O’s Reviews > The Eastern Front: Memoirs of a Waffen SS Volunteer, 1941–1945 > Status Update

“But the Soviet fighters were watching. They would patrol the drizzling sky, circling like hawks above the field. Every day twelve or fifteen of our Junkers, shot down after a few minutes of flight, would fall down in flames amid the screams of the wounded, who were being grilled alive.”

“First of January, five o'clock in the morning.
Everywhere in the world, people were drinking; women were laughing; and the faces of drunken men bore the stigmata of vices that burdened them. And in the day slowly rising over the white steppe, a broken youngster was going to die because he had believed in something great, because an ideal pure and strong had brought him to sacrifice.”

“For a long time the fog continued to clasp the sinuous valleys. Dense and milky, it spread from one to another, as clean as the water of a rosary of lakes. Over this white sheet the mountains rose like gold and rust colored islands. From the depths of the lakes of fog, new islets would emerge, ever lower peaks rising forth in their turn, like legendary worlds engulfed long ago by deep waters.”

One of the best accounts of the war I’ve ever read. Barbaric yet poetic. Goes from describing how Soviet peasants were so hungry they’d eat the disease ridden bodies of German horses after they were shot, to waking up beside the Donets river with a crystal blue sky sparkling above.