From the diary of Yevgeny Yevtushenko (born 1932), taken to Moscow when he was ten years old to witness captured German soldiers marched through Red Square:
In ’44 my mother took me back to Moscow. There I saw the enemy for the first time. If my memory is right, nearly 20,000 German prisoners of war were to be marched in a single column through the streets of Moscow.
The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police.
The crowd was made up mostly of women—Russian women, with hands chapped and roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and thin hunched shoulders which had borne half the burden of the war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans.
Full of hatred, the women gazed in the direction from which the column of prisoners was about to appear.
At last we saw it.
The Nazi generals were marching at the head, their massive chins stuck arrogantly out, the corners of their lips scornfully turned down. Their whole demeanour was meant to show their superiority over their plebeian conquerors.
“The bastards stink of perfume,” a woman in the crowd spat with hatred.
The woman’s work-worn hands were clenched into fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.
Then suddenly something happened to these women. The street became dead silent—the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.
Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman’s shoulder, saying: “Let me through.” There must have been something about her that made him step aside.
She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a coloured handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now suddenly from every side women were running towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had.
The soldiers were no longer enemies.
They were people.
They saw the simple German soldiers, thin, unshaven, covered with dirty bloodstained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades. And the soldiers walked with their heads down.
The street became dead silent—the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.
The soldiers were no longer enemies.
They were people.
—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, (born 1932). A Precocious Autobiography.
