We were given a few minutes rest, and everyone dropped where he stood. To the southwest, the din seemed to have increased tenfold, and made my head swim. Then we received a fresh blow. Wesreidau and two of his aids ran through the groups of exhausted men.
"Get up! Get moving! We've got to push on now! The division has broken through. If you don't hurry, we'll be caught in the trap, so get the Hell up! We're the last ones left."
Already, men half dead with exhaustion were staggering to their feet. The noncoms tapped on the shoulders of the stronger men, who were trying to help the wounded comrades they had carried out of town, and told them not to bother any more.
"Don't load yourself with anyone who can't walk. You'll need all the strength you've got just to make it yourself."
And so we were forced to abandon a great many men to an almost inconceivably horrible fate, despite their desperate pleas for help. Half paralyzed by terror and fear, men who had lost almost all their blood managed to get up and even hide their pain so that they would be allowed to walk beside the healthy. The heroism, pathos, and determination of our breakout exceeds by far my powers of description. Men who had always been cowards became heroes despite themselves. A great many managed to cover barely half the distance.
We fought our way through the fires of Hell, losing almost half of our remaining men, as we pushed for more than nine hours, from shell hole to shell hole, along the famous and tragic Konotop-Kiev road, past Burnt-out tanks and piles of hundreds of shriveled corpses.

You who perhaps will some day read these lines may also remember that in the autumn of 1943 the bulletins announced that German troops caught in Konotop had managed to break out of a Russian trap. This was true. Of course, the price was never mentioned, because it didn't matter. For you, the day of deliverance was coming.

- Guy Sajer, Großdeutschland Division, The Forgotten Soldier