Memorials - Volgograd

                                                       

                                            Mamayev Mount - "Rodina" - Volgograd
                                       

                                                  August 23, 1942
      Methodically I stepped along the water line trying to keep my boots dry, while stooped over looking for something, anything, that might be metallic and "connect" me with this place and history. Connections must be found - they cannot be purchased in a gift shop. The Volga was calm, dappled by sunlight and flowing with power south. A hundred yards off shore a reddish hydrofoil
sliced a course north.
     Ahead was a quarter mile of uninterrupted shoreline. To the right the river stretched away a mile or so to the eastern shore. On my left the bank rose up and away over two hundred feet. On top was a squat, granite platform supporting the turret of a Russian T-34 tank. A four inch hole in the turret created by an armor piercing projectile killed the crew. The tank's 76.2 mm gun slightly elevated, was pointed west and even in death seemed to be acquiring targets. A series of similar tank memorials are spaced along the west shore of the Volga and indicate the "high water mark" of the German assault on Stalingrad. For five months, one week and three days - August 1942 to February 1943 - the battle raged. The city was reduced to gutted structures and rubble. Amid winter temperatures of -20 to -30 degrees (F) surviving inhabitants had neither heat nor light. One million were killed and another million were wounded or captured in the most horrific combat since Verdun - 1916. The German 6th Army - 350,000 men - was encircled and destroyed. The Wehrmacht would never recover from the losses incurred at Stalingrad and thereafter would be fighting a "defensive" war. In the 1960's, surviving German POWs - a total of 10,000 men - were repatriated to Germany from the Soviet Gulag. In the post Stalin USSR the city's name reverted back to Volgograd. *
     I continued my walk seeking a connection to this history. Once as a callow faced lad, I was stumbling along near a rampart at Fort William Henry in Lake George, NY. One of my large shoes kicked up what first appeared to be a stone but upon examination was a 50 caliber "mini ball". I was now "connected" with life two hundred years earlier, with men and women who used muzzle loading weapons, lived, loved and died around the fort. The mini ball remains a prized possession.
     Now along the shore of the Volga I reached down and picked up a metal fragment, two inches long and a half inch wide. One side was encrusted with tiny stones and sediment. The other smooth and slightly rounded like a piece of a small barrel or shell casing. In the 1980's it was still possible to walk the streets of Volgograd and see the facade of an occasional building pockmarked by small arms fire and shrapnel. But maybe this fragment had absolutely nothing to do with the battle on the Volga.
     The sun was dipping and the T-34 relic above was beginning to cast a shadow down towards the river. I put the fragment in my pocket and began the walk back to city center. On the way I passed a department store with a bronze plaque affixed to the wall next to a bright window display. It stated that Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus had used this building as the Headquarters of the 6th Army - from here its surrender order had been issued.
     *See - Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov The Battle for Stalingrad NY: Holt Rinehart and Winston; 1964.
       Also - Wikipedia; Wikimedia for photos and Robswebster.com.

Libraries With Posthumous Voices

                                         

                                             Harvard - Widener Library
                                       

                                             Utica N.Y. Public Library
     The Argentine, Canadian scholar Alberto Manguel has a personal library of 30,000 volumes. Manguel ". . . conveys a sense that posthumous voices and literary characters converse among themselves under his roof." He is also the author of Library at Night. *
     From a sitting position on the floor I reached up, seized and pulled a book toward me - half a dozen others fell with it. A memory from the Dunham Public Library in Whitesboro, N.Y. Regularly my parents took my brother and I there on Saturdays to refresh our reading supply. "Remember" my mother would harp, "never go any where without a book."
     My grammar school had no library and the high school had a large room with a few books - The Lives of the Saints - many trophies and two office desks. I was not a quality or even an adequate student. In the third year of high school my mother contemplated sending me off to barber school. Toward the end of my sophomore year in college I found myself in the Utica Public Library, a neo Greco-Roman construct from 1903. My reason for being there is lost but on the second floor rear were stacks. There I happened upon Samuel Eliot Morison's History of US Naval Operations World War II, or at least 12 of the 15 volumes. I read them all with pleasure sitting in those stacks over the next few months. Then following a surprising surge in study habits I received a BA from Utica College of Syracuse University.
     1959 - I arrived at New York University. The NYU library was quite user friendly for graduate students. But the New York City Public Library was overwhelming - its immense card catalog required concentration and saintly patience - on every subject there was always more ! Home eventually became the sub-basement of the NYU Law School Library. There below the street, in a silent, sealed, artificial environment I reviewed the transcripts of the World War II war crimes Tribunals, IMT Far East and Nuremberg. My happy view of the value of the species homo sapien was scorched and human activities since then have reinforced the pessimism.
     I would utilize the Hartwick College Library for 34 years. Because of earlier efforts by Professors Boris Schzockov and Dan Allen, Hartwick had a fine, modest, yet intense Russian/Slavic collection. (It had much Russian Orthodox material but then the splendid RO Holy Trinity Monastery was just 25 miles north in Jordanville, N.Y.) I tried to enhance the collection and remember being quite pleased in the early 1990s, that as the USSR imploded Russian students were already studying at Hartwick. I could also go into the Library and right next to the New York Times and Times of London, peruse the latest copy of Izvestia. This was a time of hope.
     During this period I spent a summer at Harvard researching Soviet nationalities. My first visit to Widener Library - I followed a bright line on the floor through different rooms, floors until I arrived at the "Slavic Section". It was quiet, cool, with the aroma of leather and musty paper. I wandered among the stacks - every volume touched required reading. Few things in life satisfy anticipation. Widener Library exceeded mine - and I had yet to visit the Russian Research Center.
      2016 - It is the future - now and then I visit the Fruitville Branch of the Sarasota Public Library. It is a bright, spacious, multi-purpose place (meetings, lectures, books for sale) with much technology as well as stacks with CDs and books. It has a children's section where youngsters can sit on the floor and pull down books.
     *See Robert Harrison, NYRB  October 22, 2015.