Vladimir Gelfand entered Berlin in 1945 as a Soviet soldier and kept a diary

Antje Weger

In the final year of the war, Marshals Konev and Zhukov were engaged in a fierce military race for the “capital of the Reich.” One of the millions of Red Army soldiers advancing relentlessly westward was Vladimir Gelfand. A Jewish Ukrainian, he served in Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army within Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front.

Although at heart he regarded himself as a thoroughly civilian person, Gelfand had voluntarily worn a soldier’s uniform since 1942; much of his family had been murdered by the Germans. Gelfand was passionate about literature and wanted very much to become a writer. Even as a soldier, he kept a private diary in which he recorded his thoughts and experiences. It was a collection of loose pages, notebooks and pads.

Other people’s diaries often have something compelling about them. In Gelfand’s case there is an additional factor: he was no ordinary witness. Six decades after the end of the war, this was the first original diary of a Red Army soldier to appear in German.

With this volume, Aufbau Verlag broke new ground. The historian Elke Scherstjanoi also played an important role, contributing excellent explanatory texts. Alongside the diary entries, the book contains photographs, official correspondence, and letters between Gelfand, his parents, other relatives and friends. The language is correspondingly varied.

The book would not have existed without his son Vitaly. He discovered the records left by his father, who died in 1983, and brought the collection with him when he emigrated to Germany in 1995.

The published entries cover the period from January 1945 to September 1946, when Gelfand was demobilized. Before the fall of Berlin came offensives that caused heavy losses. Gelfand was then an almost twenty-two-year-old lieutenant and commander of a mortar platoon. Yet the combat in which he sometimes took part on the front line is not the diary’s main subject. What is most striking instead is its unvarnished, candid look behind the military scenes.

It is as though someone had opened Pandora’s box. Within his own unit, Gelfand encountered pettiness and antisemitism firsthand. He repeatedly felt cheated. Theft and drinking were part of everyday army life. The much-decorated officer also tormented himself with self-doubt. Little often remains of the brightly polished heroic image promoted by propaganda. When a comrade wants to smash busts of Schiller and Goethe, Gelfand saves them: “Geniuses cannot be equated with barbarians.”

As an occupation officer in Berlin and the surrounding area, he encounters victims of violence with a certain degree of sympathy, yet he is not surprised that crimes go unpunished. The overall impression created by the entries is deeply contradictory.

Gelfand protests against the ban on fraternization and moves from one love affair to the next. Force is not what governs his own relationships; rather, he is held back mainly by fear of rampant syphilis. At the same time, he looks down arrogantly on the hardships of Germans in the postwar period.

As an eager communist, he views politics largely through ready-made ideological lenses and thus also proves to be a child of his time. It seems curious when the Stalin-loyal Gelfand goes beyond the expected line by praising Roosevelt, who was still an ally. Gelfand is a life-loving man with strengths and weaknesses who fits neither the stereotype of the brutal occupier nor that of the untouchable heroic soldier.

His notes were intended to serve as material for a postwar novel. The fact that they have now appeared as a book would probably have seemed to him a form of belated compensation.

Vladimir Gelfand: Germany Diary 1945–1946. 
Notes of a Red Army Soldier. Aufbau, 357 pages