There were many German prisoners in Stalingrad, and, as at Kiev, the people did not look at them. They were still in German uniform, rather ragged now. Columns of them trudged through the streets, going to and from their work, usually guarded by one soldier.

We had wanted to go out with the fishermen who catch the big Volga sturgeon from which the caviar comes, but we had no time for that since they fish all night. But we did go to see them bring in the fish in the morning. They were gigantic. There were sturgeon of two varieties, one huge whiskery catfish-looking type, and another with a long shovel nose. There were no real giants that day. The largest one that had been brought in weighed only six hundred pounds. We were told that sometimes they run as high as twelve hundred pounds, and a great mass of caviar comes from them. The caviar is taken out and iced the moment the fish are caught. The fishing is done with very large nets of great strength. The moment the boats touch the shore, the iced caviar is rushed away and distributed by airplane to the large cities of the Soviet Union. Some of the fish are sold locally, but many are smoked and put away, and sold later, and they bring a very high price.

Capa was brooding again; he had wanted to take industrial pictures, and he had not been able to. He felt that not only was this trip a failure, but that everything was a failure, that he was a failure, that I was a failure. He brooded very deeply.

We were growing irritable. Chmarsky’s gremlin had been working so much overtime that he was nervous too, and we snapped at him a little, I am afraid. And so he gave us a curious lesson in Marxism, and it ended up in a schoolboy shouting argument. And Capa renamed him Chmarsky the Chmarxist, which did not bring out the best in Chmarsky. It was just that we were irritated at not being able to photograph the tractor factory. If we had been truthful with one another we would have arrived at that conclusion.

And here was the test of the association of Capa and me, for when we got angry we never got angry at each other, we joined forces and got angry at somebody else. During our whole trip we never had a serious argument, and I think this is probably some kind of a record. During our argument Chmarsky said that we were relativists, and we, not much knowing what relativists are, banded together and attacked him from the point of view of relativism fairly successfully. Not that we convinced him, but at least we held our own and were not convinced, and we shouted louder.

We were to leave for Moscow the next day, and Capa did not sleep that night. He brooded and worried about his failure to get the pictures he wanted. And all the good pictures he had got turned sour and foul. Capa was definitely not happy. And since neither of us could sleep very much, we wrote the synopses for two motion pictures.