Is There Truth in War?

History in eyewitness diaries

Knowing how many people died during the Second World War, more than sixty years later we still know very little about how people lived during that war...

The production The Russian-German Soldier's Phrasebook, which premiered in Berlin at the Sophiensaele, is based on two personal diaries: five years, from 1941 to 1946, in the life of a Ukrainian front-line soldier, Red Army officer Vladimir Gelfand, who reached Berlin, and the notes of an unknown young woman, a resident of the German capital, about the capture of the city in May 1945. The structure of this textual montage also includes two military phrase books: a Russian-German soldier's phrase book published in the USSR in 1941 and a German-Russian soldier's dictionary for Wehrmacht soldiers, published in the same year.

Aesthetically, the theatre space is three girls and three young men. Above the stage there is a screen. There is no scenery. The young people enter into dialogue now in German, now in Russian.

Director Aglaja Romanovskaya and dramaturge Elena Kharlamova presented their version of the truth about the war to the Berlin audience. Vladimir Gelfand's son Vitaly, thanks to whom his father's diaries were published, also attended the premiere.

Vitaly Gelfand: "Who was your father? A Hero of the Soviet Union?"

"My father volunteered for the front when he was nineteen. He went all the way to Berlin. Then, after returning to Dnepropetrovsk, he graduated from university and married. He worked as a teacher of history and social studies at a vocational school. My parents lived modestly; my mother also worked as a teacher. My father worked a lot, wrote poetry, published articles in newspapers. He dreamed of becoming a writer and often said: 'When I retire...' I did not know then that he already had diaries about the war. But at that time he would simply come and read them to me.

"It turned out that he never lived to retirement. He died in 1983. There was an illness of the brain... For about a year he was 'not himself.' Once he left home and did not return. He disappeared. Four days later he was found sitting alone on a bench on the avenue. My mother was informed; I was serving in the army then... He was taken to hospital and died the next day.

"In 1985, going through his belongings, I found a mass of photographs, tram tickets, notes from girls, even a combat operations journal from Berlin that he had kept marked 'top secret,' and... diaries. They had been hidden in suitcases; my father had never shown them to anyone. I read them and began to retype them - first on a typewriter, later on a computer. To be honest, I omitted intimate passages because the descriptions were too personal - the way a person speaks only to himself... Altogether there were around a thousand pages.

"It is interesting that my father wrote that he would never return to Germany. Yet in 1995 my brother, my mother and stepfather, and I emigrated there. I visited the places in Berlin that my father had described. We even found a factory in the Kopenick district where he had worked - a completely ruined building, covered in graffiti. It is difficult to say what I felt.

"Then I began approaching various Russian and Ukrainian publishing houses. I was certain that my father's diaries would be published immediately. They asked me: 'Who was your father? A Hero of the Soviet Union? An academician? Did he have a scientific degree?' - 'No.' - 'Perhaps a great-nephew of Stalin or Brezhnev?' - 'No...' - 'Sorry, we are not interested...' In 2005 my father's diaries were published in Germany by Aufbau Verlag. When the editors compared the text, it became clear that intimate episodes were missing, and they were all restored to the book. The book appeared in Sweden last year and is to be published in Russia in 2007. I liked the Berlin production more than I expected. The actors' work, the way they do it, is remarkable and unusual."

Director Aglaja Romanovskaya: "Actors often cry during rehearsals"

"When I was in Germany talking to my German friend's grandmother and looking through photographs of her husband, who had been killed at the front, I suddenly understood that these people's tragedy was the same as ours. We were born close to that war; my grandfather also fought.

"In the production I wanted to dissolve the figure of one man and one woman among several actors so that there would be no feeling that we were illustrating the private story of a particular person. I therefore suggested that three male actors and three actresses play the unknown Berlin woman and the Red Army soldier. The company is mixed, Russian and German. There are passages performed in both languages and monologues - Stalin's, for example - spoken in Russian without translation.

"Our actors often cry during rehearsals. Not out of sentimentality, but from the feeling that we are doing the personal history of someone real. That is why I wanted each performer to approach the material not as an abstract historical exercise but as somebody's life."

"I moved to Sweden in the 1970s, when I was eleven. My mother married a Swedish citizen and we left the Soviet Union. I hold Swedish citizenship, live and work mainly in France, although I also work in Moscow. All of us who are children of emigrants have one question: who are we, where are we from? I searched for myself for so long... I remember that in Sweden I began suffering from this when I was about fifteen. Suddenly I began looking back - I wanted so badly to go back, to Moscow. I have no real feeling of home. Sometimes it seems to me that my whole life is one long return there..."

Actress Yulia Vozlyublennaya: "It needs rethinking"

"The Moscow premiere is coming soon, and a production like this may be put away in some 'dark corner'... Before working on it, I had not really thought about the fact that the victorious liberators came to Berlin and that some of them looted or committed violence. Since childhood I had heard that we were heroes, that our grandfathers were heroes. At every step I saw obelisks and pathos. Everything else was hidden. I need to rethink it for myself, and I am grateful to the production for making that happen."

Actor Fyodor Stepanov: "Toward one another through the fragments of broken destinies"

"I had not read Gelfand's diaries. When someone tells you all this, it literally gives you chills. In the diary unknown women and children are described not merely as horrors of war but as people - who they were, how they lived, how they tried to survive through the fragments of shattered destinies. Existing only in the roles 'victor - defeated' proves absolutely unproductive. Our performance ends with a question: 'Are there any more questions?' The scene asks whether everything has been said, whether everything has been understood. And that question remains open."

From Vladimir Gelfand's wartime diaries:

"Berlin. Spree... A huge two-storey house with luxurious furniture, a magnificent interior and rich walls and ceiling. The family was numerous. When our soldiers arrived, they drove all the residents into the cellar. I liked one of the young German women very much and presented her with a handkerchief... At night, when it was dark, they began to come upstairs..."

"04.02.1944, Konstantinovka. It is unimaginably hard to walk, unimaginably cold. In the villages selected for us they did not spare a single rag. The population is cursed. We somehow scraped together food, exchanging it for blankets. We had not seen bread for three days. We killed a horse left by the Germans, finished off a dying mare that was also wounded. We boiled meat day and night and ate without stopping, and in one house found potatoes and ate those too."

"23.05.1944. For the first time during my service in the Red Army I was fortunate enough to receive a parcel from peaceful Odessa residents: a piece of lard, biscuits, paper. I sent them a letter in reply. But of ten parcels that had been sent, eight were looted... It was clear that the bags or sacks in which the parcels were sent had been opened and half or most of the contents stolen. With difficulty I managed to make six more or less decent parcels out of nine. In one parcel there was a note saying that socks and handkerchiefs, belt buckles, shoe polish, envelopes and soap had been enclosed..."

Irina Parfyonova, Berlin. 
Arguments and Facts: Europe, No. 11, 2007.