Russian Veteran from the Battle of Stalingrad, in his home in Moscow.
When the Russian pincers snapped in November 1942, 300,000 soldiers of Hitler's army were trapped in Stalingrad, the legendary city on the Volga that they sought to conquer for the Nazi empire. After weeks of desperate fighting 100,000 surviving Germans went into Russian captivity. Six thousand survived, returning to Germany after the war. Of them, 35 are still alive today. We visited ten of these veterans, to trace the memories of the battle in their faces and voices. In Russia we located a dozen surviving Red Army soldiers who had fought the Germans at Stalingrad. The result of our work, conducted over three weeks of travel through Russia and Germany, is an engrossing set of personal portraits and testimony. We were invited into homes modest or ornate, experiencing different forms of welcome; we spoke with decorated war veterans as well as simple soldiers; we watched our hosts celebrate or silently grieve; we recorded as some men changed into parade uniforms that looked huge on their shrunken bodies, while others showed us the small objects that had sustained them through war and the prison camps. Throughout, we observed the workings of two different memory cultures: the haunting shadows of loss and defeat on the German side, and the culture of national pride and sacrifice in Russia. 'Faces of Stalingrad' seeks to bring these distinct memories together, by gathering in a single room the portraits and voices of soldiers who came face to face in one of the fiercest battles of World War II.