisoners swiftly improved the process. Setting up an assembly line of sieve-like tin cups, they strained the feces through them and trapped so much grain that they started a black market in it.

At Susdal, Dr. Cristoforo Capone employed his fertile imagination to save himself and his comrades. Still a charming rogue who found humor in the darkest moments, he devised truly elaborate schemes. When a truck filled with cabbages parked outside the fence, Capone organized a group that stole the load and hid it under beds, in latrines and mattresses. While his friends ate voraciously, Capone then spread a trail of cabbage leaves from the empty truck to a nearby Rumanian barracks. The theft was finally discovered, and the Russians followed the trail and fell upon the Rumanians with clubs. Meanwhile, Capone's friends ate every other piece of evidence.

The inventive doctor found yet another macabre way to sustain life. Divided into fifteen-men squads, the Italian POWs lived in ice-cold rooms where they walked incessantly to keep from freezing. Each morning a Russian guard entered, counted the men present and left rations for that exact number. As men began to waste away and die, Capone decided their corpses could serve a better purpose than being thrown onto the pile of bodies in the yard. From then on Capone propped bodies upright in their chairs and when the Russian guard made his daily count, he and his companions engaged them in spirited conversation. The guard always left the fifteen rations; soon Capone and his companions were looking better, feeling better.