Leaping from the rubble of a bombed-out building, the Soviet
soldier joins two comrades fighting their way through the streets
of Stalingrad in 1942.?
No faces. No names. Fate unknown. Just three shapes, pushing out
of shadows and fog, carrying rifles as they struggle through tough,
house-to-house combat with the Germans in one of the bloodiest
battles of World War II.
The photograph by Georgi Zelma was one of 49 on display in
"Battle for the Eastern Front," an exhibit at the University of
Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center over the
weekend.
Culled from the private collection of Texas Monthly founder,
author and movie screenwriter Williams Broyles Jr. and other photos
he donated to the Ransom Center, the exhibit illustrates the war on
the Eastern Front and the sacrifices the Soviets endured to drive
Hitler's armies back to Berlin.
Broyles, a Vietnam veteran, is the son of a World War II Marine
veteran and the father of an Air Force para-rescue jumper who will
soon start his third tour in Iraq.
Broyles said he's long been interested in war photography but
only in the last few years was drawn to the battle on the Eastern
Front, where some accounts put Soviet losses at a staggering 25
million people.
He had seen a famous photograph of a soldier lifting the Soviet
hammer and sickle flag over the burned out Reichstag in Berlin, one
of the searing images of the war, but said he knew little of the
ferocity of the fighting there.
"We grew up in the Cold War and the Soviet Union was our enemy,"
Broyles said. "Once you peel away the ideological conflict of the
Cold War and see the absolute horrors of the experience of the
Russian soldier it took all of us to win World War II but we here
in America, we don't have a good idea of what happened in the
East.
"I'm not saying my father and his friends didn't do everything
they could, only that the Russians did so much."
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and pushed to
within 32 kilometers of Moscow. The capital city was literally
within the Germans' sights before the Soviets launched a massive
counterattack.
Initially welcomed in some areas as liberators, the Nazis
quickly squandered the goodwill with a brutal campaign that
terrorized conquered territories and produced widespread
resistance.
The exhibit traces the war from the German invasion in 1941
through its retreat and the Soviet push into Germany in 1945. It
culminates with the Soviet capture of Berlin, including the image
of the red flag over the Reichstag and another famous shot of a
Soviet tank at the Brandenburg Gate.
The tank is in the foreground, making it appear very large when
set against the background of the damaged gate.
"It becomes this remarkably powerful symbol of allied victory
and at the same time a warning for the West as a whole of the
imminent power of the Soviet Union. It's a very complex image,"
said David Coleman, the Ransom Center' s associate curator of
photography.
The collection includes many powerful photographs, some of which
have never been seen in the West. In one image of intense grief, a
woman searches a field full of dead bodies for a loved one. In
another, a man carrying an orchestra bass stumbles though the
wreckage in Stalingrad.
Several images come from the battle for Stalingrad, which left
some 2 million soldiers dead, wounded or missing.
"Death was like a beast. I wanted only one thing to kill,"
Soviet veteran Suren Mirzoyan recalled in a postwar interview,
quoted in the exhibit. "Death was in our pockets. Death was walking
with us."
Broyles has traveled to Russia and the Ukraine to visit some of
the battlegrounds featured in the exhibit and has talked with war
veterans there.
"That war is still alive for them," he said.
(China Daily July 22, 2005)