While we were stationed at Losnizy, we had a curious experience with some Russian prisoners.
One day, we had some of these prisoners build a bunker for our platoon leader, the much-disliked German Untersturmführer Dambæk.
When they had finished digging the bunker, they were given food: bread, fat, and canned provisions, as well as a couple of cigarettes each.
Afterwards, they lit a fire and placed a pot over it, which they filled with meat from a dead calf.
It had been lying some distance away and was so rotten that it could be smelled from far off and was full of maggots and insects.
When this delicacy had finished cooking, they sat in a circle around the pot and ate with good appetite, all the while talking, laughing, and appearing to have a very pleasant time.
When the meal was over, they removed the tobacco from the cigarettes and rolled it into newspaper, and then they smoked it.
In this way, we gained what we considered a very revealing impression of the highly publicized civilization of the new Russia.
The bunker they built was poor, and rain continued to leak onto our much-disliked platoon leader, and we enjoyed that.
While we were stationed at Losnizy, we had a curious experience with some Russian prisoners.
One day, we had some of these prisoners build a bunker for our platoon leader, the much-disliked German Untersturmführer Dambæk.
When they had finished digging the bunker, they were given food: bread, fat, and canned provisions, as well as a couple of cigarettes each.
Afterwards, they lit a fire and placed a pot over it, which they filled with meat from a dead calf.
It had been lying some distance away and was so rotten that it could be smelled from far off and was full of maggots and insects.
When this delicacy had finished cooking, they sat in a circle around the pot and ate with good appetite, all the while talking, laughing, and appearing to have a very pleasant time.
When the meal was over, they removed the tobacco from the cigarettes and rolled it into newspaper, and then they smoked it.
In this way, we gained what we considered a very revealing impression of the highly publicized civilization of the new Russia.
The bunker they built was poor, and rain continued to leak onto our much-disliked platoon leader, and we enjoyed that.
There in the village, I experienced a sauna (a kind of Russian steam bath) for the first time.
It was a small, freestanding wooden hut.
We undressed in a shed next to it and then entered the hut, where there was an intense heat, so great that one could hardly breathe.
This heat was created by lighting a fire beneath a large pile of boulders in one corner of the building until they became red-hot.
Afterwards, water was occasionally splashed onto them, producing an unbearably hot steam.
But how it cleansed one’s sweaty and dirty body. One perspired until water streamed from every part of the body, and after remaining there for about half an hour and then rinsing with cold water, one felt cleaner than ever before and wonderfully refreshed.
It was a very simple and inexpensive, yet practical and effective arrangement.
In Losnizy, we came into contact quite often with the Russian inhabitants, but there were not many of them, and for the most part they were only women, children, and old men.
They lived in the greatest poverty in miserable huts, but they were apparently accustomed to no better, for they were always cheerful and content.
They all had lice, of course, every one of them, just like all the other Russians I had encountered.
They lived entirely on German provisions, which they earned through laundry work and similar tasks.
They were all very friendly and pleasant to deal with and quite clearly had nothing against us, though they were not always entirely honest.
They told us that there had originally been a reasonable degree of prosperity in the village, and that the houses had been solidly and, considering the circumstances, rather expensively built.
However, they had not been maintained, because during the last twenty years (while Stalin had been in power) there had never been anything left over for such things.
During that period, conditions had steadily deteriorated, and the village had become poorer and poorer.
There was no doubt that this was true, as there was ample evidence to support it.
In this village, we saw little of the war apart from the air battles that took place over the front.
But every day armoured vehicles, ambulances, and fresh troops rolled through the village on their way to the front lines.
One gained a small insight into the enormous quantities of matériel, vehicles, and fuel that the front consumed, and into the fine organization required to keep this unimaginably vast apparatus running and functioning with precision down to the smallest detail.
After about ten days in the village, the first rumours began to circulate that we were about to test our strength in the front lines themselves—namely in the Main Line of Resistance, the outermost positions before “No Man’s Land.”
(From this point onward, I shall refer to it as H.K.L., the designation we always used at the front.)