There are few things more distressing than the sight of a horse drowning. Anya Mulatova saw a soldier manage to jump to safety, but his horse, evidently injured and unable to cope with the current, sank. It was 28 June and the Third Byelorussian Front had been ordered to cross the River Berezina and advance on Minsk and Maladzyechna. Despite heavy shelling, which caused horrendous casualties, the sniper platoon managed the crossing unscathed. The Berezina is quite wide, but the regiment crossed it on rafts the size of the single room in Anya’s house, which were hastily improvised from logs.245 They were propelled by whatever means was to hand, even shovels. On reaching the far bank the girls poured the water out of their boots and marched on towards Minsk. The retaking of Byelorussia would soon be completed.
The attack went well. On 4 July 1 Guards Tank Corps entered Minsk and, joining up with 2 and 3 Tank Corps, completed the encirclement of a group of over 100,000 Germans to the east of the city. The neighbouring divisions of 49 Army pressed ahead in pursuit of the retreating Germans, but the division to which Anya Mulatova’s sniper platoon was attached stayed behind. The woods around Minsk were full of trapped Germans who needed to be captured.
Anya was to remember one day in early July 1944 for the rest of her life. She was not acting as a sniper but as a straightforward foot soldier, and her partner, Tasya, was not with her. The girls were mixed in with riflemen combing the woods. Several divisions discovered huge numbers, 105,000 soldiers, mostly demoralised, of the German 4 Army wandering about in the tree-covered areas east of Minsk in the hope of finding a way out of the “cauldron”. On 17 July 57,000 of these soldiers, led by their generals, were paraded through the streets of Minsk. What happened to the others? Some managed to slip out of the encirclement, some remained for ever in the boundless forests of Byelorussia. Anya Mulatova met one who had no intention of surrendering. He was the only enemy soldier she looked straight in the eye, before shooting him at almost point-blank range.
Anya had lost sight of the other girls and ended up with a group of soldiers she did not know. They arrived at an extensive clearing and had to cross to the other side of it. One of the soldiers, who was on horseback, volunteered to check what was on the far side. “Wait here, lads. I’ll gallop over there and let you know,” he called.246 He jabbed his horse in the belly with his boots and “it took off as if it had gone mad.” It would have been folly to stay in such an open space for long. Suddenly, a shot rang out and the horseman slumped. The horse, unseating its dead or wounded rider, bolted. The others, stunned, just “stood there gaping”, at a loss until one of them, a daredevil, surprised them all by running out, zigzagging across the clearing. As he ran, Anya, who was, after all, a sniper, was looking not at him but across to where she thought the shot at the rider had come from. She was just in time to see the flash of a second shot, which hit the second soldier. Just as she thought, it was a German sniper shooting at them. “Look, let me see what I can do,” she said to the officer in charge. She decided to approach the German marksman from behind. “Go ahead,” said the officer. They were now a group of only three.
It was unbearably hot. Anya went deeper into the woods as fast as she could, estimating how far to run and in which direction. She finally turned and saw the clearing was at an angle to her. She ran to the edge, lay down and crawled with a pistol in her hand through dry grass that scratched her face. When she recalled the episode after the war, she was amazed she had been able to crawl so fast, just like in the films. She reckoned the German must be 30–40 metres away. Crawling most of that distance, she raised herself on her elbows to check how much remained and saw “his ginger head”, very close, about ten metres away. The German sniper was lying with his back to her and looking in the opposite direction. Anya jumped up and rushed at him, shouting the first, heavily-accented German words that came to mind (not having learned German at school): “Khende hokh, shmutsige shvaine!” The German stood up and water poured off him. He had propped his sniper rifle up on a mound and had the lower half of his body in a hollow full of water, “like in a bath”. The heat and lice had evidently really been getting to him, Anya decided later. She took aim and pulled the trigger, but the pistol did not fire. “Idiot, you have to release the safety catch!” flashed through her mind. She released it, aimed at his head and pulled the trigger. The German was only a few metres away, so Anya got sprayed with blood. It never occurred to her she might have taken him prisoner. This German sniper, who had just shot two of her comrades in front of her eyes, seemed far too scary for that.
Anya breathed a sigh of relief, but then heard the bushes rustling as someone approached from behind. “This is the moment I die,” she thought, but then saw that a Soviet soldier in camouflage had emerged. No insignia of rank were visible, but from his confident demeanour Anya knew immediately he was an officer. “Hey, was that you who whacked him?” he said approvingly. Anya just nodded. “Well done, now go and wash yourself!” he ordered, confirming Anya’s belief that he must certainly be someone quite senior. She rinsed her face in brackish water, wet and rubbed the trousers and tunic that were spattered with the German’s blood, and ran to join the lads. They were carrying the body of the impetuous soldier in a groundsheet, and had bandaged up the other, tearing a shirt into strips. They rarely had bandaging packs with them then, “a disgraceful careless attitude”, Anya recalled later.247
She was shortly afterwards awarded the Order of the Red Star for taking out the German sniper. The commander who had sent her off to get washed was a colonel and put her forward for the award. Anya, though, never forgot the German’s face, long and pale, with red stubble. He would have been around thirty years old, middle-aged in Anya’s eyes. For the rest of her life she found it painful to recall the episode. Killing someone at close range proved very different from shooting at tiny figures magnified by a telescopic sight.
*
Anya and her small group continued combing the woods. It was frightening and there seemed to be “a Fritz behind every bush”.248 They were fortunate, however. They soon came upon a group of Germans who had no wish at all to continue fighting. Twelve of them had tented their rifles together and were resting on their grey greatcoats. “Prisoner, prisoner!” they shouted, jumping up when they saw the three Russians. Anya’s companions, naturally, set about searching them, going through their coat and trouser pockets, helping themselves to watches and rings. This was standard practice. Watches became a kind of wartime currency. Before the war, and indeed for long after it, comparatively few Russians possessed one. In September 1941, the local committee of Leningrad State University asked the dean of the Geography Faculty to “issue a men’s pocket watch for the LSU partisan unit” because none of them owned one.249 Watches were routinely removed from dead and captured Germans, and soldiers would sometimes show off several wristwatches on their arm. Survivors came back home after the war with looted watches. (This was not just a Soviet peccadillo, there is plenty of testimony that watches were popular as a trophy with Allied troops too.)
Anya could understand the soldiers, but was still ashamed. She always found this kind of “army behaviour” repugnant. She stood aside and comforted herself with the thought that the Germans, of course, treated Russians in exactly the same way. One of the Germans suddenly came over to her, “Frau, gut, bitte, bitte!” He handed her a gold watch on a chain.250 Anya refused, “Nicht, nicht, nein!” but the German was adamant, giving her to understand as best he could that the soldiers would in any case take it from him and he would like to give it to her. He must have been afraid of the Russian soldiers, and hoped that this woman might protect him. Anya took his watch and kept it. One of the Russian soldiers led the prisoners to an assembly point. They were “exhausted and very glum”. She felt sorry for them, yet, after all, “they were better off being captured than slaughtered.” By the summer of 1944 an order had already been issued forbidding the shooting of prisoners.251 It was not always obeyed, but in the first years of the war it had been very rare to take any prisoners at all. “Thank God these ones are not being done away with,” was Anya’s reaction, despite the fact that many members of her own family had already been killed in the course of the conflict.
She had shortly before come across an atrocity perpetrated by some of her regiment’s reconnaissance team. One dawn as they were on their way to hunt, Anya and Tasya met some scouts they knew returning from a night-time mission with two squealers. Trying to capture a squealer was dangerous and to manage it was a considerable success, therefore Anya was disturbed to see that one of them was half dead and the team were having to drag him back with them. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked, and the lads confessed they had got over-enthusiastic and cut off the German’s “bits”. She heard later he died before they got him back, and that they had been disciplined.
Anya declined to condemn them. How could they be judged after what they had seen in Byelorussia? The enemy they were at last driving from their land was leaving behind a legacy of charred villages, dead bodies, and hatred in people’s hearts. Anya viewed the half-dead squealer with mixed feelings of horror at the brutal killing of a man who possibly had done no evil to anyone, but also of justified retribution against the Germans as a whole. A Young Communist League organiser of her age in a mortar regiment had looked on with similar ambivalence in 1943 at Germans being led to execution by Ukrainian peasant women. “The women were leading some of the Hitlerites down the street. Each had an axe or a pitchfork, a fire iron or a bludgeon in her hands. The women were enraged, screaming and shouting in Ukrainian and I could not understand a word they were saying. They stopped at a pit and began pushing the Hitlerites into it. They threw several Vlasov soldiers down there too. One fascist tried to resist, wailing, “In meinem Haus drei Kinder!” The women hurled back at him, “And you think we have puppies, do you? Chuck ’im in!”
Many decades passed, the Young Communist League organiser worked for half a century as a schoolteacher and was awarded the title of Distinguished Teacher of the U.S.S.R. but, remembering how those peasant women had murdered the German prisoners, he still thought no power on earth would have induced him to try to prevent them taking their revenge.252