The Undesirables (Sample Chapter)

Chapter 1: The Correspondent

Now there were no Russian planes left, and no anti-aircraft guns still operational in the ruins of the city. So long as German planes remained west of the Volga, they had nothing to fear.

Jillian was beginning to have trouble breathing. It wasn't because of the smoke; it was because of the smell. Burning oil and industrial waste enveloped the city in noxious fumes. Jillian noticed that the few Russian soldiers who had made it aboard with her were reaching into their combat gear and pulling out gas masks. Jillian desperately wished she had similar equipment.

The Stalingrad docks approached. Just like the dock on the other side of the river, this one was crowded with people. But they were a different kind of people.

Whereas on the eastern side of the river soldiers were reluctant to climb onto the boat, here people were desperate to get aboard.

As the ferry approached Jillian began to pick out individual faces in the crowd pushing to the edge of the dock. The sight made her stop feeling sorry for herself. Women and old men reached out to the approaching ferry, beseeching it with wales of sorrow to take a child or baby out of Stalingrad and to the relative safety of the opposite shore.

These refugees had no gas masks, either. Some had scarves, dampened with river water, tied around their faces, but most had nothing but the clothes on their backs. All their worldly possessions had been burned by the German firebombing.

They couldn't even be properly called refugees, because they weren't allowed to leave the city – nobody was. "Not one step back," Josef Stalin had famously declared, and that didn't just apply to soldiers.

Officially, Stalin didn't want the civilians to leave the city because he believed Red Army soldiers would fight harder if they could see who they were defending. They'd be less likely to retreat if they knew that would leave women and children in the hands of the attacking Germans.

But Jillian suspected that was a lie.

Less than a year ago Jillian had been on the Northern front, just outside the besieged and starving city of Leningrad. She'd never been inside the city, but she had been given the privilege of interviewing many of the refugees that managed to escape the German encirclement.

The stories she heard were horrifying – stories of death, starvation, even cannibalism. Most of what she heard she couldn't print, not at first, anyway. Stepan wouldn't let her. The Soviet censors feared that news of starving citizens would degrade morale when it was desperately needed.

But then something unexpected happened. A famous Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, wrote a symphony dedicated to the men and women dying in Leningrad. The symphony was a sensation, and it didn't lower morale, it boosted it.

When Russians understood the evil intention of the German starvation policy – to kill Russian Slavs in order to leave the land vacant for German farmers – they had something concrete to fight for. They were no longer just defending a dubious Communist government; they were now fighting for the very survival of their loved ones.

What's more, the plight of Leningrad alerted both the United States and Great Britain to the sufferings of Russia. The public in those countries began to sympathize with far off Russia, and this shift in opinion allowed their governments to spend more money and resources on lend-lease efforts. Russia received a boon in essential military equipment like Studebaker trucks and canned spam rations.

Stalin learned his lesson. Suffering civilians made good propaganda. It made the Russians sympathetic and it made the Germans look like brutes.

Stalin wasn't preventing Stalingrad's citizenry from leaving because he thought the soldiers would fight harder to defend them. He was doing it in order to put those citizens directly in harm's way. He wanted Stalingrad's civilian population to suffer. He wanted German soldiers to kill, starve and brutalize women and children.