I read Enemy at the Gates: the Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig this week. I picked it up at a used bookstore years ago because I really liked the movie. The book is totally different. The whole sniper story is cool, but it took like five or ten whole pages in this 400 page masterpiece. I couldn’t put the book down … but at times the stories were so tragic and horrendous I did want to put it down. The battle itself is an amazing story, but Craig did a beautiful job tracing the real life stories of real people through the six month ordeal. It is a history book, not a novel, but I’ve read my share of history books in my life and this one is one of the best. Some of these quotes are longer, but hopefully you’ll get a taste of what I mean (I chose some of the less gruesome pieces … you’re welcome). The last one is my favorite.
p.327 [This is close to the end of the battle, as the Soviets were circling in around the German 6th Army and closing in] Southwest of Kotelnikovo, Sgt. Alexi Petrov spurred his gun crew on toward Rostov. The squat artilleryman had lost count of the times he had crossed and recrossed the twisting loops of the lower Don, but he ignored his exhaustion as he pursued an enemy who had held his family in bondage for more than a year.
In the midst of the offensive, however, Petrov met a new foe. Approaching the outskirts of a village, the inhabitants – men and women – ran out and attacked his unit with pitchforks and hammers. The Red Army troops withdrew from the onslaught and stumbled back with the news that their assailants were native Kazakhs, a minority violently opposed to Communist rule from Moscow.
The Kazakhs screamed insults and shoulted: “We don’t want any Russians here!” while bewildered Soviet soldiers milled about on the plain. Someone phoned division headquarters for advice. Within minutes a terse order came back: “Destroy them all.”
In the general ardment that followed, Petrov fired high e shells into the village, which blew into thousands of pieces of mud, clay, and timber. Machine guns picked off any who tried to escape, and the Kazakhs were killed to the last child.
Gazing at the crackling flames, Petrov suddenly wondered why these people had such a hatred for the state. What was it about Communism that made them turn against their brothers? He was plagued by a terrible guilt for killing his own brethren.
p.314 At an officers’ mess inside the Kessel [the area in Stalingrad where the Germans were surrounded, cut off from supplies and near starvation], blond Lt. Hans Oettl was surrounded by men wishing him a happy birthday. Seated in front of his own blue china, from which he had eaten for years, he watched a cook ladle out a huge steaming portion of goulash filled with thick chunks of meat. Astounded and delighted, Oettl began to eat.
The door suddenly burst open and a military policeman stormed in, demanding to know whether anyone had seen his watchdog. In the sudden silence, Hans Oettl looked at his companions, now staring uncomfortably at the floor, then his gaze returned slowly to the goulash and mountain of meat in front of him.
While the policeman thundered threats against anyone who might have killed his pet, the lieutenant deliberately raised his fork and chewed a portion of the policeman’s German Shepherd.
p.312 On New Year’s Eve, discipline in the revitalized 62nd Army (Soviet) relaxed and, along the shore, high ranking Soviet officers held a series of parties to honor actors, musicians, and ballerinas visiting Stalingrad to entertain the troops. One of the troop members, violinist Mikhail Goldstein, stayed away and went instead to the trenches to perform another of his one-man concerts for the soldiers.
In all the war Goldstein had never seen a battlefield quite like Stalingrad: a city so utterly broken by bombs and artillery, cluttered with skeletons of hundreds of horses, picked clean by the starving enemy. And always there were the grim police of the Russian NKVD, standing between the front line and the Volga [the river through Stalingrad], checking soldiers’ papers and suspected deserters .
The horrible battlefield shocked Goldstein and he played as he never played before, hour after hour for men who obviously enjoyed his music. And while all German works had been banned by the Soviet government, Goldstein doubted that anny commissar would protest on New Year’s Eve. The melodies he created drifted through the loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow.
When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: “Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.”
Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach Gavotte.
Peace.