Another long day and another long ride. I made it to Rzhev by late evening. I stay in an old Soviet era hotel that I am sure is still bugged and walk around a town that seems to have blissfully ignored the last 20 years. War memorials abound and Lenin still has a watchful eye over the town centre. The war memorials are somewhat expected however. This area and town saw terrible fighting during WWII. Its location close to Moscow and position on the top of a large river gully gave Rzhev significant strategic importance. A quote that I have found gives a glimpse into what life was like here during Nazi occupation,
"In the town of Rzhev there is a concentration camp with fifteen thousand captured Red Army soldiers in it and five thousand civilians," noted a smuggled report of December 1941. "They are holding them in unheated huts, and they feed them one or two frozen potatoes each a day. The Germans threw rotten meat and some bones through the barbed wire at the prisoners. This had made them ill. Every day 20-30 people are dying. The ones who are too ill to work are shot." (Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale—quote from the Center for the Documentation of Contemporary History, Smolensk Oblast)
"In the town of Rzhev there is a concentration camp with fifteen thousand captured Red Army soldiers in it and five thousand civilians," noted a smuggled report of December 1941. "They are holding them in unheated huts, and they feed them one or two frozen potatoes each a day. The Germans threw rotten meat and some bones through the barbed wire at the prisoners. This had made them ill. Every day 20-30 people are dying. The ones who are too ill to work are shot." (Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale—quote from the Center for the Documentation of Contemporary History, Smolensk Oblast)
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