And so I took a train in Minvody and slowly made my way up north. The traffic was constantly disrupted; I had to change convoys several times. In filthy waiting rooms, hundreds of soldiers milled around, standing up or sprawling on their kits, waiting to be served soup or a little ersatz coffee before heading off into the unknown. Someone would give up a space on a bench for me and I would remain there, motionless, until an exhausted stationmaster came and shook me. In Salsk, finally, they put me on a train coming up from Rostov with men and materiel for Hoth’s army. These makeshift units had been hastily and haphazardly formed: men on leave intercepted on the way home, as far as Lublin and even Posen, and sent back to Russia, underage conscripts whose training had been sped up and then curtailed, convalescents swept out of the lazarettos, individual soldiers from the Sixth Army found wandering outside of the Kessel, after the catastrophe. Hardly any of them seemed to have any idea of the gravity of the situation; and that wasn’t surprising, the military communiqués remained obstinately silent on the subject, at most mentioning activity in the Stalingrad sector. I didn’t speak with these men; I stowed my kit and wedged myself into the corner of a compartment, withdrawn into myself, absently studying the large vegetal shapes, branching out, intricate, deposited on the window by the frost. I didn’t want to think, but thoughts flooded in, bitter, full of self-pity. Bierkamp, a little inner voice raged inside me, would have done better to put me directly in front of a firing squad, that would have been more human, rather than making hypocritical speeches about the educational value of a siege in the middle of a Russian winter. Thank God, another voice groaned, at least I have my shuba and my boots. It was frankly a little difficult for me to conceive of the educational value of pieces of burning metal tearing through my flesh. When you shot a Jew or a Bolshevik, it had no educational value, it killed them, that’s all, even though we had a lot of nice euphemisms for that too. When the Soviets wanted to punish someone, they sent them to a shtrafbat, where the life expectancy was a few weeks at most: a brutal method, but an honest one, just like everything they did, in general. One of their great advantages over us (aside from their seemingly countless divisions and tanks): at least with them you knew where you stood.
