MAIN MENU   SOLDIERS AT WAR   DOCUMENTS   BATTLES   TANKS   ARTILLERY

Hello dear brother!

Now we're very far. Somewhere in the Danzig corridor. Everything's alien here. and houses, with high Gothic roofs, and trees, some low and branchy, some tall with branches growing upwards, and streets paved with small tiles, straight and smooth with brick sidewalks at the edges, and the people - Poles - with whom, or rather, who, are not especially disposed to talking with us, and even the air is a somehow damp, foggy Baltic air. How many ruined cities there are. We drove through some completely destroyed towns, from which only ruins remained, or in the best case, houses, crooked and damaged, with traces of combat, with mess in the rooms, with books strewn around, and flower pots, and glassware, cloths, furniture - everything. In one such town we drank our fill of beer in a brewery. There aren't any civilians, or very little of them. Sometimes we happen upon completely undamaged towns, in one of these we are now located. Gestapo officers lived here in several buildings. If only you saw these rich apartments, clean, bright, with all conveniences. There are furnishings still left in the rooms, even grub, many books of various kinds. Lots of little volumes of Hitler's Mein Kampf, it would be interesting to read it, but I don't understand German too well. Various illustrated magazines, with pictures of Hitler in all views, poses, and positions, a lot of different literature, which I think I could read with pleasure.

We eat well. In the basements of these houses there is a multitude of vegetables, yesterday one soldier brought in a cow, and anyway, we have the right, or rather, are supposed to be supplied from the local resources, which is what we're doing. I am still not receiving letters from you or Mom. How is it with the thing I asked you about, and life in general? What's new in Moscow? Yu.K. 7.2.45 (Feb 7, 1945)

Main