Monday 23 September 2013

ENEMIES, PEOPLE

In 1941, mother took me back to Moscow. There I saw our enemies for the first  time. If I remember right, nearly twenty thousand German prisoner of war were to be taken in a single column through the streets of Moscow.

                There were lots of people on the streets, looking on from behind a line of Russian soldiers and policemen. There were mostly women – Russian women, hands hardened by work, thin shoulders bent under the load of the war. Everyone of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans.

                They looked with hate-filled eyes in the direction from which the Germans were to appear.

                At last we saw them.

                The general walked in front, cold, tall, proud – they looked as if they had won the war, not lost it. They looked as if they believed themselves to be much better people than the Russians or anybody else in the world.

                Looking at them, the women slowly grew angrier.

                Then they saw the German soldiers – thin, unshaven wearing dirty, blood-stained bandages, hobbing on crutches or with their hands on the shoulders of their friends. The soldiers walked with their heads down. It was a pitiable sight.

                The street became very quiet – the only sound was that made by the soldiers’ shoes, and the thump-thump of their crutches.

                Then I saw an old woman push herself forward touch a policeman’s shoulder, saying, “Let me through.” There must have been something about her that made him step aside.

                She went to the line of soldiers and took out from here coat something tied up in a coloured cloth. It was a piece of bread. She pushed it into the pocket of a soldier who was so tired that he was almost falling as he walked. And now, suddenly from everyside, women were running towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had.

                The soldiers were no longer enemies.


                They were people.

***
GATHERED FROM MY OLD TEXT BOOK
                

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