A Man Without Breath

Victor Lungwitz was a waiter from the Adlon Hotel. He waited tables because he couldn’t make a living at being an artist. He joined an SS Panzer Division in 1939 and was sent to Belarus as part of Operation Barbarossa. When he was off-duty he liked drawing churches, of which Minsk has almost as many as Smolensk. One day he went to look at some old church on the edge of town. It was called the Red Church, which ought to have put him on his guard. They found Victor’s drawing but no sign of him. A few days later a mutilated body was found in some marshland nearby. It took them a while to identify poor Victor: the partisans had cut almost everything off his head – his nose, his lips, his eyelids, his ears – before cutting off his genitals and letting him bleed to death.

When you fight a war with a Baedeker you don’t always know what you’re going to see.

In the colonel’s draughty little Tatra I drove east along the Vitebsk highway with Smolensk in front of me and the Dnieper River on my right. For most of the way the road ran between two railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main station; it was a huge icing-cake of a place with four square corner towers and an enormous archway entrance. Like a lot of buildings in Smolensk it was painted green, and either green meant something significant in that part of Russia or green was the only colour of paint they’d had in the stores the last time anyone had thought of carrying out some building maintenance. Russia being Russia, I tended to subscribe to the second explanation.

A little further down the road, I stopped to consult my map and then turned south down Bruckenstrasse, which sounded promising given that I needed to find a bridge to cross the river.

According to the map the west and east bridges were destroyed, and that left three in the middle or, if you were a Russian, a log-raft passenger ferry that resembled something from my time at a boys’ summer camp on Rugen Island. On the north bank of the river I slowed the car as I came in sight of the local Kremlin – a fortress enclosing the centre of the ancient city of Smolensk. On a hilltop, behind the castellated red-brick walls built by Boris Godunov, stood the city’s cathedral with its distinctive pepper-pot domes and tall white walls, and looking to my eyes as ugly as an outsized wood-burning stove. At least now I could say that I’d seen it.

I showed my papers to the military police guards at the checkpoint on the Peter and Paul bridge, asked for directions to the German Kommandatura, and was directed to go south on Hauptstrasse.

‘You can’t miss it, sir,’ said the bridge sentry. ‘It’s opposite Sparkassenstrasse. If you find yourself on Magazinstrasse, you’ll have gone too far.’

‘Are all Smolensk street names in German?’

‘Of course. Makes it a lot easier to get around, don’t you think?’

‘It certainly does if you’re German,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that what it’s all about, sir?’ The sentry grinned. ‘We’re trying to make it as much like home as possible.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

I drove on, and in the shadow of the Kremlin wall on my right, I went along Hauptstrasse until I saw what was obviously the Kommandatura – a grey stone building with a pillared portico and several Nazi Party flags. An extensive series of German street pointers had been erected in the square in front of this building – many of them on a broken Soviet tank – but the general effect was not one of clarity of direction but confusion; a sentry stood in the middle of the pointers to help Germans make sense of their own signs. The red of the flags on the Kommandatura added an almost welcome splash of colour in a city that was as grey and green as a dead elephant. Underneath the flags a dozen or so soldiers were watching a boy, riding bareback on a spavined white horse, perform a few tricks with the nag. From time to time they would toss a few coins onto the cobbled street, where they were collected by an old man wearing a white cap and jacket who might have been some relation to the boy or possibly the horse. Seeing me, two of the soldiers came over as I pulled up and saluted.

‘Can’t leave it there, sir,’ said one. ‘Security. Best leave it around the corner on Kreuzstrasse, next to the local cinema. Always plenty of room there.’