Armageddon - Max Hastings [298]
The surviving family members subsisted almost entirely on potatoes through two years of German occupation. Their journey to Latvia among a mass of other local peasants was a week-long nightmare, interrupted by interminable halts, because partisans had cut the rail track. Near Riga, families were separated. “The old people, we discovered later, went immediately to become soap,” said Gennady Trofimov. “Children became blood donors. Mothers worked in the fields.” They became the slaves of local farmers, fed only at their whim. Gennady earned his first pay, a loaf of bread, for a day’s labour driving a horse which powered a loom to make fibre out of flax. “We did not even understand the meaning of the word misery,” he said. “All we knew was that we were hungry all the time. If we found something to eat, that meant a tiny moment of happiness.”
In the autumn of 1944, as the Red Army swept across Latvia, they were moved into a barracks in Riga. “We lived like animals, sleeping on the floor, scavenging for rubbish,” said Gennady. His grandmother looked after little Anna, while his mother was sent out to dig trenches for the Germans. The Russians were already bombing the port. At the age of three, Anna could tell the difference between an aircraft bomb and an artillery shell, from personal experience. The whole family fell on their knees and prayed through the air raids. They celebrated every religious holiday. Their grandmother proved a woman of iron, one also possessed of great gifts. Though she was illiterate, she had spent much of her life working as a nanny for rich families. She had an extraordinary fund of proverbs, jokes and fairy stories, which for almost four years were the only entertainments they experienced. “It was a miracle that we survived,” said Gennady. He spent the days wandering the town, searching for food. At the age of ten, he possessed no toys, had never attended a school, could not write or read more than a few words glimpsed on shop signs. Almost the only game known to him and scores of other hapless urchins around the barracks was to take turns to crouch in an old motor tyre and roll each other down the street in it. In the winter of 1944, the family was sent to another farm in southern Latvia, where they spent the rest of the war. “My only memory of life was as a struggle,” said Gennady. “My mother seemed very ordinary. Yet she proved to be a heroine, because she kept us alive.”
Viktor Mamontov was sixteen when he was captured by the Germans in 1942. He had survived the siege of Leningrad, in which his father died of starvation, while he himself worked twelve hours a day in a shell factory. His elder brother was killed in one of the first battles, fighting armed with a spade because there were not enough rifles. Mamontov was evacuated to a town near the Black Sea, and was in hospital recovering from pneumonia when the Germans overran the area. He fled for his life among thousands of terrified young soldiers who were throwing away their weapons and uniforms. After being wounded by a bomb fragment, he was taken into captivity by the Germans. He escaped, and roamed the Crimea for a time until he was caught riding on a German train without papers. He was shipped among a consignment of Jews, partisans and other “antisocial elements” to a concentration camp near Bremen.
At first, he worked among 800 others in a canning factory, sleeping on the concrete floor, starving. Then he was transferred to load ballast on to trains and clear air-raid salvage and unexploded bombs. Late in 1943, a group of prisoners were denounced for plotting an escape, and he found himself among them. The indicted men were transferred to a prison at Wissemünde, and then to the 21st Punishment Camp near Brunswick. This was his worst experience yet. All 400 prisoners were required to run rather than walk everywhere.