There is a time and place for first-person stories, which is usually no time and no place. But this is the only time I’ll get to tell this one. It’s quite good. And it relates to Russia, Volgograd, and preconceptions.
My grandfather Josef was in Vienna in 1938 when Germany annexed Austria. He was a footballer, a player in the Viennese league before the war during the golden age of Austrian football, the days of Hugo Meisl’s Wunderteam and all that.
As a fit young man he was press-ganged into the German army like thousands of other Austrians and eventually led off to fight against the Red Army at Stalingrad. There, my grandfather was injured, captured by Russian soldiers and kept alive in a military hospital during the bloodiest, most decisive battle in the defeat of fascism in Europe during the second World War.
Something close to 800,000 soldiers on all sides were killed. The lucky ones died instantly. Others froze to death, starved or found themselves living in an indescribable military hell. Russia’s extraordinary sacrifice is rightly commemorated. It has become a rallying point for Russian patriotism in the last few years.
As ever, there are many sides to these things. Josef’s involvement was typically haphazard. My grandmother’s family were Jewish. They made pottery in Vienna. There’s a picture of all the siblings together holding violins under their chins, living the artsy Viennese dream. I don’t really know this side of the family well. But what I do know is quite hair-raising.
My grandmother met my grandfather as the pre-Hitler days came to a close. My grandfather was a footballer, she was an ice skater. In the pictures I’ve seen, they did a lot of grinning. Then the Nazis marched in. (“With open arms, they welcomed them” – this is as much as I ever got out of my grandmother about that.) Suddenly the ice skater and the footballer became a Jew and a German soldier. Awkward. Family get-togethers, you can imagine, were a little strained.
Family myth tells me Josef had a brother who was a paid-up Nazi and a true believer. He discovered the family secret: that these blond, Aryan-looking Ronays were in fact a bit Jewish and living in plain sight. He was about to denounce them. I have been told that the great-uncles killed him. This may or may not be true. I think it probably is.
Finally, the Nazis did come to the door. My great-grandfather, a striking, collected man, told them they were mistaken, that they wanted the apartment down the hall, and by the way, look at my lovely blond, blue-eyed daughter.
The Ronays fled, helped by friends, and came to live in Chiswick in west London – proud, noisy, German-speaking people in straitened circumstances. They had a pottery studio in Holland Park. One of the great-uncles painted pictures and sold them on the railings of Hyde Park.
But my grandmother stayed in Berlin, for love, with a baby, my father, in tow. She survived the war somehow. My father was eventually airlifted out of West Berlin in a Red Cross helicopter. The only bit he remembers is the fur hat they gave him to wear that was full of lice and itched horribly.
But she survived without Josef, who was shipped off to Stalingrad to fight in what I now suspect must have been the 44th infantry division, which included Austrian conscripts. In January 1943, all supplies exhausted, and with almost total loss of life, the 44th infantry was effectively liquidated.
Somehow, Josef survived. The story goes he was buried under a building by an explosion that finished off his platoon. He survived because he was fit from playing football. And also because of kindness from Russians. My grandfather was taken to a military hospital, where he was treated and eventually recovered.
No doubt conditions were terrible. The family gave him up for dead. But after the war he walked out of a prison camp and returned to Vienna where, family legend has it, he got to inspect his own gravestone.
Josef came to England briefly a few years later. He watched Arsenal play and went to Wimbledon. He spoke no English. Life had moved on. He died a few years later.
My grandmother talked about “Hansie” a bit, but not much, in the years before her death 15 years ago. The family, or at least my grandmother’s bit, always had a respect, and indeed a gratitude, towards Russia and Russians. She could be a snob and a queen bee. But she did remember it was Russians who saved Josef.
And so here I am in Volgograd for the first time, to cover England's opening World Cup game against Tunisia, with a chance to stand under the awe-inspiring The Motherland Calls statue, both a call to arms and a monument to a mechanised insanity. It is impossible to visit these places, so steeped in blood and remembrance, and not feel moved.
It isn’t hard to imagine what Josef would have made of the current, rather milder excitement here. First of all, he would have given short shrift to anyone telling him what he ought to be thinking about Russians, or indeed about anyone. Mainly, though, he’d have wanted to shake a few hands and watch the football. - Guardian service
