A KAROBO ON THE EASTERN FRONT WRITES TO HIS WAR GODMOTHER. THE POOR DIED IN LENINGRAD AFTER THE GREAT RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE. I PUBLISH THIS LETTER WITH LOVE AND SOLIDARITY WITH THE RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS WHO HAVE COLD HUNGER AND FEAR IN THE TRENCHES OF DONETSK IN THE HOPE THAT GOOD TRIUMPHS OVER EVIL. THIS IS A WAR OF THE GRINGOS THAT RUSSIA AND UKRAINE SUFFER

 

CHRISTMAS EVE OF A KAROBO ON THE EASTERN FRONT. LETTER TO HER GODMOTHER

Position 375 Antiaircraft Section

Dear Aderita, I received your letter yesterday. They brought her the hippomobile of the Comandancia. I hadn't been able to make the distribution in seven days because we've had one of those epoch-making sleets. These really are storms and not those of El Bierzo. Thank you for the Christmas bonuses with the nougat and the bottle of cognac, he'll stop, bullet, and the picture of the Child Jesus that we've placed in a preferential spot in the shack, and Jesusin is looking like a sun, and I don't know how he can stand thirty-five with those white tamaras. two below zero How is God and everything can! Well, you see, we got involved in singing Christmas carols like crazy and then we all cried like fools. Even Lieutenant Müller, who commands the cattery and is a dry-looking Prussian military man who seems unsentimental, had tears rolling down his face. I also thank you for the face mask and even more so knowing that it has been woven by you with a scarf that belonged to your grandmother. The bottle of Carlos III we gossiped in love and fraternal friendship. Corporal Seidenbaum picked up some sausages and several bottles of what they call schnaps around here, along with a bottle of vodka he took from a Russian they took prisoner, and someone brought out a guitar and a tambourine. And it was sorrow. You will say that we are drunk but no. Without some heat in the stomach, here you get rice because, as I say, here it is much colder than in León. You will say why do you tell these things. Well, I have nothing to tell you. Here there is only snow and snow. Even the trees sink below the white slope. Christmas carols. We sang La Marimorena and he had Bum. We are a mixed section of German and Spanish gunners. My unit was so decimated in the last few days that forces had to be pooled. We understand each other as we put it but I have learned some German although I almost understand Ruski better, which seems less difficult to me and I know several phrases in that language. One that we learned when on the long marches on foot from Grodno to this area they call White Russia we entered the isbas or shacks of half-hearted peasants dying of thirst and hunger and we were greeted by barefoot children, smiling grandmothers and poor old men. covered in rags. And there the usual ditty. T menisti ñiet mkariovo ni malieko which means our cows have died we don't have milk. But the poor gave us soldiers what they had and lit the samovar and heated us tea with a little bread. The kind grandmothers crossed us on the forehead because that's how Aderita are Christians and I didn't suppose that because I had told us that they were the Russian communists and lost reds. Well, it's not true. In the huts, even the most miserable, there were images of Our Lord and the Virgin. They have a lot of devotion to the Mother of God who they call Blogodortisa. The lamp lit day and night reminded me a little of the altar in my town when we went to the rosary and genuflected on our knees before the Blessed Sacrament. Russians don't kneel, they bow down and cross themselves continuously. They say that to scare away bad spirits. These good people impressed me and I wondered what we have come to do here on this earth to sow death and destruction. Many doubts assail me Aderita. Here is a Major Schmidt who says that the invasion of Russia was Hitler's mistake. That we all believed that what had to be changed was the inequality of the poor and rucos. Schmidt says that the devil got into the crazy head of the Führer. And that this is crazy. The truth is that the Russians did nothing to me because here the communists that were in Spain we do not see them anywhere, without humble and plain and long-suffering people like the Castilians, it is clear that Commander Schmidt only utters those doubts when they have already been in the body five or six cups. And as for his shirt because he can be arrested, I am the corporal piece of a cannon that we call eight. Eight. I got tired of shooting at the Russian planes and I've managed to shoot some down, but I'm happy to see more come every time, they're a swarm. The other day they took out ten or twelve Wehrmacht soldiers who were stuck in some foxholes. Almost a few children were Germans. Their feet were frozen, the music of Stalin's barrel organs can be heard day and night. We stop them for the moment but after a while they bring reinforcements and attack and attack. In the background the sky is dyed red. It is the hell of Stalingrad, . Yesterday they were passing convoys of destroyed battalions. They were Romanian infants. They are badly presented