I discuss the interview with the cook Agrafena Posdnyakova separately because she is the only one who witnessed the German occupation firsthand. Posdnyakova shared her fate with approximately 150,000 to 200,000 other residents.47 Some were denied permission to leave in time, but most stayed to care for sick family members or were reluctant to leave their homes with winter drawing near. Very few gained an accurate picture of the occupiers; if anything, they dismissed Soviet reports of German atrocities as exaggerations.48
The destruction of the city wore on after the heavy aerial bombardments in the final days of August. The Luftwaffe continued its air strikes and Soviet artillery shelled the war-ravaged districts from the east bank of the Volga. Residents—mostly the elderly, women, and children—sought shelter in cellars, sheds, foxholes, and drainage pipes.49 Indiscriminate grenade fire killed many during the street fighting, and the Soviet press published outraged articles about Wehrmacht soldiers who used civilians as human shields.50
The Germans built military administrations in the occupied districts and the surrounding areas. Major Hans Speidel, the commandant of Stalingrad, explained to his Red Army captors in February 1943 the goals of the German occupation: “complete destruction of the party and Soviet cadres, eradication of all the Jews,” the exploitation of the population, and the security of the soldiers occupying the city.51 In April 1943 the NKVD reported that “those involved in uncovering the Jews were mainly members of the German field gendarmerie and the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Traitors among the local population played a considerable role in this. To flush out and exterminate Jews, all dwellings, cellars, niches, and dugouts were checked.”52 Few Jews lived in the Stalingrad region, however. The Soviets counted 855 murdered Jews, refugees from Ukraine most likely; some were killed in sadistic fashion.53 Major Speidel explained to his interrogators that the Germans shot Jews and communists immediately because they did not know where to put them.54 The number of those murdered would have been higher, were it not for the last-minute evacuation of civilians.
The Germans required all city residents to register at local military headquarters. Anyone who could not produce a registration card risked being shot or sent to a concentration camp. Men fit for military service were preventatively incarcerated with other war prisoners.55 A special staff under the command of the chief quartermaster of the 6th Army organized the evacuation of residents deemed suitable for economic exploitation. Starting around October 1, the Germans mustered eight thousand to ten thousand residents each morning and sent them on a sixty-mile march—without food, water, or nighttime shelter from the cold—to the nearest railway stop, in Kalach. There they were sent by train to the Forshtat detention center, 180 miles west of Stalingrad, and were inspected by the German authorities.56 A Wehrmacht soldier described in a letter dated November 20 the lines of deportees walking toward Kalach in zero-degree cold: “On both sides of the road lie frozen women and children. They also lie in trenches and ditches where the refugees are seeking protection at night. Their only food is dead horses. Each such horse is stripped to the very bones.”57
The Red Army began its counteroffensive at the end of November. By then there were only fifteen thousand civilians in the German-controlled areas of Stalingrad.58 Their situation worsened rapidly in the following weeks. Since arriving in September, German soldiers had routinely looted households for jewelry and other valuables. In December soldiers began ransacking shacks and cottages, looking for hidden food and warm clothing. Cold, hungry, and exasperated, the invaders intensified their violent attacks on civilians. Units stationed in the barren steppe outside Stalingrad sent commandos into the city to get wood. They demolished whole dwellings without regard for the inhabitants. As the 6th Army fell back, officers and soldiers took up lodging in undamaged residences and threw the inhabitants out into the street. Some German officers confiscated the quarters of their Romanian allies; many of them raped female civilians.59
The chief inspector of the 71st Infantry Division for Stalingrad South ordered all remaining civilians to register on January 1, 1943. To receive a registration card, each resident had to give the local military headquarters four and a half pounds of grain. All in all, 2,500 residents registered, yielding the invaders four tons of grain. In some instances marauding soldiers robbed residents of their meager reserves on the way. The inspector, believing that only a small segment of the remaining population had reported for registration, ordered a second registration for January 10. This time, the charge was four and a half pounds of wheat or six and a half pounds of rye. Three hundred additional residents registered.60
In her interview Agrafena Posdnyakova described this mandatory levy along with other experiences and impressions of the German occupiers. Her husband and two of her children died during the battle. The story of how she and her four remaining children survived for almost six months of fighting and austerity is astonishing. I was unable to find written documents or photographs giving more information about the cook and her family. But here is how a municipal employee described other civilian survivors she saw on returning to her destroyed neighborhood in February 1943: “We were walking around our liberated district, along little paths, among the mines and encountered people who had lost their memory, who were afraid of the sound of their own voice. You would look at such a person—a boy’s figure, but the temples are completely white.”61
Ulitsa mira (Peace Street), Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: L. I. Konov
COMMISSION ON THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
Stalingrad, March 14, 1943
Agrafena Petrovna POZDNYAKOVA, an employee of the City Committee62
At first I worked for the city committee as a cleaner, and then I worked in the kitchen. It’s been five years already. My husband was a worker. We had six children. My oldest girl also worked for the city committee, in the library. She was in the Komsomol. My husband was a shoemaker. He worked at a shoe factory, then in a workshop for invalids. I lost my husband and two of my children during the fighting in Stalingrad.
The enemy started bombing on August 23, in the evening, of course. All of us were at work. It was a good day, everything was all right. In the evening we got back home—and before we’d even sat down, he dropped by for a visit.
I could have gotten out of the city, but all my children were sick at the time. That’s why we stayed here. When our people were here it wasn’t so bad, even with the bombs. We were getting bread, and when the bombs came we hid in basements. Sometimes we stayed underground day and night. There were times when it would quiet down a bit, and we’d jump out to grab something, to get some bread, or bake some, and then it was right back down to the basement. We went to the railway for water. Bullets flying overhead. It wasn’t easy getting water. It happened a lot that someone would go for water and not come back. We took the water from a tank, and it often came mixed with fuel oil.
We lived on Solnechnaya Street. It was a small two-story building. We were staying in the basement. On the evening of September 14 our basement was taken by the Germans. On September 17 everything was burned. The entire block was burned to the ground. We were driven out of the basement. Me and my family stayed in some trenches in the courtyard, but the house was intact.
Around eleven a fire broke out. It was just awful. Terrible. We stayed, had our supper in the house. We were getting ready to leave, taking some things, getting the children. The Germans closed the doors and shouted: “Sleep, Rus, sleep!” We had to pass the children through a window and then crawl out ourselves. We had to leave everything behind. All that was left of the place was the walls. We spent the night within those walls. That morning the Germans came and announced that we had to leave this place immediately. So we went back to our trench. We cleared it out a bit, got down, and stayed put. That’s where we were until September 26. There was heavy shelling on the 27th. My husband and daughter were killed, and we were covered in dirt. This boy here (she points) was wounded. We got dug out, and we left. We went to the basement of this girl, the one who’s come with me today. We stayed there until October 12, which was when the Germans drove us out of the area for good, out from the center to the outskirts of the city. Some left with bags over their shoulders, but I had this wounded boy, small children, and my own legs were also injured. We relocated to the outskirts of the city behind the Soviet Hospital, in the Dzerzhinsky district. We’ve been living there ever since. The Germans came and kicked us out of this place too. We went to the commandant’s office, we begged them. I’m sick, I’ve got children. They came to take a look and shrugged: you’ve got too many as it is. They’ll all die anyway.
They roughed us up pretty good, hit us, shot at us.
There was still a lot of grain in the elevator.63 The Germans were taking the grain from the elevator. There were these terrible trains of carts. The men moving the carts were Russian prisoners. If you asked one of them for something, they’d bring you a bag or half a bag of flour. We’d pay him two or three hundred rubles for it. There was a German for every Russian prisoner. We’d buy from one of them, and in an hour, hour and a half, another German would come [take it away] because he knew that we’d bought it. That did it: we were ruined. We had no money, no bread. While our people were here, until September [unintelligible] we were getting bread, flour, some white bread for the children. We somehow managed to keep going. Then we started eating horses. There was nothing to feed them with, so the horses started dying. Out on the road by the Soviet Hospital there were these barracks, terrible places. We’d go there, to the barracks, and ask the Russian prisoners. [ . . . ] You could tell the horse was going to die anyway. So he shot her. We took the meat and ate it. Later, when the Germans were surrounded, they were eating horses too. They left us the legs, heads, entrails. But by the end we didn’t even get that. They took everything, left us only hooves and guts. If they saw you had any horsemeat, they took it. Especially when the Romanians got pushed here from Kalach, when our guys took Kalach—we thought they were going to eat us all alive. They were starving. It was so cold, and they were practically naked. It was awful to see. These scarecrows were always on the move. They took anything and everything they came across.
Back when they first took Stalingrad, they could get what they wanted. They needed clothes, good shoes, gold, watches, and they got everything. In the German commandant’s office, for example, they offered transportation out of the city in exchange for gold watches, good boots, men’s suits or coats, good carpets. But of course we didn’t have any of these things. So the only way we could go was on foot. The Germans did other things too. They’d take what you gave them, drive you out of the city, and then leave you there to fend for yourselves. [ . . . ]
A lot of people stayed in Stalingrad. Girls, young women, children under fourteen, men under fifty-five or sixty, and women up to fifty were packed off to Germany. Many young women and girls worked and even lived with them. Real patriots, those ones. At the start people who worked here in the city center were allowed to go home, but with a German escort. They stopped letting people do this recently. They got special insignia and documents so the places they were living in didn’t get destroyed. Some of them did laundry, some of them cleaned.
When our boys came on January 28 our building was again hit by two shells.
They’d knock on the door and ask to come in and get warm. You’d let them in, and they’d toss the place and take your stuff. Towards the end, if you’d made some flat bread with bad flour, they’d take that as well. You’d make something for the children—horse soup. Or you’d have extra pieces of horsemeat—which you cut up in pieces instead of bread—they’d even take this from you. We stopped letting them in. So then it would go like this: They’d come in a group of two or three. One would stand at the door with a revolver. The others said: give us what you’ve got. My husband isn’t here, I’d say. Look for yourself. They’d look and they’d look and they’d find nothing, and if there was anything to find they’d take it. Every night the same story. We stopped letting them in for a while, but then they started shooting.
Then there was an announcement saying that we had to bring bread to the commandant’s office, two kilos’ worth. If you didn’t have bread, then you could bring meat. If you didn’t have meat you could bring horsemeat, salt, soap, or tobacco. I didn’t have anything at all. I went to the commandant’s office and said that I had nothing. So what? You’ve got to give us something. If you don’t, we’ll take your pass. I said that I didn’t have a pass. You can take me and my children and do what you like with us.
This girl’s mother had some spoiled rye flour that mice had gotten into. I picked it over, sifted it, poured it into a bag, and said that was everything I had. That’ll do, they said, give it here.
When we lived on Ninth of January Square,64 this boy, Gera, was going to school. Two Russian soldiers gave him a little wheat. We had nowhere to put it, so we stashed it. When we got kicked out of that apartment, we didn’t get a chance to get it. Then they posted a notice saying that the area beyond the railway was restricted. Going there was punishable by death.
Four Germans were quartered in our place. They stayed with us for two whole weeks. Taichka’s sister was working on Communist [Street]. She worked for the Germans. She came with a patrolman. We arranged for him to accompany me to where the wheat was buried. It had gotten to the point where the children were dying from starvation. He said of course he would. He spoke good Russian. They were having a hard time of it because of the lack of bread. He said: “Lady, let’s split it fifty-fifty.” I agreed. He comes to get me the next day. We set off. We got to the bridge by the fire tower. The policemen there let him through, but not me. They told him to either get me a pass or get lost. There were skirmishes constantly going on in this district. He said: “Let’s go, lady, let’s get you a pass!” The two of us went to the prison. They had some sort of military headquarters there. He wasn’t allowed in. He said: “Let’s try the commandant’s office.” And so we went. When we got there he explained the situation. There were generals there, officers. They call for me: Do you have any grain? I say I used to have a bit, but that it might be gone by now. They assign another German to us, a gendarme, they called him. With the gendarme we were let through. The patrolman was sent home, and I went with the gendarme. We crossed the bridge, went down Communist Street, kept going farther. There’s more and more shooting. He says: “Lady, that’s the front line!” I say: “Go back, then.” He sticks to the walls while I walk right down the middle of the street with my sledge. Again he says: “You can’t walk in the street, this is the front.” I say: “Go back then, why don’t you? I’m not afraid.” I kept going, forgot all about him. When I glanced back I could see him sneaking his way forward. We make it to Shilovskaya Street. There used to be an enlistment office there. There was a rope stretched across the street with a patrolman standing nearby. That meant we couldn’t go this way. He says something to him in German. “Lady, you can’t go there, that’s the front line.”
I looked: it had snowed. You couldn’t even see any footprints, let alone people. I told him we were nearly there, that he could stay here while I kept going. It was open all around, you could see everywhere. Someone started shooting, but I keep going with my sledge. Then they must’ve seen that I was a woman because the shooting stopped, and then our soldiers were shooting. I got to my place marker and dug up the wheat. Then I tidied up the grave where my husband and daughter were buried. I stayed for quite a while. I’d already put the sack on the sledge. He came up and said: “Show me where it was buried!” Maybe there’s some more left. I say: “Go ahead, take a look!” He looked. I left, and he crawled after me. We made it to Communist Street. When we got to the bridge, I turned onto another road. He says: “No, we’re going to the commandant’s office, the grain must be given to them.” I think to myself, does that mean I went through all that for the commandant? Turns out I had. There was a notice posted there in Russian: Anyone with knowledge of stores of grain or clothing must report it to the office of the commandant. They’d send a patrolman or two, who would then go dig up the stash and divide it between them. I never got my share. They didn’t give me so much as a single grain. They took all of it and then brought me home. I had lost two buckets’ worth of wheat.
After returning to Stalingrad, refugees sit on the ruins where their home once stood, March 1943. Photographer: N. Sitnikov
On the 26th, when our forces were about to enter the city, the Germans occupied our building, which became their headquarters. They kicked us out into the courtyard at four in the morning, with all the kids and our things. We stayed in the trenches for two days until our soldiers arrived.