Foreign News: FROM STALINGRAD'S RUINS

(2 of 3)

We Are in the City. Near the river the streets are still black, except when bombs land. In that moment the outline of the buildings is silhouetted against the sky and reminds one of a fortress. Indeed Stalingrad is a fortress. Underground we enter the staff headquarters. Telegraph girls, their faces pale from sleepless nights and explosion dust, tap out dots and dashes. Communication officers pass with quick steps. In their dispatches they do not write about the hills, valleys or heights, but about suburbs, streets and sometimes even single buildings. I try to light a match, but it is quickly smothered. Here underground there is not enough oxygen.

Now we are riding through the streets in a dilapidated gazik [old make, small Soviet car] to a command point. We pass a gate through which roll squeaking wagons loaded with fresh bread. Evidently the building housed a bakery. The city is still alive.

At dawn we arrive at a half-finished building [all nonmilitary construction in Russia stopped at war's outbreak] in which a brigade staff is headquartered. The street bordering it on the north along the German lines has been smashed by mortar fire. At one intersection, where I remember the policeman who used to direct traffic, a tommy-gunner now stands, showing the passing soldiers a dip in the road invisible to the Germans.

Midmorning finds us seated in the plush chairs of an observer's post in a fifth-floor apartment that used to be occupied by an engineer and his family. On the floor stand pots removed from the window ledge, and in their place is a range finder used for long-distance observation. In a village several kilometers away we see German mobile units on the move. An instant later several of them touch off our well-hidden mines and blow up. The angered Germans reply with a mortar barrage directed at nothing in particular.

Then I walk over to a table in the middle of the room. In the center is a vase of wilted flowers and near it are schoolbooks and a pad of paper bearing a child's handwriting. He had just finished a composition about pioneers. In this apartment, as in thousands of others, life stopped for civilians on a word.

Toward evening we arrive at a glass factory. The entrance is heavily guarded. Severely examining our documents, they remind me of Red Guards in 1918. Inside we see the director, firemen, watchmen and members of the factory workers' guard. Though machine tools have been evacuated, the workshop remains; guarding it are elderly men who have given their best years to the factory.

The director tells us how several days ago German tanks broke through defenses in one area and rushed toward the factory. When the news reached the factory the men decided that somehow they had to close the breakthrough. The director ordered the workshop manager to finish repairs on several tanks. Meanwhile other workers sat in the tanks and studied their operation. Then & there they formed themselves into tank crews.

Ten or 15 minutes later the repairs were finished and the tanks crawled out of the factory gates. They met the Germans on a stone bridge which was the only means by which the Nazis could advance over a deep gully. The Soviet tanks were followed by the workers' infantry [called Opolchenie]. Furious battle raged all day around the bridge and in the valley.