DIARY OF LIEUTENANT GELFAND

In January of this year I heard another programme in the fascinating Echo of Moscow series The Price of Victory. This time it was not devoted to decisive battles of the Second World War, outstanding commanders or the weapons of victory, but to a diary — or rather a succession of diaries — kept first by a Red Army private, then by a junior lieutenant commanding a rifle platoon, later a mortar platoon commander, and finally an assistant chief of a transport department: Vladimir Gelfand. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the active army and, from May 1945, in the Soviet occupation forces in Germany.

Why did the broadcast interest me so much? It mentioned that Gelfand’s post-war life was connected with studies in the city of Molotov, our present-day Perm. He married there and had a son. I remembered from childhood that my mother was a lifelong friend of a colleague, the well-known Perm paediatrician Berta Davidovna Gelfand.

I, in turn, have known Berta Davidovna’s son Sasha — Alexander — for many years and have warm feelings of friendship toward him. He and his family have lived in Israel for a long time. I remember very well how Berta Davidovna supported my mother and helped her during a long and serious illness, and how my mother later visited her sick friend and brought her homemade broth.

During a recent Skype conversation with Sasha Gelfand I told him about the radio programme devoted to the diaries of his namesake. Sasha replied that the programme was about his father. Unfortunately, he knew little about him or his military past because Sasha’s parents separated when he was a small child in the mid-1950s. His father left Molotov and returned to his native Dnipropetrovsk. After that I decided to learn more both about the wartime diaries and about Vladimir Gelfand himself.

To my surprise, I quickly found a great deal of information on the Internet, including the famous four-hundred-page diary. Vladimir Gelfand’s son from his second marriage, Vitaly, had transcribed the handwritten notebooks and converted them first into typescript and then into electronic form. Vitaly lives in Berlin and took his father’s archive there in a large cardboard box. From 1987 onward he spent a quarter of a century sorting out and deciphering this extensive handwritten legacy. Besides the diaries, the archive contained reports, service documents of various kinds, poems, letters received and written by Gelfand, and roughly five hundred photographs. It is an enormous body of material.

In 2005 part of Gelfand’s diary for 1945–46 was published in German. The publication caused a sensation in Germany, where in recent years there has been intense interest in what happened in 1945 and 1946. For the first time readers saw impressions of this kind written down by a Soviet officer. In 2007 a German theatre production based on pages from Gelfand’s German Diary was staged under the title The Russian-German Soldier’s Phrasebook: The Story of a Dialogue.

The paradox is that Vladimir Gelfand’s diary appeared in German and even in Swedish translation, yet in Russia it has never been published in book form. It can only be read on the Internet. Gelfand began keeping the diary in May 1941, while still a schoolboy, and ended it in early October 1946 after returning from Germany to his native Dnipropetrovsk.

I spent two days reading the diary downloaded from the Internet and remained deeply affected for a week. Its emotional force, authenticity, precision of observation, psychological insight, irony, self-irony and good literary language were a revelation to me, at times a shocking one. As literature it seemed to me a fusion of the early war writing of Remarque and Hemingway, Babel’s Red Cavalry, Hašek’s Švejk epic, the lieutenant prose of Baklanov and Okudzhava, and in places even Sholokhov’s They Fought for Their Country, Simonov’s wartime diaries and Astafyev’s war stories. All of that is present, and at a strong confessional literary level.

Gelfand wrote in almost unimaginable conditions: in trenches, during brief lulls, on ammunition crates, on the road, in hospitals, at night by the flicker of candle stubs or improvised lamps made from cartridge cases. He wrote in notebooks, exercise books, on loose sheets and scraps of paper. These were not recollections composed years after the events. He wrote on the same day or the next, while events were still fresh. Such personal documents are priceless because Gelfand called what he saw by its proper name.

The diary is particularly valuable because servicemen were officially forbidden to keep diaries during the war. In practice attitudes varied. Counter-intelligence officers sometimes held preventive conversations with a man caught keeping notes. If the diary contained no unit numbers, locations or other sensitive information and merely recorded private impressions, people could sometimes turn a blind eye. In Gelfand’s case one commander even advised him to use an indelible pencil because it would preserve better than ink. A political officer once tried simply to tell him what should be written in the diary, but that officer later disappeared from his immediate surroundings and Gelfand continued recording what he considered important.

Gelfand was not inclined to embellish reality. If anything, he looked at life sceptically and with gloomy pessimism, while retaining an almost fatalistic conviction that he himself would survive. It seemed to me that he lived by Solomon’s wisdom: “Everything passes, and this too shall pass.” At the same time he eagerly noticed and recorded whatever could bring joy in wartime — the beauty of nature, the attractiveness of girls and women, letters from relatives and acquaintances, and the books he read constantly. He invented nothing. His diary preserved the memory of dozens of unknown, inconspicuous people who never entered official history.

The military historian Oleg Budnitsky, who has studied the diary and took part in the Echo of Moscow broadcast, said that databases of the dead, the decorated and the men who served had enabled him to identify many people mentioned by Gelfand. This corroborates the diary’s factual reliability.

What else makes the diary unique? First, its broad chronological span, from 1941 to 1946. Second, it was written at or close to the front. Third, Gelfand wrote continuously, almost daily. And he did not only keep a diary: he wrote poems, articles for front-line newspapers, letters to relatives and former schoolmates, and letters on behalf of comrades who could not write or were unable to write because of wounds.

Gelfand never portrays himself as a hero. He was drafted on 6 May 1942 and, after about three weeks of training, was sent to what he called the “Kharkov front.” In reality he arrived amid the Kharkov catastrophe, one of the most difficult periods of the war apart from 1941. Soviet forces were retreating even though at first they had considerably outnumbered the Germans.

20 August 1942

“Individuals, small groups and large units all have an exhausted, tormented appearance. Many have changed into civilian clothes; most have thrown away their weapons. Some commanders have torn off their insignia. What a disgrace! What an unexpected and sorrowful contradiction with the newspaper reports. Woe is me, a soldier, a Komsomol member, a patriot of my country! My heart contracts with shame and helplessness at being unable to stop this disgraceful flight.

“Every day I become more convinced that we are strong and that we will inevitably win, but with sorrow I must admit to myself that we are disorganised, that we lack proper discipline, and that because of this the war is being prolonged and we are temporarily suffering setbacks. The senior command fled in cars and abandoned masses of Red Army men, although the front is still far from here. German aircraft fly almost at ground level as if they were at home and do not let us raise our heads throughout the retreat. All crossings and bridges are destroyed; property and livestock, smashed and mutilated, lie along the roads. Looting flourishes everywhere and cowardice rules. The military oath and Stalin’s orders are trampled underfoot at every step.”

What a text! Imagine if it had fallen into the hands of a special-department officer. Yet it was written by a Soviet patriot, a man who greeted Stalin’s Order No. 227 — “Not One Step Back!” — with enthusiasm.

During the retreat from Kharkov Gelfand was encircled and broke out. He retreated toward Stalingrad, took part in the defence of Stalingrad and was wounded in December. After hospital treatment he fought in Ukraine, including on the approaches to Crimea in 1943–44, crossed the famous Sivash, and was among the first to enter Odessa. His notes written on the day and the day after the Red Army entered that city are especially interesting. He was shifted from one front to another. Gelfand served as a mortar man — in wartime perhaps only infantry was more dangerous. He was briefly a private, then a sergeant, and later attended junior-lieutenant courses. By the standards of the time he was considered educated: eight years of school and one preparatory workers’ faculty course for university admission.

From his first days in the army, Gelfand — a schoolboy suddenly turned soldier and a Jew — unfortunately encountered humiliation, insults and even beatings, as well as deception, theft and unfair treatment by superiors. Raised in the spirit of Soviet internationalism, he wrote with pain and indignation about the anti-Semitism he met throughout the war, beginning during evacuation in the North Caucasus in 1941 and continuing throughout his years in the active army.

23 October 1941, Yessentuki

“Jews. Pitiful and unfortunate, proud and cunning, wise and petty, kind and miserly, timid and desperately reckless… In the streets and the park, in the bread shop, in the queue for kerosene — everywhere one hears a terrible, hateful whisper. They are talking about Jews. Jews are thieves. A Jewish woman stole a fur coat from a shop. Jews have money. One woman supposedly had fifty thousand but complained of fate and said she was naked and barefoot. Another Jew has even more money but says he is starving. Jews do not like to work. Jews do not want to serve in the Red Army. Jews live without registration. Jews have climbed onto our necks. In short, Jews are blamed for every misfortune.

“I have to hear all this more than once — my appearance and speech do not reveal that I am a Jew. But I see that here in the North Caucasus anti-Semitism is a mass phenomenon.”

28 June 1942

On the road toward Stalingrad Gelfand found two German propaganda leaflets. He mocked their clumsy arguments but admitted that one theme had been inserted skilfully: anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semitism is very widespread here,” he wrote, and German claims that “we are fighting only against the Yids sitting on your necks and responsible for the war” might influence some soldiers. The leaflets also said that Jews sat safely in the rear and were too cowardly to fight. Gelfand answered that there were at least seven Jews in his company alone and promised to demonstrate by his own example how absurd those accusations were.

29 December 1942

In hospital he again encountered furious anti-Semitism. Conditions were appalling: breakfast arrived at six or seven in the evening; supper, supposedly due at five in the morning, did not arrive at all. Food was little more than thin semolina water; bread, butter and sugar were strictly rationed. Yet many patients blamed Jews for everything and openly used anti-Semitic slurs. A Jewish political officer spoke seriously to everyone; while he was present they agreed with him, but the moment he left, terrible insults were directed at him and at Jews generally. “Anger is choking me,” Gelfand wrote.

German occupation forces had shot many inhabitants of Salsk. There, Gelfand noted, Jews and some prominent communists had been singled out for execution.

13 March 1943

Reports of mass executions of innocent Jews made him fear even more for relatives in Yessentuki. “As for the Germans, I have decided forever: there are no enemies more evil or more deadly for me. To the grave, to my last breath. In the rear and at the front I will serve my Motherland and my government, which gave me equal rights as a Jew.”

Anti-Semitic remarks nevertheless continued among fellow servicemen. Men could casually declare that Jews were all scoundrels, that Germans were right to shoot them, or accuse Gelfand of trying to avoid combat. He answered that they did not know where he had fought and had no right to judge him without knowing him.

7 May 1945

“About Jews. Why am I a Jew? Why do nations exist in the world at all? Why are Jews disliked? Why must one so often conceal one’s origin?” Gelfand described another Jewish soldier whom he instinctively felt close to because the man was despised in the same way. Gelfand himself could often pass for Georgian or Armenian, but his surname immediately revealed his origin.

He was at his best where fighting was taking place. In battle he felt that he was where he belonged: firm, decisive and confident, unlike his usual personality as he himself described it. Even wilful subordinates obeyed his orders. Strikingly, he seemed almost free of fear of death. Shells could be falling, everyone else terrified, yet he would sit and write, convinced somehow that he would survive.

The diary contains a horrifying episode involving Maria Fyodorova, a young medical orderly from Astrakhan whom Gelfand met shortly before a battle. There was no romance, simply conversation. She already had a medal; he had none. When shelling began, he gallantly gave her his own deeper trench and moved into her shallower one. Half a minute later a shell struck his former trench. Nothing remained of Maria. Gelfand wrote that he managed only to place a small memorial marker where the trench had been and write a short epitaph on a board. Then the unit moved on in the attack.

Oleg Budnitsky later said on the radio programme that he had found Maria Fyodorova in the Ministry of Defence database: the date of death, her role as medical orderly and her Astrakhan origin all matched exactly — another confirmation of the diary’s accuracy.

Here are several short diary excerpts illustrating both the hardships of war and the author’s response to them.

30 September 1943

“The day before yesterday the Germans covered us with artillery fire. So accurately that only some miracle saved all of us: not one man was killed or wounded. I stayed in my trench during the shelling and decided not to hide — whatever happens, happens. But the shells burst so close and with such force that my trench collapsed and the concussion buried me under earth. If I had not managed to stick my head out a little earlier, I might have suffocated.”

11 October 1943

“Yesterday I fired all day — around seven hundred mortar rounds, if I am not exaggerating. Nobody asked how many ‘cucumbers,’ as they call the rounds on the telephone, we fired, but every minute they asked how many were left. The enemy is shelling the whole area; there is hardly a living patch of ground free from craters. I am amazed that the Germans have not found us here. Mortar bombs and shells land five or ten metres from our positions. Even now the enemy’s six-barrel mortars are howling and bursting.”

He still found time to write letters — to his mother, relatives in Magnitogorsk, his father, Aunt Anya and Uncle Lyusya.

17 November 1943

He complained about tight boots, the absence of felt boots and warm trousers, and the lasting effects of frostbite suffered during the Stalingrad winter of 1942. Such mundane discomforts appear constantly beside descriptions of combat.

On other days he wrote about the fear of being at the front for the first time, the instinctive desire to live, and his almost mystical belief that fate would not suddenly destroy the bond between him and life.

7 May 1944

“Yesterday marked two years since I joined the Red Army. The future will show what will happen. My life is needed not only by me; otherwise fate would long ago have crippled me, deprived me of everything I possess and thrown me to the raging death that has reached its limit in this war.

“If that is so, then a beautiful woman will be found for me, a splendid angel of love will hover above me, and the rest that is necessary and inevitable will come with time. If only I am not wounded and do not become a cripple — that is my one dream now. And my second dream is to become a writer. What does that require? Talent, diligence and time.

“I still lack an award. I have fought for so long and no one has appreciated my efforts. Medical girls, actresses, mediocre divisional storekeepers — even they wear medals on their chests, and I? Apparently I have not deserved one…”

Then the “Katyusha” thundered, darkness was falling, machine-gun fire trembled somewhere, guns barked and rifle shots cracked. “The front is tensely waiting for something.”

11 May 1944

Gelfand listed letters received from relatives and friends, noted poems he had sent out, and wrote that the unit was moving to the front line to take up defensive positions on the left bank of the Dniester near the village of Krasnaya Gorka.

14 May 1944

Fierce fighting raged around the bridgehead across the Dniester. German forces had pushed Soviet units back from one village, but the front had then stabilised. The river was only about a hundred metres wide. Groups of fifteen, twenty or thirty aircraft appeared throughout the day — Soviet and German, although by then Soviet aviation predominated.

9 July 1944

The newspaper Kirovets published Gelfand’s poem “Mortar,” changing the title to “My Mortar” and making alterations that infuriated him, including a crude spelling error. He drafted a formal complaint to editor Major Shchetinin, accepting the changed title but protesting against grammatical and stylistic distortions and insisting that his original lines be respected.

At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, serving with the 301st Division, Vladimir Gelfand took part in the bloody Vistula–Oder operation, which carried the Red Army through Poland to Germany’s borders. He was repeatedly sent to some of the hottest sectors.

20 August 1944

“About thirty men remain of the company. There were seventy. Two platoon commanders were killed, one wounded. I was present when they received their mission. The two who were killed were pale before the battle, and on their faces I read the deathly shadow of dead men. I was frightened by one man’s indifferent, lifeless face, his even and empty answers, and by the other’s hurried questions and frightened eyes. I understood they would not live. I wanted to shout, to stop them, shake their hands and calm their hearts before battle, but I did not dare.”

The junior lieutenant who was later wounded had answered briskly and confidently, and in his words Gelfand sensed life and the will to fight for it.

“The most melancholy and nightmarish thing in war, at the moment of battle, is to sit in a trench or slit, watching smoke from shells bursting like hail, feeling the breathing of the earth, smelling burning and sensing the uneven beating of your own heart. Out in the open, in battle, at the moment of collision with the enemy, you forget fear and danger. You never feel so miserable as when sitting still, inactive, obsessed with the thought that hell is immediately beside you.”

He described an unnamed infantryman wounded in both arms who nevertheless used those injured hands to bandage other wounded men, carried out ten submachine guns and his own as an eleventh, and only then collapsed from blood loss.

14 January 1945, 4:50 a.m.

“It is still pitch-dark outside and Fritz is already tormenting us with furious attacks. My heart pounds; it is terrifying when shells thunder, howl and roar nearby while you sit and await the decision of fate, which has already intervened in your story more than once. The light goes out after every explosion. Earth falls down; it hangs above my head like a grey nightmare, fifty or sixty centimetres thick. I am in a tunnel dug to the right of the firing position, one or at most one and a half metres deep. The exit toward the enemy is very dangerous. We are in full view, and his fiercest attacks are directed at our position.

“The soldiers swear because they are afraid. But I say nothing and do not show my fear — a commander must have iron nerves.”

He had visited the sixth company the previous day. Four men had been killed during an enemy artillery strike; their mangled, bloody bodies still lay in the communication trench because there had been no time to remove them.

17 February 1945

“I often think about my present life. What do I lack now? There is plenty of paper, time has not abandoned me, I have pencils and ink — write, my friend, use the opportunity. But two obstacles badly hinder my work, confuse my thoughts and torment me unbearably: lice and cold.”

Alexander Gelfand, Vladimir’s son, later wrote that neither in 1965 nor in 1982 had he wondered how his father came to be in the first echelon crossing the Oder. He had assumed it was an order. Later, from diaries sent by his brother Vitaly, he learned that Vladimir volunteered. The command had warned the men that an extremely dangerous operation was being prepared and called for volunteers.

Why volunteer for what was nearly certain death? Soviet patriotism — yes. Hatred of the Nazis — yes. Reckless courage — yes. But Alexander believed all these motives were secondary to Vladimir’s desperate need to leave Captain Rysev’s company. Rysev struck Lieutenant Gelfand in the face in front of other servicemen and provoked him into retaliation. Gelfand wrote: “Either I hit him back and he shoots me for raising my hand against a commander, or I shoot him myself and am executed by tribunal for murder.” Battalion leadership merely accumulated mutual complaints. Volunteering for the Oder operation gave him a lawful way out — even if it meant risking almost certain death.

In spring 1945, as part of Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, Gelfand crossed into Nazi Germany and took part in preparations for the assault on Berlin, fighting Germans who had dug in and were defending the approaches to the capital fiercely.

2 March 1945

“Our mortars are arranged in a dense chain right at the forward edge — the mortars of the whole army! Twenty metres ahead are the 45-mm guns, also in a chain. Behind us are 76-mm guns, and farther back… what is there to say? I have seen a multitude of Katyushas, ‘Ivan the Terribles,’ or as they are jokingly called, ‘Mudishchevs,’ masses of tanks and self-propelled guns — everything imaginable in our defensive camp. But the enemy will not fall silent at once; he also has much equipment, and it is difficult to suppress his fire. This breakthrough will be the most tremendous and significant of all, because the enemy has fortified this area for more than half a year, drawing forces and equipment here.”

14 April 1945

Just before the decisive offensive Gelfand was assigned to headquarters to compile the combat operations journal. Soviet artillery gave the Germans what he called “not a very strong concert,” but even that forced the enemy back farther than Soviet commanders had expected. There were surprisingly many prisoners.

He regretted that by the end of the war he had become thoroughly rear-area personnel, generally two or three kilometres from the enemy. “I do not like this prospect at all. I am drawn to where it thunders, groans and burns!”

Reading the diary initially gives the impression that Gelfand did not take part directly in the storming of Berlin. His son Alexander explained the apparent gap: “During battle there was naturally no time to write. Father never described events retrospectively. He also did not distinguish very well between the major and the minor. Compare Stalingrad: during the fighting there is roughly one diary entry a month because there was no time to write. At the end of the battle he was in hospital and physically able to write — but instead of describing Stalingrad, he wrote about how a man in the neighbouring bed cheated him.”

From March 1945, as an active contributor to front-line newspapers, Lieutenant Gelfand was assigned to keep the victory combat journal at the headquarters of the 301st Division. In a grim sense this probably saved his life: judging by his diary, a large part of the company with which he had previously fought was killed. The last month and a half of the war spent at divisional headquarters may have preserved both Gelfand and the diary he had carried with him since 1941.

From 25 April 1945 Gelfand and divisional headquarters were already in Berlin. His superiors were in no hurry to recommend him for awards, but for the Oder bridgehead and the capture of Berlin taken together he eventually received the Order of the Red Star.

He was not a great poet, of course, but he wrote constantly. In victorious May 1945, after reaching the Reichstag, he composed a poem and scratched it onto one of the building’s columns:

On the balcony of a Berlin building
I stand with my fellow fighters,
I look out and spit on Germany,
I spit on defeated Berlin!

After victory over Germany, Vladimir Gelfand tried to enrol in military interpreters’ courses and, after the USSR declared war on Japan, sought transfer to the East so that he could take part in the defeat of Japanese forces. Instead he was kept in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. He wanted to go home. “Complete apathy, indifference,” he recorded on 12 June 1945.

Throughout that summer he hoped for demobilisation, but he did not meet the criteria of either the first wave under the decree of 23 June 1945 or the second under the decree of 25 September. Without a clear assignment, he spent June in unstable relations with his superiors. When a scientific library was to be removed, he called the action “shameful barbarism” in his entry of 16/17 June.

He also tried unsuccessfully to obtain leave to visit his sick mother in Dnipropetrovsk. After returning from evacuation she had spent nearly two years trying to recover the room where she and Vladimir had lived before the war and property appropriated by neighbours.

Gelfand remained in Germany until September 1946. He served in various logistical units, organised deliveries of goods and materials to Soviet formations, and took part in transport and dismantling connected with restitution and reparations. He travelled widely through German cities, bought a camera and became an enthusiastic photographer. He brought about five hundred photographs back from Germany.

In October 1946, after five years of war, Vladimir Gelfand returned to Dnipropetrovsk. In 1949 he married Berta — “Beba” in his diary — Koifman, a girl he had known from school and corresponded with during the war. She lived with her parents in Perm, then called Molotov, and studied at the medical institute. Their son Alexander was born in April 1950.

In 1952 Gelfand graduated from the philological faculty of Gorky Molotov University. His diploma thesis was devoted to Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Storm, and in February 1951 he even met Ehrenburg in Moscow for a conversation.

From August 1952 Vladimir taught history, Russian language and literature at the Molotov Railway Technical School. His marriage to Berta soon entered a crisis. In 1954, leaving his wife and son, he returned to Dnipropetrovsk and took a job teaching history at a vocational school.

Until his death in 1983 he continued teaching history in vocational schools in Dnipropetrovsk. He actively wrote articles and poems for local newspapers. Between 1968 and 1978 he published around sixty articles on education and memories of his wartime past.

As a Communist he also took an active part in public work at the schools where he taught. At the same time, amid the anti-Semitism that existed in Ukraine in those years, he often became involved in sharp arguments with fellow teachers on questions of nationality.

He had two sons in his second marriage to Bella Shulman. In the 1970s he managed to publish a short excerpt from his memories of the first days in defeated Berlin in the newspaper Soviet Builder of 25 April 1975. Compared with the diary, however, he softened and embellished almost everything — understandably for the time.

Vladimir Gelfand died in Dnipropetrovsk on 25 November 1983.

According to historian Oleg Budnitsky, he and fellow researchers of military archives Tatiana Voronina and Irina Makhalova prepared for publication a complete canonical and annotated text of Vladimir Gelfand’s diaries checked against the originals. The book was expected to appear that year.

In conclusion, I would add that Zhenya, the grandson of Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand and the son of my friend Sasha, strongly resembles his grandfather as he appears in the photographs of 1945. He also took up the military baton from his grandfather, serving honourably in the armoured forces of the Israel Defense Forces and taking part in combat operations.

Arkady Yut

© Day by Day. Editor-in-chief: S. Korzhenevich. Registration certificate PI No. TU 59-0035 of 18 July 2008. Founder: Perm Regional Jewish National-Cultural Autonomy. Editorial and founder’s address: 116 Yekaterininskaya Street, Perm. Distributed free of charge. Print run: 1,250 copies. Printed by Nika Publishing House, 34 G. Khasana Street, Perm. Published within the regional programme for the development and harmonisation of national relations among the peoples of Perm Territory.