The Fall of Berlin

Front matter

Mendl Mann The Fall of Berlin

TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Maurice WOoLFTHAL

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Contents

Introduction 1 Summary of At the Gates of Moscow 9 Summary of At the Vistula 17 The Fall of Berlin Chapter One 25 Chapter Two 55 Chapter Three 88 Chapter Four 117 Chapter Five 147 Chapter Six 175 Chapter Seven 206 Chapter Eight 224

Index 233

Introduction

A million and a half Jews fought in the armed forces of the Allies during the Second World War. They served in the armies, navies, and air forces of their native lands. Many who were forced to flee the Nazis then joined the war effort in the countries that had given them refuge. Between 490,000 and 520,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army.' Most of them were native-born Soviet citizens; others were refugees from Poland and other lands occupied by the German Army. More than 120,000 Jews in the Red Army died in combat, and another 75—80,000 were murdered by the Germans as prisoners of war.

Mendl Mann’s series of Yiddish Second World War novels—Bay di Toyern fun Moskve [At the Gates of Moscow], Bay der Vaysl [At the Vistula], and Dos Faln fun Berlin [The Fall of Berlin]—recount the war against Hitler from the unique perspective of Menakhem Isaacovitch, a Polish Jew who flees the Germans and finds refuge in the Soviet Union. Although the trilogy is a long saga that reflects Mann’s experiences as a frontline soldier, each book can stand on its own. Although Mann was fluent in Polish and Russian, he chose to write in Yiddish, both out of his devotion to the language, and because he aimed to reach what was left of the Yiddish-speaking world. In 1939 there had been an estimated eleven million Yiddish speakers, but the Nazis and their collaborators murdered more than half of them. Only At the Gates of Moscow was translated into English.

Menakhem, the protagonist of the saga, is now called Mikhail. He fights in the Red Army, both to defend the country that welcomed him and to seek revenge on the Germans who are destroying Poland and exterminating the Jews. By introducing us to ethnic Russians,

1 Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War Against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2010), p. 5. 2 Ibid., p. 126.

© Maurice Wolfthal CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233.02

Belarussians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Kalmyks, Georgians, Caucasians, Mordvins, and Siberians, Mann emphasizes the multiethnic character of the Red Army’s war against Hitler. But Mann makes clear that in their defense of the Soviet Union, the Jewish soldiers, like the other “nationalities,” were struggling to fight a war in the shadow of Stalin, a dictator whose paranoia and whose murderous secret police, the NKVD, poisoned the war effort.’ In addition, as the trilogy reveals, the Jews were fighting to defend a country where antisemitism still persisted at all levels—including the armed forces—despite more than twenty years of official Soviet ideology.

While the three books reflect Mann’s grueling years as a frontline soldier, his life before that had been vastly different. Born in 1916 in Plonsk, Poland, he spent his childhood in the nearby village of Sochocin, which had been settled by Jewish farmers in the nineteenth century. His memoir, Mayne zikhroynes fun plonsk [My Memories of Plonsk]* lovingly evokes this rural life: the open skies, the meadows, rivers, lakes, farms, orchards, water mills, horses, cattle, shaggy dogs, and country folk. His friends were the children of farmers, Jewish and Christian. Mann’s trilogy is suffused with affection for village life.

The family moved to Plonsk when he was eight, and lived on the Shulgas [Synagogue Street]. His parents sent him to a kheyder (traditional Jewish religious school), a khinukh yeladim (modern Hebrew-language Zionist school), and a Polish public school. The politics of the Second Polish republic were frequently discussed at home, and Mann witnessed a Socialist demonstration when he was ten. At age twelve he studied Polish with a private teacher, who instilled a love of Polish poetry in him, but he was becoming increasingly aware of the precarious status of Polish Jews.

His neighbor, a tailor who sang as he worked, invited him to a meeting where he saw a portrait of Ber Borochov, with the inscription:

3 NKVD The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. Established in 1917 as NKVD of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the agency was originally tasked with conducting regular police work and overseeing the country’s prisons and labor camps (Wikipedia entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD).

4 Mendl Mann, ‘Mayne zikhroynes fun plonsk’ [My Memories of Plonsk], in Sefer Plonsk ve-ha-Sevivah [The Book of Plonsk and its Surroundings], ed. by Shlomo Zemach, Mordekhai Halamish, and Mendl Mann (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yotsey Plonsk be-Yisrael, 1963), pp. 570-90.

Introduction 3

“Long Live the Jewish Working Class in Palestine.” But that meeting of the Poalei Zion [Workers of Zion] was disrupted by “Reds” who saw Zionism as nationalistic betrayal of Marxist ideals. But the movement appealed to Mann by holding out the hope for Jews to have a land of their own, where they would cease being an oppressed minority, and he became a leader of a Poalei youth group. He began to write poems, most in Polish, some in Yiddish, and the dream arose of becoming a writer.

Mann’s older brother Wolf (Velvl) was an established painter who did landscapes in oils and watercolors and drew portraits in charcoal. Mend, too, was drawn to art from an early age, and his teachers recognized his talent. He later followed him to Warsaw, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited his work. He began publishing Yiddish poems in Literarishe bleter [Literary Pages], the Folks-tsaytung [People’s Newspaper], and the Arbeter-tsaytung | Workers’ Newspaper].

When the Germans invaded in 1939, Mann escaped to Tuczyn, where he met Sonia, his future wife, and then to Kharkov. He attended a teachers’ institute and was sent to teach in Tengushay, Mordovia. Their son Zvi was born there. Mann was mobilized by the Red Army to drive out the Germans, and he fought from Moscow to Warsaw to Berlin. His wife was also mobilized, and she sang for the troops. Mann’s knowledge of German was an asset in interrogating captured soldiers both in the USSR and in Germany.” His fluency in Polish was useful when the Red Army advanced towards Germany. Mann’s artistic talent contributed to war posters and newspaper propaganda. Once, on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday, he was told to produce a lifesize portrait and to hang it prominently outside. But a fierce wind was blowing, and as he tried to fasten the portrait he accidentally drove a nail through Stalin’s forehead. For this perceived insult to the leader, he was sentenced to the mines in the Urals, but he managed to survive and rejoin the army at the front.

In the meantime, the Germans had forced the Jews of Plonsk into a ghetto. They had systematically murdered about 12,000 Jews from the city and its environs.° After Mann’s discharge from the Red Army, he returned

5 The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Soviet Union, abbreviated USSR, was a federal socialist state in Northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party, with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian SFSR.

6 Geoffrey P. Megargee, The United States Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 26.

from Berlin to Poland, hoping to start a new life and to help rebuild the Jewish community. He went to Plonsk and learned that his entire family had been murdered, as had his wife’s in Ukraine. She was overwhelmed with survivor's guilt for the rest of her life, particularly because she had not taken her baby sister with her to the USSR. Mann went to Lodz and devoted himself to work on behalf of Jewish children who had survived and were now orphans. He headed the department of culture and education of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. There he wrote an anthology of poems, Di shtilkeyt mont [The Silence Demands its Due], the first book published in Yiddish in Poland after the war.

In 1946 Mann attended a meeting of survivors in Warsaw held to commemorate the Ghetto Uprising of 1943, at which the importance of finding the Ringelblum archives was discussed.’ Increasing Communist repression and outbreaks of antisemitic violence culminating in the Kielce pogrom of 1946 drove him to leave Poland.’ He settled in Regensburg, where he continued to be active in the Jewish community. There, in 1947, he co-edited with Yekheskel Keytlmann’ an illustrated Yiddish newspaper, Der nayer moment [The New Moment], named after the Warsaw paper that he had written for before the war, Der moment. They also produced a literary journal, Heftn far literatur, kultur, un kritik [Volumes for Literature, Culture, and Criticism]. Mann contributed to the journal Fun letstn khurbn [From the Last Extermination], whose purpose was to document the Holocaust. Published in Munich by the Central Historical Commission of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the U.S. Zone, it was distributed to all the DP camps and abroad."°

7 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 205.

8 Between 1945 and 1947, an estimated 150,000 Jewish survivors left Poland for the DP camps in Germany. See Laura Jockusch, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 24 (2010), 373-99.

9 Jechezkel Keitelman was one of a cadre of survivors devoted to maintaining Yiddish literature after the Holocaust. Among his works were: Oysterlishe geshikhtn un andere dertseylungn [Strange Stories and Other Tales] (Regensburg: Yidishe zetser, 1947), Oysgehakte velder [Cut Down Forests] (New York/Philadelphia, 1952), and Oyfn veg keyn Uman: un andere dertseylungen [On the Road to Uman: and Other Stories] (New York: Tsiko, 1967).

10 See, for example, Mendl Mann, “Der oyfshtand in tutshiner geto” [The Uprising in the Tuczyn Ghetto], Fun letstn khurbn, 9 (September 1948): pp. 59-66.

Introduction 5

Mann never felt at ease in Germany, and he wrote of his ambivalence about living in the country that had nearly exterminated the Jews." He attempted to go illegally to British Palestine with his wife and son on the steamship Exodus in 1947 alongside 4,500 other Holocaust survivors, but the British sent them back to Hamburg. Mann managed to get to Israel in 1948 and served in the army for eight months. He then lived in the former Arab village of Yazur and continued to write. He wrote intensely and prolifically, primarily at night.

Though some of his work now reflected his life after the war, his devotion to Yiddish continued unabated, and he corresponded with Yiddish writers abroad. He moved to Tel Aviv in 1954, and worked with Avrom Sutzkever on the editorial board of the premier Yiddish literary journal in Israel, Di goldene keyt [The Golden Chain], to which he contributed poems and literary criticism until the end of his life, as well as to a dozen other periodicals. He continued to draw and paint, particularly scenes of nature, as a way to relax. Mann visited the United States and Paris.

Though Mann took pride in the new Jewish state, he grew increasingly bitter at the vilification of Yiddish as the despised language of a weak people without a homeland.” The fact that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion led this campaign was particularly galling to him, in that Ben-Gurion was himself from Plonsk. Mann left Israel in 1961 and settled in Paris, where he edited Undzer vort [Our Word]. When survivors from his hometown published the memorial book Sefer Plonsk ve-ha-Sevivah [The Book of Plonsk and its Surroundings], he was one of its editors, contributing extensive sections in Yiddish. Mann’s son, Zvi Mann, recounts that when his father presented Ben-Gurion with the Sefer Plonsk, Ben-Gurion disparaged the book because Mann had written his essays in “zhargon,” a term denying Yiddish its rightful status as a real language. Mann took the book back and slammed the door.”

11 Michael Brenner, Impressionen jüdischen Lebens in der Oberpfalz nach 1945’, in Die Juden in den Oberpfalz, ed. by Michael Brenner and Renate Hépfinger (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009), p. 241.

12 Tamar Lewinsky, Dangling Roots? Yiddish Language and Culture in the German Diaspora’ in We are Here: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. by Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 308-34.

13 See National Yiddish Book Center, Wexler Oral History Project, interview with Zvi Mann, son of Mendl Mann, June 18, 2014, https://archive.org/details/ ZviMann18Jun2014YiddishBookCenter

Mandl Mann in 1966 by uncknown photographer. Courtesy of Zvi Mann.

Mann exhibited his paintings in Paris in 1967. He collected art, and Marc Chagall became a close friend. When Mann published an anthology of short stories, Der shvartser demb |The Black Oak] in 1969, Chagall provided an aquarelle for the frontispiece. It depicts Mann going back to his hometown and taking notes, with the souls of the murdered Jews floating in the sky."* ae ef

ly MU / hA

Syranpe Tew pres

Marc Chagall, ‘L'auteur Mendel Mann dans son village’(Author Mendel Mann

in his hometown). Aquarelle with Chagall’s handwritten dedication to Mendel

Mann. Reproduced in Mandel Mann’s Der shvartser demb [The Black Oak], Paris:

Undzer kiem, 1970, and at http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr12/tmr12021.htm. Courtesy of Zvi Mann.

14 See “Signed Marc Chagall Aquarelle” by Zvi Mann and David Mazower, in The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language, http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/ tmr12/tmr12021.htm

15 The note reads:

Dear M. Mann, I am sending you a few of the features I promised you. In them I wanted to express—as far as I was able—the fate of the Yiddish writer in his “former” land —

With best wishes

Mark Chagall

Introduction 7

Many of Mann’s works were translated into English, German, Hebrew, French, Danish, Spanish, and Italian. Mendl Mann died in Paris in 1975 at the age of 59 as a result of old war wounds, and his son brought him back to be buried in Israel in Kibbutz Kfar Giladi.

MENDEL MANN’ MENDEL MANN

Vistule

Book covers of French editions of Mann's trilogy: Aux Portes de Moscou (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1960); Sur la Vistule (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962); La Chute de Berlin (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963). Courtesy of Zvi Mann.

Bibliography

Arad, Yitzhak, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War Against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2010).

Brenner, M. and Hopfinger, R., eds, Die Juden in den Oberpfalz (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009).

Jockusch, Laura,’ Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 24 (2010), pp. 373-99.

Kassow, Samuel D., Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Kostyrchenko, Gennady, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin's Russia (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995).

Lewinsky, Tamar, ‘Dangling Roots? Yiddish Language and Culture in the German Diaspora’, in We are Here: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. by Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 308-34.

Mann, Mendl, Mayne zikhroynes fun plonsk [My Memories of Plonsk], in Sefer Plonsk ve-ha-Sevivah [The Book of Plonsk and its Surroundings], ed. by Shlomo Zemach, Mordekhai Halamish, and Mendl Mann (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yotsey Plonsk be-Yisrael, 1963), pp. 570-90.

Mann, Mendl, ‘Der oyfshtand in tutshiner geto’ [The Uprising in the Tuczyn Ghetto], Fun letstn khurbn, 9 (September 1948), pp. 59-66.

Mann, Zvi and David Mazower, ‘Signed Marc Chagall Aquarelle’, The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language, http: //yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr12/ tmr12021.htm

Megargee, Geoffrey P., The United States Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

National Yiddish Book Center, Wexler Oral History Project, ‘Interview with Zvi Mann, son of Mendl Mann’, June 18, 2014, https://archive.org /details/ ZviMann18Jun2014YiddishBookCenter

At the Gates of Moscow

Cover of Bay di toyern fun Moskve | At the Gates of Moscow], New York: Alveltlekhn YidishnKultur-Kongres, 1956.

October 1941. The Germans have occupied Poland and invaded the USSR. Menakhem Isaacovitch, a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis in 1940, is warmly welcomed by the villagers of Tengushay and is now called Mikhail. As the German onslaught threatens Moscow, he is called up by the Red Army, along with local ethnic Russians, Mordvins, Bashkirs, and Tartars. The young artist, twenty-two, longs for his hometown. The destruction of Poland and its Jews, and now the devastation of the USSR, drive him to seek revenge on the Germans.

When the recruits arrive at the reserve camp, Commanding Officer NKVD man Akim Suzayev learns that Menakhem is Jewish and offers insidiously to do him special favors. But Menakhem insists that his only wish is to fight on the front with the men of Tengushay. They are sent by train towards Moscow where the remaining population freezes, starves,

© Maurice Wolfthal CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233.03 and struggles to prepare its defenses. Antisemitism rears its head in the city with the slanders that Jews are draft-dodgers and war profiteers and are living lives of luxury in the eastern republics.

The men of Tengushay are assigned to the 316" Infantry, commanded by a Jewish general, Pliskin. Menakhem meets him just outside Moscow, the first Jew he has seen in a long time. Near a field hospital he meets a wounded Jewish soldier who informs Menakhem that the Germans are exterminating the Jews in Smolensk. Exhaustion and fever land Menakhem in the hospital, where he meets Anna Samuelovna Korina, a Jewish nurse from Moscow. Romance grows between them. Menakhem asks for paper and a pencil to do some drawings, which are admired by some officers. As he leaves the hospital, Anna tells him that she has just earned her medical degree. She asks him to visit her mother in Moscow when he catches up with the 316". The troops are poorly fed and armed, already demoralized by the collectivization of the farms and by Stalinist repression.

Mid-November. When he reaches his unit, news comes that the Germans have broken through Moscow’s outer defenses. The men welcome him warmly, and they push on towards Moscow. As the roar of battle comes closer, Politkommissar NKVD Nikolai Zhillin orders the men to stop the Germans at all costs. To their shock, a line of Siberian troops with machine guns stand right behind them. Zhillin orders them to shoot any infantrymen who desert or retreat.

The German Willy Ropp is taken prisoner in the battle, carrying a letter for Division headquarters. Menakhem, Adrian, and Zakhar are told to take him to Vladikino, but the camp has moved on, along with the field hospital and Anna. Famine and chaos rule in Moscow as civilians evacuate and thousands of recruits keep arriving. Rioting erupts in resentment against the well-stocked shops reserved for Party members. Police and NKVD try to maintain order. Menakhem searches for headquarters and runs into Gen. Pliskin, who orders him to take Ropp to headquarters in the Kaluga underground station. Menakhem repeatedly suppresses the urge to kill the arrogant Nazi.

Anna’s elderly Jewish mother cares for her five grandchildren in an apartment shared with another family, while her sons are at the front and their wives are at work. She has recently been disrespected and insulted, both by Zinin—her building superintendent—and in public by

At the Gates of Moscow 11 strangers in the shops. Rumors abound that the Germans have already won. A pro-German mob carries crosses and swastikas, roars “Death to the Jews,” and sings the Tsarist anthem. Zinin welcomes this Nazi sentiment, which he hopes will soon deliver her apartment into his hands.

Menakhem and his men confront the crowd. Seeing the swastikas, the prisoner Ropp runs towards them, gives the Nazi salute, and shouts “Heil!” Menakhem shoots him dead. A battle ensues. Zinin and others are killed. The men find the headquarters. They are warned not to tell anyone about the Russian Nazis they had met. Politkommissar Zhillin greets them, reads the German letter, and sends the men to await new orders. Menakhem seeks out Gen. Pliskin, who is delighted that Jews are fighting at the front and tells him in Yiddish that his job is to kill German soldiers. The men have a free day until they are reassigned. Menakhem searches for Anna’s house. He sees leaflets that German planes have dropped to incite hatred of the Jews. A foreigner, Menakhem misses his hometown and the company of Jews, but is glad to be alive in Moscow.

Memories haunt him of the Polish countryside, of his father forced to wear the yellow star, and of Tengushay, especially of the village girl, Lioska. Anna’s mother greets him affectionately, first in Russian then in Yiddish. He then finds Anna’s hospital, where she is now operating on wounded soldiers. Their bond is still strong, and she kisses him as he leaves. Menakhem returns to headquarters, finding that the 316" has been sent to the front. Capt. Suzayev again talks to him in innuendoes with phony camaraderie. Col. Petrov reassigns Menakhem to stay at regimental headquarters; his knowledge of German will be useful. He takes tearful leave of his two companions.

Menakhem is assigned to interpret and to interrogate prisoners, and is given instructions how to treat them. The first German questioned is Johann Stimmelmeir. Menakhem asks him if Munich is beautiful, then if Warsaw is. Then the prisoner is driven around to appeal on a loudspeaker to German soldiers to surrender. Menakhem’s close friend Frolitch, a peasant from Tengushay, brings a warm letter from Anna at the hospital. Menakhem begins drawing again.

As the battle rages around Moscow, a tank unit arrives. Two of the officers are Jews who want their names changed on their identification, because they fear that their comrades will betray them if they’re captured by the Germans. But Menakhem refuses to change his name. Zhillin sees Menakhem’s drawings at headquarters and thinks they may be useful to the war effort.

Two reconnaissance men—one of them Jewish—are found guilty of failing to have cleared a minefield, leading to the death of soldiers. Both are shot. Menakhem overhears Suzayev and others blaming the Jew. He then asks to go on a dangerous patrol in Navilkovo. Suzayev scowls, but Petrov agrees. The mission goes well, but Menakhem returns wounded; Anna treats him. Zhillin shows them newspapers with Menakhem’s drawings.

Lt. Col. Tcherkass, a Jew, leads the battalion. When the fighting ends, it turns out that the two men had indeed cleared the minefield, but the Germans had mined it again. Suzayev had wrongly blamed and executed the men. Menakhem returns to the command post. Anna has his drawings in her room. Soviet bombers and tanks are routing the Germans, with partisans playing a vital role. Menakhem heals and returns to the front. On one mission, Petrov reflects on the situation of Jews as a minority. Petrov cites their heroism among the troops; Menakhem recalls antisemitism.

Tcherkass is wounded in a fierce counterattack. Petrov sympathizes with his zeal to kill Germans, but says it is reckless. During a lull in the fighting in Zabori, Menakhem declares tremendous pride in defending Moscow and his wish to remain in Russia after the war. The memory returns of his parents forced to wear the yellow star. Called on to interpret, he goes into shock when he learns of the massacre of 25,000 Jews in Minsk. Petrov is sympathetic; Suzayev is not.

Menakhem again interrogates German prisoners, and one of them, Hugo Rudoss, admits having been in the Jewish ghetto in Minsk. Menakhem flies into a rage, smashes his revolver twice into Rudoss’ face, and then orders the guards to take him away. When Suzayev finds out, first he mocks Menakhem for not having killed Rudoss, then he rants incoherently against the Jews. Tcherkass is brought in mortally wounded when he attacks a tank unarmed.

Anna’s mother’s life in Moscow is a struggle, made even more unpleasant by the Tartar and Ukrainian daughters-in-law whom she has taken in. But she remembers Menakhem’s visit affectionately and sees his war drawings everywhere in newspapers and magazines. In

At the Gates of Moscow 13 the hospital, Politkommissar Zhillin praises the drawings’ usefulness to the war effort, but belittles Menakhem’s ability to portray Russian faces because, Zhillin says, he’s not a Russian himself. Anna bristles at this slighting of Jews.

Then she is summoned to treat Tcherkass in a dugout. But it’s too late; Frolitch is overcome with grief. After Tcherkass is buried in the frozen ground, Politkommissar Zhillin makes a speech in which he belittles Tcherkass’s heroism, calling his action suicidal and reprehensible. Menakhem leaves in disgust. As the winter freeze arrives, Soviet morale soars while that of the Germans plummets. Division Headquarters snatches up Menakhem’s drawings as soon as he makes them, and Frolitch begs him to make one of himself, which he does gladly.

At Suzayev’s instigation, the NKVD Special Section charges Menakhem with dereliction of duty for having sent the prisoner Hugo Rudoss away without completing his interrogation and without making sure that he reached detention. In the midst of the hearing, Col. Galinkov suddenly asks Menakhem why he didn’t join the Polish army that was forming in the USSR, and whether he plans to return to Poland after the war. Menakhem explains that he was not able to complete the interrogation because of his fury that Rudoss had massacred Jews in Minsk. Galinkov sympathizes, but rebukes Menakhem for breach of military discipline and suggests that the Germans may even have secret agents among the Jews. But he drops the charges.

Menakhem is promoted to lieutenant for a series of military actions and is also given a medal; Frolitch celebrates. Anna comes to the dugout to congratulate him. Their affection is great, and she kisses him as she leaves. Menakhem reads the morning announcements from Moscow to the men and goes out on patrols at night. The soldiers in one dugout insult him with antisemitic taunts, and he sends one of them sprawling.

The Vladikino dugouts expand into a military base with a hospital and nurses. Menakhem sees official reports of the German slaughter of Jews in Minsk, Grodno, Vilna, and Rovno—reports that merely call the victims “Soviet citizens.” As the Red Army advances, troops who were from west of the front line are deserting. Paranoia in Moscow leads to the pre-emptive deportation of such troops to the mines in the Urals. Menakhem receives a warm letter from Lioska in Tengushay and writes back that he is deeply disturbed by reports of the massacres.

Another German prisoner is brought in for interrogation. He is insolent and says, “I do not talk to Jews.” Enraged, Menakhem sends him away on the pretext that he had simply refused to talk. Col. Petrov rebukes Menakhem for not doing his job, thereby possibly endangering the troops. The next day his weapons are taken from him, and he is led under guard to Division headquarters. Col. Galinkov makes disparaging remarks about Jews, accuses him of treason, and insinuates that Menakhem did not join the Polish Army in the USSR for some sinister reason. He then orders a court-martial.

Menakhem hears more antisemitic slurs while awaiting trial. He is interrogated at length, then charged with breach of military discipline. Because of his earlier infraction in the case of Hugo Rudoss—but in light of his heroism in battle—his sentence is to be demoted in rank and to be sent to a disciplinary unit. Capt. Suzayev, called as a witness, says Menakhem is unreliable because of his “foreign” ways and his hypersensitivity as a Jew. Politkommissar Zhillin echoes these views, adding that Menakhem favors the company of Jewish soldiers over that of ethnic Russians, and that his drawings indicate a pro-Jewish bias that plays into Nazi propaganda. Col. Petrov merely agrees that Menakhem committed a serious breach of discipline. Frolitch testifies that Menakhem was well-liked by the villagers of Tengushay. The defense argues that Menakhem has the same right to hate the Germans as ethnic Russians do; that the German prisoner’s refusal to answer Menakhem had been a provocation; that a court-martial was unnecessary, and normal discipline would have sufficed. Menakhem requests that he be sent to fight at the front line. Instead, he is demoted and ordered to report to the Special Unit in Gorki.

He wanders around Moscow while waiting for the train, comes across Kalmuk soldiers, Tartars, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and sees his war posters on display. He tries to find Anna without any luck. On the train, Nina, a railway guard, invites him to her compartment, offers him a drink, and tries to seduce him without success. Furious, she gets the police to haul him to the Barashovo police station. The train to Gorki leaves while they peruse his papers. A sled takes him past the Temlag labor camps through Alexandrovo and Krasni-Yar towards Tengushay. He is warmly embraced by the villagers Maria Periferovna and Ivan Ivanovitch, with whom he had lived before the Germans invaded. Lioska runs to their

At the Gates of Moscow 15 cottage to greet him. He is moved to tears by the affection she shows him. The pain from his battle wound surges up. The next day he visits Lioska and her mother at home and spends the night with her. They go to the train in the morning, accompanied by Maria and Ivan.

Chaos reigns at the Gorki headquarters. The food is atrocious. The prisoners are Caucasians, Tartars, Chechens... every Soviet nationality except ethnic Russians. Menakhem says there’s been some mistake, but to no avail. His deportation to the Urals fits into the NKVD plan to keep suspect soldiers far from the front line. The men in the train from Gorki freeze and starve to death. With the help of others, Menakhem barely survives until they reach the mines. The German Army is bogged down as it retreats from Moscow under constant harassment. Dr. Anna Samuelovna Korina is sent by plane to work with partisans near Smolensk.