Page 33 - Excerpts from the diary

whatever weapon happens to fall into his hands and throwing at people whatever he can grab. I suffer from this more than anyone.
Although he is physically rather weak, I still hesitate to grapple with him because I do not trust his sanity. Today we quarreled over some
trifle and he hurled a large clay pot at me; it missed and shattered against the wall, along with other crockery. I am amazed that he gets
away with everything. He has beaten Rysev, the company commander, and others.

I have stocked up on money—seventy thousand (!) German marks. They will not remain in circulation forever, but perhaps they will be
useful later. Among the German money I even found ten Soviet rubles.

6 or 07.02.1945
To the commander of the 3rd Rifle Battalion, 1052nd Regiment,
Major Boytsov

From the commander of a mortar platoon,
3rd Mortar Company,
Lieutenant Gelfand

REPORT

I petition the battalion command to send Sergeant Ivan Petrovich Beresnev to a penal company as a man resistant to correction who is
undermining discipline in the Red Army.

During the training period, while serving in the 2nd Platoon, Sergeant Beresnev went from being a mortar-crew commander to the third
member of a crew; at a Komsomol meeting he was removed as company Komsomol organizer and expelled from the All-Union Leninist
Young Communist League for abandoning his post without permission at night.

When Beresnev was transferred to my platoon, he told me that in the 1st and 2nd Platoons people had picked on him and treated him
unfairly, whereas in reality he was an obedient and disciplined soldier. Very well, I decided. “I do not know your past and will not hold it
against you. With me you are a new soldier, and from now on I will judge you by what you show yourself to be.”

Yet the very next day after this conversation Beresnev fell asleep at his post, failed to carry out the order of his crew commander, and
committed a number of disciplinary offenses. Thereafter the conduct of Red Army man Beresnev not only failed to improve but, owing to
a number of circumstances, became genuinely intolerable—especially during the march after the breakthrough of the German defenses
near Warka and continuing to the present day. Beresnev came to address the commander of the 2nd Platoon, Lieutenant Shitikov, simply
by his surname, and mocked and refused to carry out orders from Lieutenant Kanonenko.
During our stay here on the left bank of the Oder, there has not been a single day when Beresnev has not fallen asleep at his post or failed
to report on time for firing duty at the mortar position. He does not recognize the authority of his crew commander at all, treats me with
contempt, and by his conduct corrupts the discipline of the men in the platoon.

Beresnev’s only concerns are sleep and food. Feeling that certain company officers indulge him, Sergeant Beresnev has reached the point
of losing all soldierly appearance: he is dirty, slack, and no soldier regards him as a junior commander because of his indiscipline and
slovenliness. Corporals and Red Army men themselves shame Beresnev for his conduct, but neither conversations nor disciplinary
measures have any effect on him; his behavior remains outrageous.

16.02.1945
They say there are two Frankfurts on the Oder, one of them called Frankfurt am Main... But the lice! How many I have acquired during
these days in Germany! I never had so many in Poland, in Bessarabia, or back home in Russia. Now there are so many that they crawl
over my body like pigs around a German farmyard: small ones, big ones, enormous ones, singly and in chains... They will probably eat
me alive. Carrying them on one’s body is unbearable; this ordeal seems more biting to me than battle itself. I want to scream until I am
blue in the face and tear out my hair. My whole body is covered with marks from the bites of these disgusting and dangerous insects.

I have not changed my underwear since December 1944. It is all filthy and already torn—the lice gnaw through it, and the cotton padding
next to my body has rolled into lumps.

Now we are standing still. The soldiers have searched all the houses, and there is no suitable clean underwear to change into. The
company sergeant-major did receive underwear for the whole company, but when the Katyushas began firing—he was then near the dam
on the Oder—he threw everything down and ran far away from the supplies. Meanwhile all the underwear was stolen.

There is no possibility of arranging a bath now; there are more urgent things. Our bridgehead is very small but extremely important for
the further development of operations, and therefore they demand of us—and Berzarin and Zhukov even appeal to us—to hold the
captured bridgehead at all costs.

The weather here is capricious. It rains almost every day; there is no snow, and the earth is one impassable mass of mud. It is warm, like
spring. The ice on the Oder has begun to move; it carried away the crossing and dragged the wreckage upstream. Communication with
the right bank is broken.

So our hopes, dreams, and desires of breaking quickly into open country, taking Berlin on the move, and completing the defeat of Hitler’s
hordes behind its walls are collapsing. All this might very well have been accomplished. At first the Germans had very few men and little
equipment here, especially men.