Armageddon - Max Hastings [291]
Devyataev was desperately cold, and got Krivonogov to pull his striped coat back over his shoulders: “My whole being was concentrated upon flying the plane.” They followed the coast northwards. He risked losing height, and suddenly saw a bridge. There were Russian soldiers on it. He brought the plane in to land amid renewed firing from the ground. As the Heinkel touched the frozen snow, the undercarriage collapsed. They thrashed through the mush to a halt. A jumbled mass of bodies was thrown forward into the cockpit by the impact. But all were alive and uninjured. They scrambled clumsily out of the aircraft, walked a few yards in their wooden clogs, then found themselves so weak that they were obliged to clamber back into the fuselage. They had no idea where they were. After thirty minutes, a wary Russian cavalry patrol arrived from Sixty-first Army. The escapers explained themselves to the incredulous soldiers: “You got away from a rocket centre?” For some hours, they were treated as miracle men. Their rescuers hastened to feed, clothe and congratulate them.
Then the NKVD arrived. The prisoners were questioned relentlessly, hour upon hour and then day after day. At last, the interrogators gave their verdict: “What you claim to have done is completely impossible. This is obviously a German plot.” The nine other men of Devyataev’s work gang were fed for a few weeks, than drafted to penal battalions. Five died in the last weeks of the war, advancing into German minefields at the crossing of the Oder. The pilot himself spent the next year in solitary confinement. Once, he was escorted to Peenemünde, to retell his story on the captured rocket site. Then he was sent back to his cell. He was told nothing of VE-Day when it came, and on 20 May was shipped to the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen near Berlin. A year later, following the testimony of captured Germans and Soviet survivors of the slave-labour camp, the NKVD grudgingly conceded that there might be something in Devyataev’s story. He was released and demobilized. With his papers stamped as a former PoW, however, it was months before he could find work of any kind. He endured a life of grinding poverty: “Even friends with whom I had been at school turned their backs on me . . . the sun began to shine for me again only when Stalin died.” In 1957, the truth of his astounding exploit was at last officially recognized. Mikhail Devyataev was made a Hero of the Soviet Union.
MANY JEWS, before they were shipped to concentration camps, passed months or years imprisoned and half starved within the ghettos of their own native cities. “Boredom is usually associated with the idle rich,” wrote Jerzy Herszburg laconically, about his time in the Lodz ghetto, “it also existed in the ghetto and even in the camps.” In July 1944, he and his fellow inmates were assembled for shipment to Auschwitz. “It may be difficult to comprehend . . . but the gathering of the Jews took place in an almost friendly atmosphere.” They had all been enormously heartened by the Allied landing in Normandy. They believed that the war must end soon. Jewish police marshalled their charges at the station with carefully labelled suitcases. Only a few inmates mistrusted the atmosphere of goodwill, hid themselves—and survived. Herszburg, a sixteen-year-old, argued afterwards that at least the ghastly delusions of the passengers lent a spurious optimism to their last days. His own uncle, who had shown great kindness to him in the ghetto, rode the train to Auschwitz “in peace and