Daughters of the Resistance
Page 32
Natasha raised her eyebrows. ‘A wedding dress fitting is a question of life and death?’
Lisa nodded. ‘Not just any fitting. The final fitting.’
‘The final fitting,’ mimicked Alexei, rolling his eyes. ‘I had to wait for you for an hour! An hour in the dark corridor.’
Lisa pulled away from him. ‘You know you can’t see me in my wedding dress before the wedding. It’s bad luck.’ She whispered the last two words as if the mere mention of bad luck was enough somehow to summon it.
‘It’s bad luck to be outside at a time like this,’ murmured Natasha.
Lisa said, ‘Don’t worry. The streets are perfectly safe. And Papa will understand.’
‘I doubt it. Just yesterday he said you were too young to marry.’
Lisa laughed as if it was the most preposterous thing she had ever heard. ‘And I reminded him that Mama was younger than me when they got married. And Grandma was only sixteen when she married Grandpa. When Mama was pregnant with Stanislav, she was the same age as you.’
Exasperated, Natasha shook her head.
Lisa continued, ‘Did you hear the dressmaker? Apparently, I have the perfect figure. Mind you, I still have time to lose a few pounds before the big day.’
Alexei ran his hands over her tiny frame. ‘Don’t lose a few pounds, Lisa. There won’t be any of you left to marry.’
His words were interrupted by a distant rumble. Half a city away, the horizon lit up in red and yellow.
An explosion followed.
And another.
And another.
For a few breath-taking seconds, the ground vibrated. Somewhere in the distance, machine guns barked and people shouted. And then, as if nothing had happened, all was quiet again. On the outskirts of town, fires smouldered and smoke rose in a gloomy mist.
‘Don’t be scared,’ said Alexei, pulling Lisa tightly to his side. ‘There won’t be much bombing today.’
‘How do you know?’ demanded Natasha.
‘Just something I’ve heard. The Nazis don’t want to destroy our city. They’re saving it.’
‘Saving it for what?’ Lisa wanted to know.
‘For themselves, silly,’ said Natasha.
Lisa gasped and didn’t reply. Natasha could tell her sister was scared because she no longer dawdled. Racing one another, they turned onto Taras Shevchenko Boulevard. It was sunny and warm, as if summer had decided to stay a little bit longer and wait – for what? The Nazis in the Soviet Union? The daily bombing? The sheer joy of nature in late bloom and its unrestrained abundance seemed out of place in the face of the German invasion. The blue skies, the whites and reds of the flowers, contrasted sharply with distant gunfire and burning buildings.
Posters adorned every wall, most of them depicting a comical figure of Hitler, his body twisted into a shape of a swastika. We will kick Hitler back all the way to Germany, the posters declared. On every corner, loudspeakers yelled out Soviet propaganda and occasional news from the front. Natasha wished the news were as optimistic as the posters, but it was rarely the case.
As she tried to keep up with her sister and Alexei, Natasha thought of the first time the bombs had fallen on Kiev, on Sunday 22nd June. She thought of the shock and the fear and the disbelief. Nearly three months on, they had become accustomed to the shelling, to the regular din of machine-gun fire, like a soundtrack to their daily lives. With dismay, she realised it had almost become normal. The realisation scared her more than the Nazi planes drifting overhead. She didn’t want to accept the unacceptable, to get used to the unthinkable. But she knew she wasn’t the only one feeling this way because there were more and more people on the streets during the bombings. Yes, they made an effort to walk closer to the buildings to avoid being hit, but they no longer slowed down, or sought shelter, or interrupted their quest for food. Even now, as explosions sounded, the queue outside the shop didn’t disperse. As if nothing was happening, people continued to wait for their bread and their sausages and their flour, for all the things they needed to survive and stave off the war. What was happening to their city now, what had happened three months ago when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, seemed like a nightmare that would never end. Natasha felt as if at any moment she would wake up only to find the streets of Kiev peaceful and quiet.
Since the day her city was first bombed in June, Natasha had waited impatiently to wake up.
In Taras Shevchenko Park, the ground was littered with shells that had once carried death but now lay peacefully at their feet. Natasha could feel their sharp edges through the soles of her boots. One of her favourite places in Kiev, the park was unrecognisable. Anywhere not covered by pavement was excavated. In the last three months, it had transformed into what seemed like the habitat of a giant mole, full of holes and burrows. All the trenches that the Kievans had dug, all the barricades they had built, enthusiastically at the end of June, habitually in July and sporadically in August, now stood empty and abandoned. How meaningless it all seemed, how futile.
Uncertainly Lisa muttered, ‘The Germans aren’t coming here. Haven’t you heard the radio?’ Like clockwork every few hours, the radio and the loudspeakers outside screeched, ‘Kiev was, is and will be Soviet.’
How ironic, thought Natasha. As if anyone believed it now.
‘The Red Army will soon push Hitler back,’ added Lisa.
‘What Red Army?’ muttered Natasha.
Suddenly, on the corner of Lva Tolstogo and Vladimirovskaya, Lisa came to an abrupt halt. Natasha, who was only a couple of steps behind, bumped straight into her sister. ‘What—’ she started saying and then stopped. Her mouth assumed the shape of an astonished ‘O’ but no sound escaped. All she could do was stare. From the direction of the river, hundreds of soldiers in grey were marching towards them.
Wide-eyed, the sisters and Alexei backed into the park and hid behind its tall fence, watching in fear.
The wait was finally over. The enemy were no longer at the gates. Surrounded by crowds of confused men, women and children and accompanied by barking dogs, the enemy were right there, inside their city, their grey uniforms a perfect fit, their green helmets sparkling, their motorbikes roaring, their footsteps echoing in the tranquil autumn air.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my family for always being there for me. Thank you to my mum for her wisdom and kindness, to my husband for his love and support, and to my beautiful little boy for filling every day with joy, laughter and cuddles.
Thank you to Emily Kitchin for her amazing vision for this book and for bringing out the best in me as a writer. Thank you to Abby Parsons for her wonderful feedback and for guiding this book to publication and to Belinda Toor, Helena Newton and Michelle Bullock for their help. And huge thanks to the wonderful teams at HQ and HarperCollins360 for making my dream come true.
Finally, I would like to thank all my readers around the world, especially those who reached out to me in an email or a review. Your wonderful comments make all the hard work worth it.
Dear Readers,
Thank you for choosing this book. It means the world to me to be able to share this story with you and I hope you enjoyed it.
When my debut novel, Sisters of War, was first published, many readers reached out to me, asking what happened to Lisa after she was taken to Germany. I knew there was a story there somewhere and it was an absolute pleasure to write it.
Just like Sisters of War, Daughters of the Resistance is set in and around Kiev (or Kyiv, as it’s known in post-Soviet era) – one of my favourite cities in the world where I lived for three years as a child. Kiev will always hold a special place in my heart, and it was hear
tbreaking to research the period of the German occupation and its devastating effect on the city. Despite the order to hold Kiev at all costs, on 19th September 1941, three months after Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union, the Nazis entered the city. Although many people had evacuated or joined the army, 400,000 still lived in Kiev when Hitler’s Army Group Centre marched through the streets. The occupation would last 778 days. It was a time of terror, hunger and persecution for the local population. Historians estimate that between 100,000 and 150,000 people perished in the tragedy of Babi Yar. Another 100,000 were forced to Germany for work. Most of them never came home. When the Soviet Army finally liberated Kiev in November 1943, only 180,000 people remained in the city.
Daughters of the Resistance is fiction but history is full of true stories just like this one, of people like Maxim, Azamat, Lisa and Irina, regular people who were faced with extraordinary challenges and did extraordinary things to overcome them, who had to make tremendous sacrifices and difficult choices to survive. While researching the period of occupation, I have read dozens of memoirs and diaries of the survivors. Three of them made a great impression on me. One was the hauntingly beautiful and disturbing diary of Irina Horoshunova, whose family had been shot by the Nazis for their connection to the partisans. Irina worked as a librarian and wrote her diary throughout the occupation, describing her daily life, hopes and fears. Another diary was that of Alexandra Sharandachenko, who worked as a schoolteacher and, later, a registrar in Kiev. These women were incredibly brave to detail the horrors of the occupation. Had their diaries been discovered, they would have been arrested and most likely shot. Finally, the diary of Ivan Genov, commander of the Second Partisan Division in Crimea during the war, provided a wonderful insight into the partisan life. The partisans were known as the Third Front and were a great threat to the Nazis and true heroes of the German occupation.
I’m always happy to hear from my readers and would love to know what you thought about the book. Please feel free to get in touch or subscribe to my newsletter at http://www.lanakortchik.com.
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