M Mendl Mann The Fall of Berlin Mendl Mann TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MAURICE WOLFTHAL ENDL The Fall of Berlin M Mendl Mann’s autobiographical novel The Fall of Berlin tells the painful yet compelling story of life as a Jewish soldier in the Red Army. Menakhem ANN Isaacovich is a Polish Jew who, after fleeing the Nazis, finds refuge in the USSR. The novel follows Menakhem as he fights on the front line in Stalin’s Red Army T against Hitler and the Nazis who are destroying his homeland of Poland and HE exterminating the Jews. F ALL Menakhem encounters anti-Semitism on various occasions throughout the O narrative, and struggles to comprehend how seemingly normal people could F B hold such appalling views. As Mann writes, it is odd that “vicious, insidious anti- ERLIN Semitism could reside in a person with elevated feelings, an average person, a decent person”. The Fall of Berlin is both a striking and timely look at the struggle that many Jewish soldiers faced. Skillfully translated from Yiddish and introduced by Maurice Wolfthal, this is an affecting and unique book which eloquently explores a variety of themes – anti-Semitism, patriotism, Stalinism and life as a Jewish soldier in the Second World War. The Fall of Berlin is essential reading for anyone interested in the Yiddish language, Jewish history, and the history of World War II. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers. com Cover image: Marc Chagall, L’auteur Mendel Mann dans son village (1969), reproduced at http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr12/tmr12021.htm. Courtesy of Zvi Mann. Cover Design by Anna Gatti. book TRANSLATED AND WITH AN eebook and OA editions also available INTRODUCTION BY MAURICE WOLFTHAL OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com English translation, Introduction and Notes © 2020 Maurice Wolfthal This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Mendl Mann, The Fall of Berlin. Translated and with an Introduction by Maurice Wolfthal. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https:// www.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at, https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 9781800640771 ISBN Hardback: 9781800640788 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800640795 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800640801 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800640818 ISBN XML: 9781800640825 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0233 Cover image: Marc Chagall, L‘auteur Mendel Mann dans son village (1969), reproduced at http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr12/tmr12021.htm. Courtesy of Zvi Mann. Cover design: Anna Gatti. The Fall of Berlin Cover of Dos faln un Berlin [The Fall of Berlin], New York: Tsiko Bikher Farlag, 1960. Chapter One Towards the end of January 1945, two personal events deeply shook Dr. Anna Samuelovna Korina of the Red Army’s military hospital in the Praga district of Warsaw on the Vistula. They were sudden and so unexpected that they unnerved her, making her afraid to perform even the simplest operation. Under the pretext of fatigue, she entrusted the fate of the wounded soldiers to Dr. Leszniak. The snowstorm that had been raging for three days seemed to be pounding in her temples. She stood for hours on the top floor of the building, staring, immobile, through the little window at the snow-clad world. Nearby a rusty brown sheet of metal broke off from a shattered roof, ripping clouds of snow in a fierce blast of wind. She could not tear herself Translation © Maurice Wolfthal CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233.01 26 The Fall of Berlin away from the window. She stubbornly refused to leave the desolate landscape. The clouds of snow that blasted against the windowpane swirled back into her memory that terrible experience with Zhillin in the swampy woods of the partisans, in the village hut, on the night they had lost the battle. Anna sensed the wind and felt the cold, and she felt better. The very whiteness, its wildness, the sharp snow cooled the fever in her eyes. She turned as white and translucent as the clouds of snow. No, the fatigue was not an excuse. She could overcome that. But she was terrified of her hands, of the trembling in her fingers. She held them up towards the gloomy evening light in the window and leaned her large, round forehead on the half-frozen pane. Now she again felt the fever pounding from her eyes. Anna’s agitation had begun as soon as she learned that Nikolai Zhillin was in Praga, and that he could show up at any moment. Would Zhillin dare to appear at her door? How would she react to his smile, the smile of NKVD Col. Zhillin, who had been awarded the Order of Suvarov First Class, and who had been honored “for distinction in the occupation of Praga and operations on the Vistula.” She ran over to the little white night table and threw down the newspaper. When she closed her eyes she once again smelled his sweaty, liquor stench all over her. She again felt his steel pistol against her with his weight. Once again it was if she were sinking down into a field of nettles. She again heard Zhillin’s orderly Zadurkin outside, laughing his snide little laugh. Now Zhillin had resurfaced on the banks of the Vistula. He had reached her through fire, through blood, swamps, nights of debauchery, and snowstorms. The next day, after a sleepless night, they brought Menakhem to the hospital in Praga. Anna was in the midst of night rounds in the surgical ward. Here was the bed of Isaac Farber lying next to Zakharchenko, and then, suddenly, a familiar face: thick eyebrows, a chiseled jaw, finely formed lips, and two small creases between his brows. She looked at the dark eyelashes, and an ancient memory surged from a time years ago, outside Moscow. Her gaze grew blurry and she couldn’t see anything. Was it from tears or from the clouds of dry snow? She brushed his jaw with her fingers shaking, as lightly as if it were in a dream. It felt good to run her long fingers over the face of the young Chapter One 27 injured soldier, a face battered by snow gusts, pounded by storms, yet still so gentle. The wounded man narrowly opened his eyes, moist, black, deep. Anna recognized him. She bent over and read the chart near his bed, and her lips whispered, “Menakhem, Mikhail.” The two creases between his eyebrows smoothed out, and a real smile radiated from the corners of his mouth. He sank into a soft white haze, luminous, and silvery, and his hands felt the warmth of a sunny meadow. Menakhem’s sudden appearance made the image of Zhillin’s face all the more repugnant to her. The few sentences in Pravda brought to life the pale-hued Russian from deepest Russia, the Politkommissar with the colorless, watery eyes that turned from clear to cloudy. His thin, sharp lips played with words insolently, words with the power to reduce to dust anyone he came into contact with. But Zhillin was not hated. More than once he had shown courage, even bravery. He was like a fox which, with its fur ablaze, can run through wheat fields, burning them down without being harmed himself. Instead of walking behind a traditional plow or driving a swing plow over the fields back home, he had been uprooted from his native village and dragged off to the barracks in a Moscow suburb, where he was trained to be in the Special Section, a Politkommissar in the Red Army. Mistrust, suspicion, and hatred were instilled in him. They riled up his latent peasant slyness and cultivated it with scientific methods. They twisted around every word that was uttered by suspects and transformed them into acts. Their own words were like sweet, enticing seeds for birds that have been poisoned. Zhillin’s instructors were half- baked Russian intellectuals, “professors” from the Rabfacs,1 experts in Leninism, smooth Party theoreticians, and dull journalists who were tired of endlessly writing the same editorials. By the time war broke out with the Germans, Nikolai Feodorovich was already a full Politkommissar attached to a military unit. He was well versed in the sayings of the “Father of the Nations”2 and the reports 1 Workers’ Faculty: schools started in 1919, to prepare workers for university. 2 In the 1930s, Stalin was routinely honored with hyperbolic titles, among them, The Standard-bearer of Peace, The Great Helmsman of the Revolution, and The Leader of the International Proletariat.