Inside the Rzhev Meatginder
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All the other events of this night are described by me in the poem “We Remember”, in which everything is true, without any artistic or other fiction.
And with an infant, too, the truth. I didn’t remember that young woman because I hadn’t lived in the village for three years before the war, but she was walking next to us, at the back of a column with a small knot and an infant in her arms, supported by a sling over her shoulder.
The child was crying loudly all the time, it looked like he had a cold. The woman often stopped, corrected something in this bundle in her arms, tried to calm her down, but the child cried, not stopping. When she stopped once again, the escort who was walking nearby pushed her in the back with the butt of a rifle, she fell face forward, and naturally dropped the child. The bundle rolled back a meter and a half or two, while she was trying to get up, the escort poked at this bundle with a bayonet and threw it to the side of the road. The woman rushed to the bundle, but she was driven back into the column with her rifle butts.
The poem was written for the tenth anniversary of the victory in 1955 in Spitsbergen, where I often visited in those years, working as a ship mechanic of the Murmansk Arctic Shipping Company, there sometimes, it happened to have free time to remember everything I had experienced in the heat of the war.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of these events, already living in Moscow, I tried to publish this poem in “literaturnaya Gazeta (newspaper)” and in Izvestia. But it either did not reach the editors, or they did not find anything interesting in it that was worthy of the seal of that time, I do not know.
And then, after we, the inhabitants of the burned Egor’evskoe, were driven to the village of Aleksandrovka and, in some ways, as we were resettled, famine began.
Chapter 7. The year is 1942. Hunger
None of the residents of our former village could stock up on at least some food, and what could be taken with them – after all, you cannot carry much on yourself, since almost every family had young children.
That’s the situation. It seems that they saved children from death: they were carried on a sled, carried in their arms, but it turned out that they were brought to die of hunger. Local residents themselves survived with difficulty, they also had children, they also had to be saved from all the hardships and dangers that the war brought with it.
Mowed rye and wheat were in the stacks, it was possible to thresh them before the arrival of the nazis very little, so the villagers had minimal grain reserves.
Usually the main threshing was carried out in late autumn and winter, the sheaves were first dried in the rigs, and then threshedincovered currents. And this autumn it did not work, the villagers were forced to build fortifications, and, most importantly, these buildings and devices served as wood for the ceilings of trenches, machine gun nests and dugouts.
Apparently, the Nazis were going to survive the cold in warm huts, so the houses were not touched when fortifications were built in the autumn, but sheds, rigs, barns and even baths were dismantled and used in the construction of these defensive structures.
Stacks with unthreshed sheaves were burned. Livestock had already been eaten by the Nazis and the main product for the inhabitants of almost all villages, became potatoes, but they also tried to put a paw on it by insatiable hordes in uniforms. And then, they drove us in, who had nothing but hungry mouths. People began to starve to death.
From the first day, when we were driven to the village of Aleksandrovka, grandmother Manya and I went with a bag to the houses of local residents – to beg for alms. Mom began to help the old grandmother with housework in the house where we settled. My sister helped my mother and looked after my little brother and the elderly. We were all starving. A bucket of potatoes, which my mother received from my grandmother in advance, was eaten in two days – there were as many as seven hungry mouths. Collecting alms turned out to be almost an empty affair, because there were no fewer beggars than residents in Aleksandrovka itself – our entire village.
In order to understand how limited the space in which the villagers and we who were driven here found themselves turned out to be, it is necessary to describe the spatial situation that developed at that time.
As I have already said, the first line of German defense passed behind the village houses 50—60 meters away – where there were outbuildings. The houses themselves with palisades and fences are about 25—30 meters, the road in front of the houses is 20 – 25 meters, and further, 150 – 200 meters along the bank of the Derzha River, wire barriers. And beyond the river, with a channel width of 30 – 35 meters – a field resting on the forest, which arced around this field and rested with a wide tongue on the Derzha River. This forest was already occupied by our Soviet troops in February. From the village to the forest along the riverbed was about 800 meters. This is the picture that we got – houses with residents reliably covered the first line of German defense from the fire of our troops.
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