374. Shoot the Firefighters!
On the night of 3 December 1941, our 5th Company, which was
standing by in reserve in the second line of the defences, had been
called up in an emergency and urgently transferred to a new sector
near Uritsk. This sector, it emerged later, was the hardest one for the
regiment to defend. It was situated along a tram line running from
Leningrad through Uritsk to Strelna and, weaving here and there, it
deviated from the tram line as far as the Gulf of Finland itself.
The dugouts hastily excavated in the tramline bank were
barely covered by puny layers of planks. If a shell exploded nearby,
their walls would rock and all sorts of rubbish would pour down
from the ceiling: glass, bits of iron, refuse. So you could only sit in
a dugout like this with a helmet on. In the ditch to the right of the
tramline ran an actual trench 1.5–2 metres deep. It was impossible
to dig any deeper; underground water would well up and flood the
trench.
The nights at the time were long and dark. The Nazis were
afraid of the dark and of nighttime visits by our scouts, and
therefore they kept the front line constantly under observation.
Regularly, every two to three minutes, they would launch flares
into the boundless black sky, so that, thanks to the Nazis, no man’s
land was clearly visible. That suited us; we could economise on our