Davidzon Radio 

“Vladimir Gelfand. A Shocking War Diary.” Valeria Korennaya on the program “Wings from the Attic”

Valeria Korennaya. Theater and film actress, singer-songwriter, poet, writer, television and radio host, journalist. She graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre School in 1985, acting department. She worked at the Arkady Raikin Satyricon Theatre and the Stanislavsky Theatre. She has lived in America since 1990. For fifteen years she hosted nightly television news and the program “Our Guest,” interviewing well-known actors, writers, directors, and people from other creative professions. Winner of the “Person of the Year 2003” award. She acts in films. Winner of Best Supporting Actress at the World Music and Independent Film Festival, Washington, DC (2020); nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Garden State Film Festival (2019), among other nominations. She is currently the author and host of “Wings from the Attic” on Davidzon Radio, New York.

There is so much that is good in life:
A daughter’s voice, spring once again,
A house with a porch dusted by moonlight,
The blue of a clear sky,
A book not yet read,
A gaze than which none is warmer,
Stars scattered like diamond dust
Along shady poplar avenues.
So much music in autumn’s colors—
Rake through the leaves and find an answer,
Dive to the bottom of a quiet lake,
Drawing a silver trail with your body.
Darkness is merely emptiness not yet filled,
A skyscraper is a forest growing upward;
It will be remembered by one desire alone—
To scrape yourself all the way to the sky,
Astonished by the ringing clarity of the air,
Knowing that a cloud is only water.
You resemble the skyscraper in steadfastness
And in striving toward nowhere.
The first breath, the first cry and step,
The first snow and a downy shawl.
And I could have begun like this instead:
“There is so much that is bad in life...”

“Every day the radio brings news, each item more unpleasant than the last. Yesterday the Germans took Vyazma, the day before yesterday Goryansk, and today—horror of horrors!—Mariupol. How long can this continue? How will this new offensive end? Where are the English, where are the Americans? Or are they powerless too? But the facts deny that. ‘But... when?’ Aunt Polya says more than once, and I agree with her. How many people will die, how much territory will fascism swallow before England and America give our country any substantial help?”

Good afternoon, dear radio listeners. Valeria Korennaya is with you. Akmal Tokhirov is at the sound engineer’s console. I began the program with my poem “There Is So Much...” Then you heard an excerpt—not from today, although it sounds as if it could be, but from the time of the Second World War.

“Nothing has changed since then,” you might say. Is that really so? And if it is, what century are we living in? At what level of cruelty does humanity, and some of its representatives, stand today?

Today it is not I who speak to you, but Vladimir Gelfand, an officer of the Soviet Army, through his unique diary, which he kept from 1941 through 1946. No other comparable document of the war contains this degree of candor, at times shocking candor. Everything is intertwined here: exploding shells, monstrous living conditions, deaths, and the romantic torments of the young Gelfand, who is tasting love and does not understand what to do with it; and love too, including relationships with German women; bombardments that at a certain point turn into background noise; lice that seem to eat a person alive.

The author of the diaries passed through Poland, reached Berlin, and left a poem on the Reichstag, but he was not demobilized until a year after victory. Gelfand published fragments of his wartime recollections, but with self-censorship. He never quoted the original lines he had left on the Reichstag in 1945:

“I look and spit on Germany,
On defeated Berlin I spit!”

He replaced them with more tolerant lines:

“Look, here I am, conqueror of Germany—
In Berlin I won!”

His diaries describe with unusual clarity the moral condition of the Soviet Army, which, as we remember, was always glorified. Here something incredible emerges, something it was not customary to discuss. At the very least, it is unusual to read about caring relationships between victorious men and defeated women, German women. Gelfand’s diary was not published until 2005. A Jew of Ukrainian origin, he witnessed looting, death, and betrayal in Germany. He writes about violence and the rape of German women.

Without hiding anything, he tells how he himself was humiliated and reports his own unseemly actions, his sexual problems and “victories.” It is the only document describing the day-to-day life of a Red Army officer in occupied Germany. He writes about it so openly that it becomes obvious why this diary could not have been published in the USSR.

Vladimir Gelfand’s son found the diary while sorting through his father’s papers after his death in 1983. Gelfand had been only sixty. His diary made its author famous, just as he had wanted—and he had wanted it passionately.

Vladimir Gelfand came from Kirovohrad Region in central Ukraine. An only child in a poor Jewish family, he was born in 1923. In the 1920s his mother was expelled from the Communist Party with the wording “for passivity.” This hindered her career but spared her from repression. Vladimir’s father, Natan Solomonovich Gelfand, worked at a cement plant in Dneprodzerzhinsk and never joined the Party. His parents separated while Vladimir was still at school. At the beginning of the war he had just turned eighteen. He had completed four years at a workers’ preparatory faculty and had worked as an electrician. Despite having a deferment from military service, in May 1942 he decided to volunteer for the front. He trained at an artillery school and received the rank of sergeant. He became commander of a mortar squad, deputy platoon commander for political work, and completed an infantry officers’ school.

He could not refrain from writing. Keeping diaries was forbidden in the army. Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand nevertheless violated that prohibition.

September 1941:

“Today it is one month since I left Dnepropetrovsk. My city, the city of parks, a beautiful city, was bombed for the first time since the war began. I saw destruction and the smoke of several fires caused by the bombing. I heard of many people killed and wounded at the railway station and of children left orphaned. The city was gradually emptying, and its population thinned with every passing day. This flight of the inhabitants from the city seemed absurd...”

Several days later:

“I do not know how to cry. It seems that no grief, no sorrow can make me shed a tear. And so it is all the harder to see the dearest of people crying. I pressed her, my poor mother, to my heart and comforted her for a long time until she stopped crying.

“‘You are lazy. You did not even want to get bread for Grandmother. You spend all day reading books and listening to the radio.’ I answered, told her things, explained, but she interrupted me, would not let me speak, and forced me to speak louder than usual.

“‘Why are you shouting in a voice that is not your own?’ Mother suddenly interrupted me, and her face twisted with anger. Before me was the same old mother as before... but... Old scenes and little pictures from our long life together flashed before me. I broke out in a sweat. Mother’s face was alien and unpleasant, as it had been then, in those moments long forgotten by me when, during our quarrels, she would seize chairs, the fireplace poker, a hammer—anything that came to hand. I reminded Mother of the contents of her letters, in which she had once again picked at Father.

“‘Your father is nasty and petty, but his relatives are good people and I have nothing against them...’”

6 May 1942:

“Today the decisive event of my life took place—I was called up into the army...”

And several days later there is an entry:

“Theft flourishes at every step, blatant and limitless.”

22 June 1942:

“Today marks one year of war between our country and the German-fascist vermin. This significant date coincided with the first fierce air raid on this area. I am writing in a dugout. The raids continue even now. Khaustov, one of my men, has completely lost his nerve and has even fallen ill from fright. He is vomiting. His hands are trembling and his face is distorted. At first he tried to hide his fear of the bombing, but now, no longer embarrassed, he openly admits to me that he cannot take any more—his nerves and heart cannot stand it. This is yesterday’s hero, who last night cursed me and said that I was a ‘shitter’ who would soil my pants in the very first battle and leave him to die. I am positively at a loss in my desire, my striving, in my dreams, I would say, to bring this man to his senses, a man who absolutely refuses to obey me and tells me: ‘You can shoot me right now; I still will not listen to you!’”

28 June 1942:

“I must advance. My slogan is courage or death. Death rather than captivity. Fate must preserve my life for me. Let it take care of me; my task is to win immortality for myself. I lose consciousness from cutting a finger if even a moderately strong stream of blood appears. The sight of the dead has always been unpleasant to me. I was always beaten in fights. And now I dream of a feat of heroism—I wait for it and, more than that, strive for it! I will achieve my goal, even at the cost of my life; otherwise I am not a man but a coward and a braggart. I swear to you, my diary, that I will not be a gray, ordinary warrior hiding in the common mass of Red Army men, but will become a famous, celebrated, or at least known hero of the Fatherland...

“The mosquitoes will not let us live—they drink our blood, confuse our thoughts, and drive us into a frenzy with their buzzing and their numbers.”

2 July 1942:

“The lieutenant gave me permission to go look for something to eat. It turns out that the inhabitants are being evacuated—or, to speak more frankly, forcibly expelled. For the third day I have been observing a terrible picture: broken windows in abandoned dwellings, doors and shutters nailed shut, feathers and heads from chickens recently slaughtered, weeping women and naked children kept in line by the constant shouting of angry mothers. All the cows, it turns out, have been taken away, without even giving the villagers receipts. One woman who refused to part with her cow was shot by some lieutenant, wounded in the stomach, and is now dying. No one is even trying to save her. Villagers say that chickens, geese, and other livestock are being arbitrarily and forcibly seized by our soldiers and commanders.

“The day before yesterday, near one of the villages, I caught a live chicken and ate it, spitting out down and feathers, until I vomited. I am still nauseous and dizzy...”

“Somewhere very close by they are already firing at us with guns and mortars. Shells and mortar bombs are exploding nearby, and fragments even fly into the trenches. The village is destroyed. Many dead people and animals are lying right on the roads. The inhabitants have fled.... We know what we are fighting for, and therefore our eye is sharper than the German’s, our shell is more accurate, and our bullet is not as foolish as it is in German hands....

“Now about my belongings. They have finally ruined me, robbed me. My mess tin, which the junior political officer had long liked, two pieces of soap, two boxes of matches, one pair of underwear, and my shorts. The compass, which was the only outward sign that I was equal among the lieutenants and other company commanders, and, most important, my literary material, which was my only consolation, that sphere into which I could immerse myself completely and for a time forget all the bitterness and hardship of my army life....

“A frog jumped into my soup tonight. I bit it in the middle and almost ate it....

“Enormous multistory buildings were half-skeletons, with none of their former prewar charm preserved. Streets that had amazed people with their magnificence before the Germans came were now pitted and disfigured by craters. Of many buildings only traces remained: beds, kettles, samovars, broken bricks, and so on. Several buildings had somehow miraculously survived and now stood smoking like square boxes. That enlivened somewhat the picture of a dead city that had once been so huge and bustling with life. Around the city groups of prisoners of war—dirty and pitiful-looking Germans and Romanians—hauled various loads in handcarts and carts. A single guard walked behind them.

“Under the ruins of buildings lay soaked books by our classics, German books, clothing, all kinds of brushes. In one place I found two pieces of soap—they had not dissolved and had survived. In another, an atlas in German in which the USSR was missing, torn out.... Cigarette lighters, pocket knives, chocolate—our soldiers had their fill of all of this. Whole bales of chocolate and provisions were taken from the Germans. People simply took off anything they liked and hung it over their shoulders. Watches and anything else desired were taken. The colonels were very arrogant even at the moment of their capture, while Field Marshal Paulus did not want to negotiate with a lieutenant and demanded that a higher-ranking, more important person speak with him.

“At parting they gave me a Romanian folding spoon-fork. It will have to be cleaned because it has rusted. Now I have a spoon to replace the one stolen from my greatcoat in the hospital.

“Civilians are not yet living in Stalingrad, but they are already walking around the city, transporting things, carrying things in sacks and baskets—women and boys. They live on the outskirts. The trams are not running—the power stations are destroyed and the tracks have been torn up in places....

“The landlady told me about the Germans. They lived here as they did in the previous villages I passed through. Five Germans. Old men and old women were given bread free of charge. Young people were forced to work. The inhabitants were not killed, although the Germans took whatever they wanted. Sometimes the Romanians robbed people. Gypsies, who are numerous here, especially stole from them. For every German killed, inhabitants were immediately killed, guilty and innocent alike. So people did not even think about partisans here. Near Dvoinaya station, a group of people conspired, because of mistreatment, and wounded one German in the leg with a revolver. The fascists burned the entire settlement where it happened to the ground and drove the now-homeless inhabitants to Germany. At least they warned the residents to get out first; otherwise everyone would have died. All the Jews were taken away; even one-year-old children were shot....”

March 1943:

“There was no pork fat anywhere here. Only in one place did I come across a woman trader who apparently controlled this market. She cut off about 400 grams, but then, deciding that even that was too much, cut off another piece of about 100 grams and offered the remaining fat in exchange for long underwear. At that moment I wanted to hit her in the face, especially because she herself said that the Germans had taken fat from peasants without asking permission. Yet she wanted to cheat a soldier out of a piece of fat. I did not argue and exchanged the long underwear I was wearing for 300 grams of fat.

“As I was walking from here toward the center, I met a woman carrying two sacks. They were heavy. She would carry one a certain distance and then return for the other. It cost her a great deal of time and strength. I volunteered to help her. She had only two or three blocks left to go before reaching home. When I brought one sack to her house, she took bread out of it and cut me a piece, about 300 grams....”

In 1943 Gelfand learned that almost all his relatives on his father’s side—his grandmother, uncle, two aunts, and two female cousins—had been murdered during the extermination of the Jews in Yessentuki. Only his father and his father’s brother survived. He managed to reestablish contact with his mother, who had been evacuated to Central Asia.

“Mother is nervous and difficult,” Vladimir writes. “Rarely could she caress me in the way I wanted, but almost always she scolded me and was cold. In my heart I felt her ardent and tender love, but my mind could not accept love in that form. In childhood I was not spoiled with real emotional warmth either, but then I had not yet encountered such cruel coldness from my mother—feelings of love predominated over everything else, and so the savage beatings, sometimes banging my head against the wall, the malicious reproaches, and boycotting me in every possible way were soon forgotten.”

October 1943:

“Everyone thinks very little about me and my comrades. They often leave me without food, and once, yesterday, they almost left me behind alone when the company changed positions and moved here. Everyone, however, passionately thinks about food for himself and is wholly occupied with his own personal interests. As for others—they could all perish, for all anyone cares. What sort of people are there in the world now?...”

In the second part of the program, after the commercials, we will continue the story and diaries of Vladimir Gelfand. This is Valeria Korennaya on 620 AM, Davidzon Radio, New York. Stay tuned.

You are listening to “Wings from the Attic.” Valeria Korennaya is with you. Vladimir Gelfand. War diaries.

November 1943:

“I have not written letters for about seven days. I lost the desire to write when no replies came. There it is! The earth shook. Explosions all around, though nothing has hit here yet. And to hell with it! What is destined to happen will happen! I am not going to put down my pen merely because the German has become sick of waiting and is getting nervous, firing and carrying out fire raids on us here and there....

“My boots are tight, and no felt boots were issued. I do not have warm trousers either. They promise to give us quilted undershirts. The men have already been issued winter uniforms, including padded trousers and jackets. Footwear—felt boots—has not yet been given to anyone. My feet, frostbitten back in the Stalingrad winter of 1942, are freezing madly.

“I constantly dream of a sweet girl and of blissful love. Before my eyes appears a tender, smooth girl’s breast, so broad and dear that one could drown in it and forget grief and hardship....

“Along the road we discovered such a mass of weapons and property abandoned by the Germans that it is difficult even to imagine. There is not a man who did not get at least some trophy. I found an entire map case containing German paper, envelopes, pencils, and postcards; soap, a razor, a blanket, and other things. Some got watches, German trousers and jackets, warm blankets, weapons, or something else....

“All night I listened to Rudnev. He knows good songs about love. I remembered my civilian life, as we call it, and to the sound of the songs I pitied my youth, which along its entire path had never encountered a woman’s love and affection....

“In Leningrad, residential neighborhoods that have no military-strategic significance are being shelled with mortars and artillery. The Germans are barbarically taking part in this vileness. In due time they will pay for everything.

“My relatives who perished at the hands of the barbarians are constantly before my eyes, and my conscience justly calls and calls upon me—to take merciless revenge....”

December 1943:

“Snow has fallen. So soft, fluffy, and abundant. Winter has begun. But outside—that is, beyond the walls of my dugout—it is warm and the snow is melting. There is a lot of mud, and I do not like it. Better if a frost would arrive. Today I washed in the bathhouse and steamed my underwear to get rid of lice....

“Last night the Germans attacked again, pushed us back a little, but in the morning the artillery drove them out and forced them back to their former positions. They lost about 300 men in the process. Even today during the day many dead and wounded were lying in no-man’s-land; the Germans could not retrieve them.

“Eight Germans were captured today. On the first day of the offensive I saw a wounded German. A prisoner taken for interrogation. He cursed Hitler. Only now are they beginning to understand! He was bandaged, and he himself walked to the rear accompanied by one of our wounded men....

“Yesterday I received another letter from Mother. In it she reports that she was rewarded with a pair of felt boots.

“Here a sword of Damocles hangs over us all the time. All around, sometimes far away and sometimes very close, German shells and mortar bombs explode. Only some kind of miracle saves me from death.

“In the evening the Komsomol organizer Kolmagortsev, a junior lieutenant, merry fellow and trophy hunter, was killed. He went to retrieve the body of Senior Lieutenant Petrov, who had many trophies: a gold German watch, three women’s watches, cigarette cases, chains, two revolvers, and many other things. Four of them picked up the corpse, but suddenly a mortar bomb exploded. Kolmagortsev and one soldier were killed by it, while the other two, in fright, ran all the way into another battalion. The sappers say that Petrov’s corpse had been...”

“Petrov’s body had been mined by the Germans, and even now it is still lying there, not yet cleared of mines. Tonight they are supposed to remove the mines....

“Felt boots were issued at night. My men received mine, but one turned out to be size 39 and the other size 42....”

January 1944:

“I am slightly drunk now—I drank about 300 grams. My vision has darkened, my eyes seem to have narrowed, and my head has grown heavy and keeps pulling toward my shoulder. It is fooling around, but it will not fall—I will not let it! I received six letters yesterday, I remember, but no letter from my beloved. Where is this beloved? Somewhere in the clouds, existing only in my thoughts... yet she is such a beauty, such a clever girl.... Ah, this war and those damned Fritzes! Oh my beloved beautiful girl, please come and embrace my heart; the poor thing is withering....

“For three days we had not had bread in our mouths. On the second day we killed a horse that the Germans had shot and finished off a dying mare, also wounded by a shell. All day we ate horsemeat and made do with raw corn, and then in one house we found hidden potatoes and had a bite of those too. In the village the Germans left no person and nothing alive except dogs. This is the first time I have seen it: not one person managed to hide and remain in the village, not to mention cattle and poultry. The huts are intact. A cornfield lies beyond the village.

“A shell has just fallen very close by, and I have not yet dug myself in. And my tooth torments me so badly I cannot find a place for myself. My greatcoat, boots, hands, my whole body and uniform are covered with mud that seems to have eaten its way in forever, impossible to remove under our conditions. Mud accumulated during ten days or more of marches and advances, battles and pursuit of the enemy. We drink water from puddles—cloudy and unpleasant; sand settles on our lips and crunches between our teeth....

“We noticed some girls. They were gathering German junk from the dugouts and taking back their own things that the Germans had carried away: brooms, Primus stoves, pots....

“Today on one edge of the village we found the body of Senior Lieutenant Kiyan. The Germans had apparently finished him off while he was wounded. What horror! What shame and reproach to all these petty, miserable people who did not take him away, did not carry him from the battlefield. Perhaps all of them together were not worth the senior lieutenant. Yes, these people like receiving ranks and decorations, but they are also ready to abandon their friend and comrade, even their superior, to death and mutilation in order to save their own skins. They are ready to burn letters and trade the belongings of a comrade-in-arms who has merely been temporarily removed from duty. They are capable of anything. There are few people now, especially in wartime, capable of self-sacrifice to save people close to them or whom they know. Few. The majority are petty, filled with animal passions....

“At the front line I saw the deputy battalion commander for political affairs. In my opinion he is not a bad man. His very young wife sleeps with him—how good for him, a lucky man! Few are granted such happiness—to go to war with one’s wife!...”

March 1944:

“During the day I roasted the lice in my clothes with an iron. They burst and left greasy spots in the folds of my shirt. Oh, there were so many of them! It became unbearable to keep fighting them. I stopped halfway, got dressed, and felt a little better....

“A team of three horses pulling a field kitchen suddenly bolted like mad and raced down the street, while shells kept booming and booming, driving them on in terror. In another place a crazed gray horse was running around. It did not know where to stop and rushed about, crying out. People scattered in every direction, their eyes wide with horror and agitation. It was terrible to see.

“In the evening I went to the supply platoon. There I received bread—nothing else was available—800 grams for two days. Food is rather scarce. I had corn soup for supper, thin and disgusting, but there was no choice. Dawn was gray and cold, but the lice did not understand that—they were warm and well fed. Today I will wage a Patriotic War against them! Let them too become acquainted with the horrors and anxieties of wartime....

“My finger hurt more and more. It was unbearable. At the medical company they examined it and found that a felon had developed for the second time on the same finger and that another operation was necessary, with an even larger incision than before....

“The weather today is overcast and damp. It snowed in the morning and now there is a drizzle. And the hosts are such good people. They shaved me, washed me, and the youngest woman, the mother of four children, even washed my hair. She washed it and kept saying, ‘my little son,’ and told me that she used to wash her husband in the same way. They gave me something to eat too. And now they have put me to bed. Just like at home. The front is far, far away from here. No artillery rumble can be heard. They say our troops are already thirteen kilometers from Nikolayev. For the most part the front has stopped at the Bug River. For now....

“I stayed in one house at the edge of the village. A young girl born in 1928, almost a child, but already grown. Pretty, yet still inexperienced in love. She looks and looks and says nothing, as if she wants to discover the unknown. She looks endlessly with her beautiful blue eyes. Such a sweet, sweet creature! It is a pity I am not your age, otherwise I would show you what love is....

“I definitely appealed to many girls, all the more because I was wearing a new officer’s uniform and wore my greatcoat draped over my shoulders. The trouble is that I do not know how to behave with them, and I am terribly afraid of the moment when I will have to share a bed with a girl. It is frightening to admit—I am twenty-one years old and still have no idea or experience of it....”

May 1944:

“The weather today is poor. Wind and a cold sun. Roosters are crowing in the village, calves are lowing. In the river marshes a cuckoo calls, but both here and there shells are crashing. The two sides toss them over us like balls, and everywhere between explosions there is such silence that it is as if there were no war, as if someone were simply throwing things around for amusement. Now to the right, now to the left, now far away, now close. One shell, about four meters behind me, overshot and landed right on a dead cow; the cow was thrown up and spun about two meters to one side. The last entrails, not yet rotted away, spilled out.”

What else do we, the readers, see through Gelfand’s eyes? A lack of order and discipline in the troops: meager food, lice, antisemitism, and endless theft. Soldiers even stole their comrades’ boots.

On April 25, 1945, when Vladimir Natanovich was already in Berlin, “German women told with horror of the grief caused them by the soldiers of the front line on the first night of the Red Army’s arrival here,” the author of the diaries writes.

“‘They shoved it in here,’ a beautiful German woman explained, lifting her skirt, ‘all night long, and there were so many of them. I was a virgin,’ she sighed and began to cry. ‘They ruined my youth. Some of them were old, covered in pimples, and they all climbed on me, all of them penetrated me. There were at least twenty, yes, yes,’ and she burst into tears.

“‘They raped my daughter in front of me,’ the poor mother interjected. ‘They may come again and rape my girl again.’ At this everyone was again seized by horror, and bitter sobbing swept from one corner of the cellar to the other, where the owners had brought me. ‘Stay here,’ the girl suddenly rushed toward me. ‘You will sleep with me. You can do anything you want with me, but only you!’”

By that time German soldiers had stained themselves on Soviet territory with monstrous crimes committed over almost four years. The German command was so concerned about the spread of venereal disease in the troops that it organized a network of army brothels in the occupied territories. When the Red Army entered Berlin, posters added to the soldiers’ fury: “Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!” The political department declared that a true Soviet soldier was so full of hatred that the very thought of intimate relations with German women would disgust him.

But the command knew its soldiers poorly. They proved the opposite. Reports of sexual violence in the army at the end of 1944 were sent by NKVD officers to Beria and Stalin. They reported mass rapes in East Prussia and how German women tried to kill themselves and their children to avoid that fate. Some German women managed to adapt.

When in 1959 Vladimir Gelfand’s diary was published in Germany under the title “A Woman in Berlin,” the author was accused of having dishonored German women, and Gelfand demanded that the diary not be published again until after his death. (The reference here appears to conflate Gelfand’s diary with “A Woman in Berlin,” by Marta Hillers; German title “Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin.”)

Not a single Soviet soldier was executed for the rape or murder of German civilians. In East Germany it was considered almost blasphemous to criticize the Soviet conquerors of fascism. It is true that immediately after the war German women between fifteen and fifty-five were ordered to undergo tests for venereal diseases. “To obtain ration cards you needed a medical certificate, and I remember that the waiting rooms of all the doctors issuing them were full of women,” recalled one German woman who had been raped by Soviet soldiers.

The real scale of the rapes is conveyed by figures cited in the program: 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany. In just one Berlin district, about a thousand applications for abortions were approved within six months. Abortions were prohibited in Germany at that time, but after the war women were permitted for a brief period to terminate pregnancies. The special situation was connected with the mass rapes of 1945. One girl, writing in rounded childlike handwriting, said that she had been raped at home, in the living room, in front of her parents. For some drunken soldiers, women became trophies just like watches and fountain pens.

It is hard to learn something terrible about people of whom one had thought only in superlatives. It is frightening to part with illusions. The Soviet person wanted, and to this day wants, to know only about victory in the Great Patriotic War. Everything else does not concern him. His gaze did not go beyond heroic deeds. But moving into the future without sorting out the past is dangerous. That past may return again, in another guise—as is happening today in Russia’s terrible war against Ukraine.

Lev Kopelev wrote:

“Why were there so many bandits among our soldiers, men who gang-raped women and girls stretched out on the snow, in gateways, who killed unarmed people...”

“...who smashed everything they could, fouled things, burned them, and destroyed senselessly simply for the sake of destroying.”

Kopelev was expelled from the Party for “propaganda of bourgeois humanism and pity for the enemy,” and was later arrested and convicted for “saving Germans.” So there were many witnesses, but not everyone could tell this truth.

Vladimir Gelfand served for more than a year in occupied Germany. He was a skeptic, a gloomy pessimist, and he did not like embellishment. He had more than enough words for that. But today we do not have enough time even to come close to the end of this unique diary. We will leave that for next time. I assure you, the plot will become much more gripping. Vladimir Natanovich is worth it. We will speak about the hero’s infatuations and disappointments, how he spent the first year in Germany after the end of the war, about German women, and about the later life of officer Vladimir Gelfand.

For today, all that remains is for me to thank you, dear radio listeners, for your attention, and sound engineer Akmal Tokhirov for his help. I say goodbye until next Tuesday. As always, we will hear one another at noon on 620 AM, Davidzon Radio, New York.

This was Valeria Korennaya. Everything you hear in this program is not news, but it is also truth.

You have been listening to “Wings from the Attic,” written and hosted by Valeria Korennaya.

Broadcast of the radio program “Vladimir Gelfand. A Shocking War Diary,” Valeria Korennaya’s “Wings from the Attic,” March 7, 2023.

Davidzon Radio: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut (USA).

Valeria Korennaya on “Wings from the Attic.”

We tried brother against brother,
Now it is time—friend against friend.
They will penetrate the blackness of the square
And surface within the boundaries of the circle.
Districts will march against districts,
Cigarette butts will crawl along the trail,
Battalions will occupy the roads,
And television—the thugs.
The right will rule the networks,
The wrong one’s fate will be a prison bunk,
And no-longer-young commissars
Will threaten reprisals.
And the splendor of the parade
Will shudder from the guns,
Where there are no personalities, only people,
A crowd resembling a herd.
Digitized, in the background,
After throwing two words into a phone,
They hurry toward the vans,
Into a merciless meat grinder.
Brother and friend, district and city,
One border will displace another,
Mountain will go to war against mountain,
And slanderer against slanderer.
Time will become a steel string,
And the earth will dry with thirst,
And everyone will follow everyone
Who once already went away.
The world will meet in an evil clash,
Leaving fragments of itself.
And once again the riddles of history
Will have to be solved by descendants.

“Two obstacles greatly slow my work, confuse my thoughts, and torment me unbearably: lice and cold. Food is better: livestock whirls everywhere, rushes about, lows and bleats, grunts, suffers, and is destroyed everywhere in the defense area. Even now one horse, wounded in its front and hind legs, stands leaning against a house on two legs and sways, about to fall, while large dirty tears run from its eyes. Perhaps it is thinking something, and it has probably gone completely mad from anguish and grief.

“In another place an unfortunate cow wounded in the back and head fell into a shallow trench and began to cry loudly and piercingly—Moo! Moo! A foolish little sheep began rushing around in one place, shook its head, bleated piteously, and fell in a death spasm. There is plenty of meat here; there is no need to kill it—the war itself shoots it down every day and every hour.”

Good afternoon, dear radio listeners. Valeria Korennaya is with you. Akmal Tokhirov is at the sound engineer’s console. I began the program with my poem “We Tried Brother Against Brother.” Then you heard an excerpt from the diaries of Soviet Army officer Vladimir Gelfand, which he kept from 1941 through 1946. Today I continue the program begun last Tuesday.

Let me remind you: Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand, from Kirovohrad Region in Ukraine, was born in 1923. On March 1 of this year he could have turned one hundred, but he died forty years ago. The fact that he was a Soviet patriot and joined the Party at the front did not prevent him from describing soldiers’ lives in detail without idealization: commanders’ treatment of subordinates, looting, antisemitism, and relations between Soviet soldiers and the civilian population of Poland and Germany.

After his death, the diaries were discovered by the son of writer and officer Gelfand. Such a degree of shocking candor is difficult to find in any other comparable document of the war. The author reached Berlin but was not demobilized until a year after victory. For now, together with Vladimir Gelfand, we are in June 1944:

“On the chests of all the veteran soldiers and commanders are laurels, and on the hands of most of the ‘old-timers’—of all of them, in fact—is Stalin’s commendation,” he writes. “On their feet are elegant new boots, new greatcoats altered in officer style. All the officers drink wine and amuse themselves. I have nothing good to say and no reason to amuse myself. Everywhere around me there is sorrow and failure. Nowhere do I receive sensitive treatment or attention; I am mistreated from every direction.

“From home comes heavy news about the bad treatment of Mother and the fact that she has no permission to enter Dnepropetrovsk. From Father—news of illness; from Aunt Anya and other relatives—news of their difficulties in life. Everyone needs help, everyone must be thought about....

“The film ‘Mashenka’ is showing. Only in the cinema, only in art, in books, in poetry, do I find consolation and rest.”

July 1944:

“Yesterday enemy aircraft raided the town and dropped small bombs. The military feldsher was wounded. He was a good fellow, a joker, and he had an interesting book, ‘Notes of a Prostitute’....

“In the evening, before leaving, I went to the battalion commander for permission. They pointed me toward a door that was slightly ajar. I had scarcely entered the door, which I thought led to a corridor, when the shutter opened. The battalion commander’s sister opened it, and I caught the battalion commander and Figirita in bed. Shameless cat—she lay there undressed, half naked, and did not even try to cover herself with the blanket. I disturbed him badly.

“In general, the law of happiness and well-being in war is: fear quarrels and the hostility of your superiors....

“I have almost abandoned literature. I do not write poetry. I am not published in newspapers—the dreams and oath in my soul to make my enemies hear of me in newspapers and literature are fruitless and premature. In war it is fiasco after fiasco. No orders. Not even medals, not even for Stalingrad. No reputation.

“Once again, in effect, I am beginning to enter life, experiencing suspicion and insincerity from my superiors. The ground under my feet is unstable and full of potholes. There is no love either. Strange, but even now, at twenty-one and a half, I have not even kissed or linked arms with a single girl, except Olya, not to mention the other things many boast about, even those several years younger than I. Life is vulgar; in it there is no true love, aspirations, or genuine relations between people. There is too much meanness, treachery, and malice, and these predominate in everything. That is what I have understood; that is what life and war have taught me.

“The most depressing thing in war, the most nightmarish thing at the moment of battle, is to sit in a trench, in a slit trench, watching the smoke from shells bursting like hail, feeling the breathing of the earth, the smell of burning, and the uneven beating of your own heart. Out in the open...”

“...in battle, at the very moment of a clash with the enemy, you forget both fear and danger....

“About thirty men remain of the company. There had been seventy. Two platoon commanders were killed and one was wounded. A great deal of weaponry was left on the battlefield. The infantrymen who survived showed great heroism. I saw one such hero today, who will evidently remain unknown and unrewarded. Both his arms were wounded, yet with those wounded arms he bandaged other wounded men—there were no medics—and with the same arms he carried out ten submachine guns and his own, an eleventh. He had no strength left after that, and when I met him he was bleeding heavily....

“While combing my hair I found gray hairs. So grief and disappointments, especially disappointment in people, have affected me strongly. That is what I owe to the war and the front....”

By the autumn of 1944 the author of the diaries was already in Poland.

September:

“The uniform is torn and dirty. The battalion leadership is thoroughly bogged down in personal intrigues. The soldiers and officers concern them little: how they go about, what they eat. Why should they care! As long as they themselves live in comfort! There is no point speaking about soldiers—they are slaves of their superior, and his will is law for them. But there are officers, and many of them, who wage war only in words, sitting safely in the rear, yet through pushiness and resourcefulness receive orders and glory. The rank-and-file soldiers are generally left outside anyone’s attention. Only flattery—again this flattery and toadying—or some conspicuous feat that advertises itself gets rewarded with an order.

“I love people, but lately I have completely stopped valuing their opinion—I have encountered so much injustice and so many unpleasant things from people during the war and at the front....”

Gelfand does not dream of becoming a general, as every soldier supposedly does. No, he goes in another direction.

“I will achieve my goal!” he writes. “I will make a talent for myself. The idea of talent was born in me: that I myself want to acquire it, although I do not yet consider myself a talented person. Talent is not an accidental find, a lucky prize, a benevolent gift of fate, but a constant and intense struggle of mind and will, thoughts and desire. It is a great and difficult conquest that must be held in one’s hands like a challenge banner. Talent is born of love. Love for one’s mother, for a girl, for a tree, even an old, dry and ugly tree; love for life and, if necessary, for death.... The war, which hardened so many hearts, has on the contrary made me inclined to the utmost toward tenderness and love, and when I encountered it I surrendered to my feeling without reasoning or hesitation.”

October 1944:

“Our soldiers go around asking for milk and moonshine, stealing horses and livestock; in general the movement of the army is accompanied by the tears and lamentations of the inhabitants. The Germans did worse, but people here are dissatisfied with our Slavs in this respect as well. And this is deep in the rear, under Polish authority and in a completely foreign country. A country where people do not forgive and will do harm. They speak of the partisans with dislike too, saying the partisans robbed the population and raped young ladies.

“The hosts fully revealed their reactionary views to me. ‘We do not consider that the Red Army is liberating us—it is bringing us a different oppression, even heavier than the German one. Our people do not recognize the new government—they are traitors. You came to us with weapons because you are stronger than we are....’”

November 1944:

“At last I received a letter from Klava Pleskach, and I must say I was immediately disappointed in her. It would have been better if she had not written to me. I would have continued to love her passionately and respect her as before. But now. Her letter shows none of the intelligence and depth of thought that I had assumed she possessed, and on top of that she is terribly illiterate....

“I fell in love with the portrait of the Mother of God hanging here on the wall. What an amazingly beautifully composed woman! Truly the ideal of maidenly beauty! There is something of Tamara here, but more refined, something of other girls, and again better! Words are not enough to describe all the merits of the girl looking at me from the portrait. I will say simply: I love her, and I would embrace her so tightly, so passionately, if only she were not a portrait and did not look at me so motionlessly and indifferently.”

November 1944:

“I was handed my orders and told, ‘Go!’ I saluted, turned around, and a moment later was outside. Velvety flakes of abundant soft snow caught on my face and melted into little streams. They settled on my shoulder boards in a thick white layer, and only the wind disturbed their joyful rest, so long awaited after their great, merry, mad journey down to the earth.

“A great mission has fallen to me—to fight for the largest cities of Europe in the course of this war. For Kharkov, Stalingrad, Nikolayev, Odessa, and finally Warsaw. The battles will be cruel. Perhaps we will encounter the enemy’s most difficult resistance. Death will still walk abroad; blood will still flow....”

January 1945:

“Poland. There are many enemy soldiers in the forests. They are being caught by the hundreds. One German was publicly shot as early as 1941, when the Germans were still successful. That German was a farsighted man and openly told his compatriots, ‘We cannot defeat Russia.’ He was shot and burned as a traitor. The Germans were well fed and satisfied then; they marched, almost flew, forward. Now, the inhabitants say, they retreated in panic, exhausted, angry, and disappointed. One little Fritz came into a house, sank heavily into a chair, and said, ‘I cannot walk any farther; I would rather surrender,’ and began to cry.

“The inhabitants speak a mixed Polish. Individual phrases and words of German clutter Polish speech. People were forbidden to speak Polish here.

“Dawn is coming. By local time it is half past six. We are getting ready. For the first time in Poland I ate chicken, drank cocoa, and rested well. The sergeant and the soldiers with me took turns boasting to the Poles about how well we are fed, how we are clothed, about our technology, weapons, country, territory, people, and army, while I agreed and added on my own that fifteen people in the rear work for every one of our soldiers—five supplying food and ten supplying armaments....

“In the town the Germans abandoned so many trophies that news of it has already thundered through all the villages in the district. People are afraid of the military—the Germans frightened them—and hide; they are afraid to come out and collect trophies. Everything German, except trifles, falls to us. The soldiers behave disgracefully. Not only do they steal and take away horses, they even manage to rummage through apartments, taking bicycles, property, pigs, cows, and so on. People who are sincerely glad to see us, after these robberies, look at us with distrust and sometimes dislike. I oppose partisan-style behavior in the Red Army.

“Antagonism and unfriendliness reign among the men in the company. Swearing, obscenities, and fights never disappear from daily life—no one suppresses them. Theft and deception have acquired the status of tradition.

“The houses here are stone. In these parts the people are incomparably kind; they have suffered grief, receive us like relatives, and we live as if we were at home in Nikolayev or Odessa, even better than in Rostov—there the population had nothing left.

“There is vodka without measure. In every village every German colonist had, and has now left behind, a distillery. People drink the most ordinary raw spirit until they are insensible. Many burn out their insides, but that does not stop them. One soldier burned himself out—he died.”

January 1945:

“Germany. Thirty-eight kilometers from last night’s lodging—ninety kilometers in two days. Germany met us inhospitably, with a blizzard, a savage wind, and empty, almost extinct villages. The people here, Germans, fear Russian wrath. They flee, abandoning their entire farms and property. The inhabitants are terribly frightened. When we came, they all raised their hands and fearfully asked, ‘Alles kaputt, alles kaputt?’ Everything in their homes was turned upside down; everything useful was taken.

“The luxury of the furnishings is indescribable; the wealth and elegance of all the property are astonishing. Now our Slavs have really gotten their chance! No one forbids anyone to take...”

“...and destroy among the Germans what they had previously plundered from us. I am quite satisfied. Yesterday, for example, Rysev smashed a bust of Schiller and would have destroyed Goethe too if I had not torn it from the madman’s hands and hidden it, wrapping it in rags. Geniuses cannot be equated with barbarians, and to destroy their memory is a great sin and a disgrace for a normal person.

“Kanonenko is an idiot in the most literal sense. Today, and indeed almost every day, he gets drunk to the point of unconsciousness and begins firing any weapon that comes to hand, throwing at people whatever he can grab. I suffer quite a lot from him in this respect too, and although he is weaker than I am, I still do not dare to clash with him, because I do not trust his sanity. Today we quarreled, and he smashed a large clay pot against the wall after missing me with it....

“I have stocked up on money—7,000 (!) German marks. They will not disappear from circulation, and they may come in useful later. Among the German money I even found ten of our rubles.”

February 1945:

“Berlin is seventy kilometers away, but the day the war ends is still apparently far off. The Germans not only resist but are capable of holding us up—we have been treading water for several days—and of inflicting irreplaceable losses. At least half the manpower has fallen into the hands of death during these days or has been wounded or concussed. The nightmare is indescribable. Yesterday in this half-destroyed cellar where I am sitting, three men were wounded by a single mortar bomb. Today two antiaircraft gunners were killed, one seriously wounded; the military feldsher and one man from the mortar company were wounded too. That is only on a 150-meter stretch of our defense front.

“But the lice!... How many have bred on me during the days I have spent in Germany! Neither in Poland, nor in Bessarabia, nor back home in Russia have I ever had so many lice. Now I have so many that they crawl over my body like piglets in a German farmyard: small, large, and enormous; alone and in processions. They will probably eat me. To carry them on one’s body is utterly unbearable, and this ordeal seems to me more cutting and sophisticated than combat. I simply want to scream myself hoarse and tear my hair out. My whole body is bruised from the bites of these nasty, dangerous insects. I have not changed my underwear since December 1944.”

And, the presenter reminds us, this is February. “It is all dirty and already tearing—the lice gnaw through it, and wads of cotton remain on the body....

“A self-inflicted wound—a lieutenant (!). This is the first time I have heard of an officer shooting himself out of cowardice. He shot himself through the left hand. Young, decorated with the Order of the Red Banner and the medal for the defense of Stalingrad. His decorations were taken away, his personal property confiscated, all privileges withdrawn, and he himself was shot like a dog. I did not feel sorry for either of them, but their feelings were transmitted to me. Especially at the final moment, when the commandant ordered the guards, ‘At the traitor to the Motherland—fire!’ He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, drew his whole body inward, and at that very second three submachine-gun bullets bit sharply into his head. He collapsed to the ground as streams of blood poured out....”

In the second part of the program, after the commercials, we continue Vladimir Gelfand’s diary about his life in Germany, where he spent an entire year after the war, as well as about German love and his return home. This is Valeria Korennaya on 620 AM, Davidzon Radio, New York. Stay tuned.

You are listening to “Wings from the Attic.” Valeria Korennaya is with you.

Vladimir Gelfand. Diary.

February 1945. Poland:

“How many people fell before my eyes, bleeding, losing legs, arms, bellies spilling outward together with shell fragments—a terrible picture! But I did not notice it; I looked ahead, where barely fifty meters away the Germans and tanks were advancing, and for me that was more visible than anything else. I was not cowardly and did not run from the shells, and fate preserved me, although I ran through a yard carpeted with the corpses of people and animals, covered with splinters and bricks, riddled by shells and mortar bombs, wrapped in smoke and burning.

“There is not a single private, sergeant, or officer in the company who has not been publicly cursed by Captain Rysev with the most reckless obscenities. Captain Rysev often resorts to beating his subordinates. Once I was publicly beaten merely for asking him not to insult me in front of the men and thereby undermine my authority. Another time he arranged for a pistol to be fired at me.”

And there were reasons for people not to like Gelfand. His nationality alone was enough. At the very beginning of the war he wrote:

“Jews. Pitiful and unfortunate, proud and cunning, wise and petty, kind and stingy, timid... and.... In the streets and in the park, in the bread shop, in the line for kerosene—everywhere a whisper can be heard. A terrible whisper, cheerful but hateful. They are talking about Jews. For now they speak timidly, looking around. Jews are thieves. Jews have money. 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 heads. In short, Jews are the cause of all misfortunes. I have had to hear all this more than once—my appearance and speech do not reveal that I am a Jew.”

March 1945:

“Poznań is ninety kilometers away. The girls listen to us and enthusiastically greet their liberators. Yesterday one young lady gave me a little green bouquet of snowdrops, and I carried it with me for a long time.”

At the end of April 1945 Gelfand, serving in the 301st Rifle Division, took part in the assault on Berlin.

“What extraordinary happiness and good fortune to have been here and to finish this most terrible war in the robber city of Berlin, together with our allies, in one of the three sectors of the city, to find oneself at the last stage of victory,” he writes. “Every person who has survived all the horrors and hardships of this war and wants to settle accounts with the Germans cherishes that dream. My only goal is to be on the front line and earn at least one decoration, the decoration silly girls dream about and without which people in the rear will look at me with contempt. What can I answer them, how can I justify myself? ‘You did not fight!’ they will say, and outwardly it will look correct. What a paradox!

“That day I was brave as never before. On the road, as soon as we went out, I took her arm, then put my arm around her waist. Finally I began kissing her cheeks, neck, forehead, lips. I kissed her whole face, but it did not seem tasty to me. Why, I do not know. People, especially poets, extol the kiss as the most magnificent thing. It was the first time I had kissed a girl, not counting Olya, and I was disappointed.

“Katyusha is beautiful, but nevertheless even a kiss on the lips did not produce in me what was perhaps the proper impression. She did not resist, but she did not kiss me herself, merely opening or closing her lips for my kiss. The tenderest thing in our whole meeting was the touch of my face against her soft, affectionate neck and of my hands against her still not fully developed breast. Her hands were rough, although small and girlish, exhausted by work. Katya is a pearl that grew among thistles. Life hardened her with its demands and severity. She wants so much to live! There is much love in her, and therefore even the kiss of a stranger became an unexpected joy for her. I did not dare to take the last step, about which I had thought so much and so often....”

After victory Gelfand hoped to be discharged from the army. It did not happen. He asked for leave; his mother even wrote to Stalin, but her son was not granted leave. He called the looting of Berlin’s Scientific Library “shameful barbarism.”

In November 1945 he writes something people do not usually say about themselves:

“I am a young and, as it has begun to seem to me, interesting man, with an uneven character, touchy like tightly stretched strings, at times withdrawn into myself and hiding deep in my heart the troubles and offenses I experience; with black velvet eyes and a heart that loves life—I consider these the chief virtues of my personality.

“There is everything in me: stinginess descending to pettiness, worthy perhaps of the Miserly Knight and a greedy trader in a big market, and at the same time generosity, simplicity, and extravagance without precedent. In one day I can spend what I have sometimes preserved for years, and afterward I will again be thrifty until once more a reason appears to settle accounts with something that until then was precious and significant in my imagination. So it is in everything. I am inconsistent in my actions and plans. My time knows no planning and my labor no system.

“My thoughts depend on my mood, my work on circumstances, although not on circumstances alone. I am too susceptible to the influence of my surroundings, and the opinion of those around me plays an important role for me, although rarely, even from intelligent and decent people, can one hear sincere words. I react sensitively to every human subtlety and cannot endure injustice. Sometimes I am ready for great deeds, and I always have enough pathos, eloquence, oratorical power, and will to begin, but I rarely carry what I have begun through to the end—patience weakens, initiative dies out, and the undertaking quickly has time to become repugnant to me, especially if it meets criticism or ridicule, even unjust and malicious, even empty and unserious. Only one thought and one hope, despite all my inability...”

“...for prolonged and meticulous work, never leaves me: to be a writer and to be famous. Today I am still far from realizing even the first half of this dream, but the magnitude of my ambition and my inflamed imagination paint for me the tender, strong, durable, ardent and musical uniform of the poet, which, it seems to me, I—created by nature, created for life and grief, life and endless grief—must inevitably put on.”

You read this and recognize your own traits in the author’s description. And you understand: you probably would not have the courage to make such admissions. But Gelfand is fearless.

“The soldiers are difficult. I cannot be harsh with them—I feel sorry for people. I do not know how to curse the soldiers obscenely either. To plead, persuade, explain—that is what remains for me. But people do not accept that, and good treatment causes incomprehension in them.

“Why did fate preserve me? Why did life not abandon me amid so many mortal dangers? It follows that I am somehow useful to the majestic beauty in a motley, curly dress who bears such a tender, such a unique, such a sweet name—‘Life’....”

After victory. June 1945:

“Recently I have lived through a mass of adventures and seen many new things, but I have become a loafer and a womanizer. I keep dreaming in vain of love, even if with a German woman, so long as she is intelligent, beautiful, clean, and, most important, devotedly loves me. It has gone no further than dreams, embraces, kisses, and conversations lasting two or three hours. I have not yet found a fully suitable girl. If they are tender they are foolish; if passionate, capricious; others are ugly; still others have no figure. Russian girls, meanwhile, are proud and highly sensitive to every subtlety of conversation.

“Yesterday I learned the number of the order under which I was awarded the Red Star. The clerks from the line units proposed that we drink to the decoration, but that only made me feel even worse. This award has become my shame and a reproach to my reason.

“I have become more decisive than in previous years, forgotten timidity, and lost my shyness. Girls, moreover, have lost their pride and arrogance because the value of a man has increased during the war. I am not ugly and can count on the love, respect, and long-desired affection of many pretty girls. Ideologically and morally I have no common road with German women. They do not refuse affection, or indeed anything else.”

August 1945:

“We have been forbidden to talk with Germans. Now I am deprived of everything. Everything is again as it was during the war.

“The prudent Berlin commandant’s office, anticipating trouble, ordered the Germans: ‘On holidays, when the Russians will be drinking and celebrating, lock your doors with every bolt so that servicemen cannot break into houses and make trouble there.’”

The diary’s author, Red Army lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, is writing while clearly understanding that someone besides himself might read it. All the more so because everyone had long known about the diary, and he himself repeatedly read excerpts aloud to comrades. This diary could become not only the author’s memory but also his executioner. Therefore he writes:

“Yes, only here, abroad, can one understand how great and authoritative our country is.”

And immediately afterward, the twenty-two-year-old young man thinks of something entirely different:

“The German woman promised to come tomorrow. She has a warm breast and a young, yielding body. And I, with my thirst for tenderness, will soon drown either in a sea of love or in a swamp of vulgarity.”

November 1945:

“A woman. Well, what can you do with her? She is three years older than I am. She fell in love with me at first sight, and so strongly that even when drunk I dare not keep silent about it. It is already two in the morning. I am back home again. What fault is it of my youth that war happened and we found ourselves in Germany? I cannot live without love; I need tenderness, life, I need love.”

December 1945:

“When I became a teenager and went to school I was shy, unsociable, timid, and girls my age cooled toward me before they had even had time to flare up. I had no luck in love. I knew a woman for the first time only after the war in Berlin, and even then only because she herself volunteered for it.”

January 1946:

“Berlin has hardly changed. Cafes and restaurants are full of idle people; trams and buses are crowded. The streets are bustling and tram stops annoying, where beggars give you no peace: adults and children, rich and poor—all ask and ask....

“The regiment has not changed. The people in it have not changed either—scandals and swearing, unauthorized absences and irresponsibility. People kill the day waiting for evening. Venereal disease has become widespread: neither bars nor wire barriers hold them—they break through and travel to Berlin and its outskirts....

“At the barber’s I stopped before a portrait of a girl, magnificently executed by the artist’s brush. I could not tear myself away and decided to acquire it. ‘The portrait costs 500 marks,’ the damned German with the sly snake-like face calculated, and to tempt me he began telling me that a Jew had painted the picture, a Jew had sold it, and the girl herself was Jewish too—the old scoundrel had apparently guessed who I was and decided to play on national feeling.

“‘I do not care who this girl is. I want to have this portrait,’ I said, and took out half a kilogram of pork and gave it to him.

“‘Not enough!’ the barber cried greedily and grabbed at the two onions remaining in my suitcase. I gave him one—I had nothing left except bread and would have to go hungry, but the girl, alive and beautiful, is worth having with me, even if only within the frame of a portrait!

“Women can be beautiful, but with them one cannot brood and think sad thoughts....

“I am completely without winter uniform and am forced in winter conditions to wear a German raincoat, a tunic made from German material that I acquired at my own expense, old boots, and summer breeches....

“Thieves, card players, and drunkards have appeared. Card games are becoming widespread. Hundreds and thousands of marks cut through the air, strike the table, and, disappearing into the pocket of some accidental lucky man, turn into vodka, cologne, alcohol. The loser has nothing left but dreams of revenge, and he keeps losing until he is left in his underwear. Fine if he is honest. Otherwise.... Many officers have begun losing belongings and money. They steal everything that comes to hand. They do not disdain trifles: scissors, pencils, postcards. They steal without shrinking from any baseness—they break suitcases, force locks. Every evening drunken cries rush about, cards flash—life flows on.”

April 1946:

“Yesterday at the Köpenick district commandant’s office there was another emergency. A drunken sergeant major, locked in a room together with an officer with whom he had been drinking, fell from the third floor of the building onto the pavement and was killed.”

Soon Gelfand admits, with disarming honesty, that he contracted a venereal disease and describes in detail...

...how he was treated. And finally, in September 1946, he was informed that he was being demobilized.

“I bought gloves, several pairs of socks, many hats and caps of different colors,” he writes. “There will be suits, now that I have something to put on my head. I was unable to obtain a radio receiver. Now all that remains is to get a typewriter and tires for a bicycle.

“Life has turned its face toward me. Germany, I have not become tired of you, but I leave you with pleasure, depraved and empty. There is nothing astonishing in you, nothing joyful. Only life in you is merry and carefree, cheap, noisy, and talkative. But Russia—I no longer remember what she looks like, do not know how she lives or what is interesting there now. Her earth is dear to me; it seems I am ready to gnaw it endlessly like chocolate with my greedy teeth, lick it with my tongue twisted into German, and kiss it with hard lips, washed in blood and tears.

“I have an obscene amount of belongings. I know everything is needed and everything will come in useful, but they cause me so much trouble and anxiety. I am possessed by one natural dream—to bring all my things home: eight small but heavy suitcases, two sacks and a little sack of flour, a violin, and two string bags with various basic necessities. It is too much for one person.”

By October 1946 he was already in Dnepropetrovsk. An entry appears in the diary:

“At home there is torment. Endless scandals and unpleasantness.

“People say that extra months have been added to the year: hunger-month, swelling-month, drying-up-month, death-month.”

Gelfand entered the university’s history and philology faculty, taught at a technical school, and wrote newspaper articles in Ukrainian and Russian. He married twice and had three sons. Living conditions were difficult. For more than ten years a family of four rented a room of ten square meters. At the end of the 1960s they were finally given an apartment.

Vladimir Gelfand died in 1983 at the age of sixty. His diary did indeed make its author famous, just as he had wanted, becoming a unique and singular document of the era of the Second World War.

So it really does turn out that “once again the riddles of history must be solved by descendants.”

All that remains is for me to thank you, dear radio listeners, for your attention, and sound engineer Akmal Tokhirov for his help. I say goodbye until next Tuesday. As always, we will hear one another at noon on 620 AM, Davidzon Radio, New York. This was Valeria Korennaya. Everything you hear in this program is not news, but it is also truth.

You have been listening to “Wings from the Attic.” Author and host: Valeria Korennaya.

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