Volodymyr Polishchuk
“Made in Yelisavetgrad”

THE FRONT-LINE DIARY OF VOLODYMYR GELFAND

Among the memoirs of participants in the Second World War published in Germany, Volodymyr Gelfand is today perhaps one of the most popular authors. His front-line diaries have appeared in print three times in Germany — in 2002, 2005 and 2008 — and twice in Sweden, in 2006 and 2012.

Volodymyr Gelfand was born on 1 March 1923 into a poor Jewish family in the settlement of Novoarkhangelsk. In 2006 the young family moved to relatives in Yessentuki, but already in 1928 returned to Ukraine. In Dniprodzerzhynsk his father worked as a foreman at a metallurgical plant, while his mother was a teacher in the plant kindergarten. In 1933 the family moved to Dnipropetrovsk.

In August 1941 Gelfand moved to Yessentuki, where his grandfather lived. There he took part in rear-area work. On 6 May 1942 he joined the army. He trained at an artillery school near Maykop. In July 1942 his military unit was encircled. With a small group of soldiers Volodymyr broke out and took part in the fighting near Stalingrad. Sergeant Gelfand was appointed deputy platoon commander for political work. After being wounded in the arm in December 1942, he was taken to a military hospital. In February 1943 he was sent to an officers’ rifle school near Rostov. After three months of training he graduated with the rank of junior lieutenant. From August 1943 he served in a mortar platoon of the 248th Rifle Division. In January 1944 Gelfand received the rank of lieutenant. From November 1943 he was a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

At the front, in the military hospital and at the junior officers’ school, he kept a diary. Between attacks and enemy bombardments, on marches, during fortification work and while preparing offensives, he looked for intellectual pursuits. He read books, wrote poems, sent articles and poems to central newspapers, produced wall newspapers and compiled combat leaflets.

At the beginning of 1944 Gelfand’s unit fought in southern Ukraine; in May 1944 it crossed the Dniester into Bessarabia. Columns of prisoners of war and traitors appeared ever more often. In the diary he describes the Red Army soldiers’ hatred of prisoners.

In the autumn of 1944 he was near Warsaw. The diary filled with notes about encounters with Polish civilians. In November 1944 he did not take part in combat operations for more than two months. This was connected with Gelfand expressing his feelings to Galai, the division commander’s front-line girlfriend, which angered his superior. At the beginning of 1945 Volodymyr Gelfand was given command of a mortar platoon. For him it was something like a punitive reassignment. On the eve of the Berlin operation he was assigned to General Antonov’s headquarters to keep the combat operations journal.

Gelfand spent the first peaceful days in occupied Berlin as a staff officer. He wanted to go home — “complete apathy, indifference,” he wrote in his diary on 12 June 1945. Yet he was included in neither the first nor the second wave of demobilization. With no clearly defined assignment, he spent June in uneasy relations with the command. When the Scientific Library was looted, he regarded it as “shameful barbarism” (entry of 16/17 June). He was outraged when private contact with Germans was banned in August, but continued making trips to Berlin.

He was demobilized in September 1946 and returned to his mother in Dnipropetrovsk. In 1852 he graduated from the university in the city of Molotov (Perm). He wrote his diploma thesis on a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg and met Ehrenburg in Moscow in February 1951. In 1954 he returned to Dnipropetrovsk and taught social studies, history and political economy at the city’s vocational schools. His father died in 1974 and his mother in 1982. Volodymyr Gelfand outlived her by only a year.

He wrote continuously. He offered the local press not only reports about school life and work results, but also memories from the front. The late 1970s were his most productive period. The collection of newspaper publications contains seven articles from 1968, twenty from 1976 and thirty from 1978.

This is what Western newspapers wrote about Gelfand’s front-line diary:

“The diary of a Soviet soldier. Its strength lies in its description of a reality that was denied for a long time and had never been described. Despite all the horrors, it is gripping reading that has reached us after many years. It is good that these notes, even sixty years late, have become available, at least to the German public. For the first time these records show the faces of the victorious Red Army soldiers and make it possible to understand the inner world of Russian soldiers.”

“Gelfand’s German Diary 1945–46 is remarkable in many respects. It is an unusual eyewitness account of the Red Army’s liberation of Poland and eastern Germany. Since keeping diaries was forbidden in the Red Army, presumably for security reasons, readers already have reason to be grateful to the Ukrainian lieutenant Volodymyr Gelfand, who courageously broke that ban. Although the diary is deficient in some respects, it can serve as a certain counterweight to the army of historical revisionists who are working to turn humanity’s great victory over Hitlerism into a brutal assault by Stalin’s guards on Western civilization.”

“These are very private, uncensored testimonies to the experiences and moods of a Red Army soldier and occupier in Germany. The young soldier saw the end of the war and the collapse of German society. We gain completely new insights into the comradeship of the Red Army and its moral condition. Gelfand’s diaries also challenge the widespread thesis that the Red Army’s military successes should be attributed primarily to a system of repression. Gelfand’s personal experiences show that in 1945/46 there were good relations between victorious men and defeated women. The reader receives a credible picture showing that German women too sought contact with Soviet soldiers — and not only for material reasons or out of a need for protection.”

“Among the many eyewitness accounts of the end of the Second World War in Germany, the diary of a young Red Army lieutenant who took part in the capture of Berlin and remained in the city until September 1946 appeared in 2005. Volodymyr Gelfand’s German Diary attracted widespread media interest and, through its observations, cast new light on existing German narratives about the fall of Berlin and the relationship between the Soviet occupiers and the German population at that time.”

“Gelfand’s diary reflects the mood of Soviet troops in the final phase of the Second World War and after its end. A Jew of Ukrainian origin arrives in Germany with great directness and a thirst for revenge. Hatred of the enemy is identified with the entire German people. Gelfand witnesses destruction, looting, deaths and betrayals. Several cases of violence and rape of German women are recorded in the diaries. He is a sensitive observer and participant at the same time and makes no attempt to conceal acts of revenge and plunder. Gelfand’s diaries are a unique chronicle of the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Germany.”

The front-line notes of the Soviet officer can be read on the Internet.

© V. V. Polishchuk, 2014
© poly-kancler.kr.ua
© poly-kancler.com.ua