Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

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When Yelena Rzhevskaya joined up in the autumn of 1941, she could have had little inkling of the role that she would eventually play in the history of the twentieth century. A young literature student, studying at Moscow State University, she initially worked in an armament factory, then trained as a nurse, before her knowledge of German caused her to be sent for instruction as a Red Army interpreter. A couple of months later, armed with a pocket dictionary and a notebook, she was dispatched to the front.

The world into which she was sent was almost completely alien to her: a dystopia of murderous combat, destitute refugees and seemingly endless ruins, in which she had not even been trained to use a gun. Her journey took her westwards through Rzhev – the infamous ‘meat-grinder’, west of Moscow, which was finally liberated in March 1943, and in whose honour she took her nom de plume – via Warsaw and on to Poznań, where she arrived in the opening months of 1945.

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