Nikolai Obryn'Ba, Red Partisan: The Memoir of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front (2007) — a book review

19 October 2016

Valuable

Nikolai Obryn'Ba's memoir (actually compiled by Dina Chebanova) — Red Partisan: The Memoir of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front (Potomac Books, 2007) — addresses his experiences as a German-held prisoner of war and, after escaping, as a forest-located Byelorussian Partisan.

Note

This American edition was translated by Vladimir Krupnik. Editors include: Dina Chebanova, Christopher Summerville, Sergei Anisimov, and John Armstrong.

Red Partisan will be most meaningful to people already fluent with World War II's Eastern Front. The book itself lacks Front-wide context. Even Stalingrad is not mentioned. And Obryn'Ba's experiences, given his art background, are unique. His ability to paint portraits and landscapes evidently allowed him to survive the otherwise unsurvivable.

Red Partisan's anecdotes highlight the value of speaking more than one language, quick thinking under extreme psychological pressure, understanding one's adversary, courage, loyalty and personal honor.

Most memorable is the book's very broadly brush-stroked portrayals of psychological complexity. You may need to be an attuned reader with significant life experiences of your own to spot these. But they're there. Some of them are complexly evocative.

The gist of the memoir

Nikolai Obryn'Ba's unique war experience derived from the fact that he began it as an art institute graduate. Although not required to fight (by virtue of his art degree), he immediately volunteered to go the front, when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After minimal training, he became a medic. His unit marched long distances each day to meet the advancing Germans. The unit walked right into a German encirclement and was captured. The memoir makes it clear that Red Army soldiers (of this early period) knew surprisingly little about (a) who was where and (b) what they were supposed to do.

Once in captivity, Obryn'Ba and his fellow artists managed to escape being worked to death by bartering their art work for cigarettes, scraps of food and somewhat privileged treatment. Many of the camp's staff — themselves POWs or collaborators, and indeed some of the Germans — retained senses of decency.

Red Partisan juxtaposes scenes of malevolent slaughter and unfathomably twisted cruelty with sparks of surprisingly delivered humanity. There are, it seems, occasional angels in Hell.

One thing that I had not known before

Most accounts of German "camps" that I have read make them seem uniformly efficient. Not so Obryn'Ba's.

His group were able to hide and feed those who were sick with typhus from camp authorities. Being discovered in non-worker condition would have meant execution. Apparently, the German system for tracking inmates in these early camps was not infallible.

Obryn'Ba's account of these instances repeatedly shows how vanishingly slender the thread of life was — and how much it depended upon whom one knew, as well as upon those people's disposition to help in spite of the risk of being caught and killed. Especially notable was how some of the comparatively healthier prisoners went without food, so as to keep the sick alive.

One unavoidable shortcoming — the memoir is sometimes noticeably lacking in detail

Red Partisan was initially compiled by Dina Chebanova from notes that she made regarding conversations with Nikolai Obryn'Ba after World War II. As a result, details that one could have asked a living person to provide are often missing.

This leads to some oddly abbreviated sections of text. Perhaps the most extreme is this one — quoted in its entirety:

Another funny story involved the Partisans of Sadchikov's brigade, neighbouring ours, who captured a tank in combat. The tank was in operating condition but needed petrol. This was obtained from the Germans themselves, at a price. Both petrol and salt were sold to us by one of their NCOs, who was a storekeeper.

But consider this more detailed passage

Here, Obryn'Ba's squad is assigned to go into a hollow (presumably a roundish depression in the terrain) near a German-occupied village.

They are to act as decoys, drawing fire from the enemy. Being nighttime, the rest of the Partisans will be able to see where the German soldiers are. Muzzle flashes and tracers will give the German positions away.

From a military perspective this seems insane. Not only will the Partisan decoys be moving downhill into a cauldron of death, they will have to run back up the hill, through deep snow, to escape:

The suspense was agonizing. Everyone expected to be the next to fall. Suddenly a flare soared above us, spilling a wave of blood-red light all over us. At the next instant, machine- and submachineguns began their work. Sparks of tracer bullets came straight at us, scoring green and pink dashes in the dark, lighting up our snowy hollow with a bright glare.

An order to withdraw swept across the line. We turned and ran. But the hollow was already flooded by a solid rain of ire, and the snow was boiling with fountains of bullets, any one of which could take your life away.

Afonka, Maria and I ran, but quickly lost our strength. I saw that Maria was no longer running but struggling to pull her feet from the snow. I myself could not run for much longer. I took the rifle from her and we switched to walking, but it was impossible to get through this hail of fire. Still, we pushed on over the boiling snow, and it seemed strange that we were still intact.

I noticed that I wasn't walking anymore but dragging myself along, staggering. Afonka was hobbling next to me. We climbed the hill where the village was located, and from where we had started. A heavy machine gun began tapping out a jerky staccato. A little more effort and we breasted the hill. Four hours later we caught up with our guys.

Readers already knowledgeable about Soviet tactics will recognize (in the above passage) that the Red Army's characteristic profligacy with lives appears to have colored everything it did. Partisan leaders populating Obryn'Ba's memoir were all drawn from the Red Army.

I doubt that any American commander would have ordered any his troops into a similarly vulnerable situation. Especially so, when we were the ones initiating contact with the enemy.

Obryn'Ba seems to have assumed that braving lunatic risk was part of successful war-making.

Highly recommended

Red Partisan will be most appreciated by those with the knowledge foundation to appreciate its emotionally moving uniqueness.

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Nikolai Obryn'Ba, Red Partisan: The Memoir of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front (2007) — a book review