This colonel met us with these words: “Look out, girls, you’ve come to fight, so fight, but don’t get up to anything else. There are men around, and no women. Devil knows how else I can explain the thing to you. It’s war, girls…” He understood that we were still very young things. The first time planes flew over, I crouched down and covered my head with my hands, then I thought, And what about my poor hands? I wasn’t ready for death yet.
I remember how in Germany…Ah, this is funny! In one German village we were billeted for the night in a castle. There were many rooms, whole big halls. Such halls! The wardrobes were filled with beautiful clothes. Each girl chose a dress for herself. There was a yellow one that I liked, and also a house robe. I can’t tell you what a beautiful house robe it was—long, light…like a fluff of down! We had to go to bed, because we were terribly tired. We put these dresses on and went to bed, and fell asleep at once. I lay in that dress and the robe on top of it…
Another time, in an abandoned milliner’s shop, the girls each chose a hat for herself and slept all night sitting, so as to wear a hat at least for a little while. In the morning we got up…looked once more in the mirror…Then took everything off, and put on our army shirts and trousers. We never took anything. On the road even a needle is heavy. A spoon tucked into the boot top, that’s all…
Zinaida Prokofyevna Gomareva
TELEGRAPHER
Men…They’re so…They didn’t always understand us…
But our Colonel Ptitsyn we loved very much. We called him “Daddy.” He wasn’t like the others, he understood our woman’s soul. We’re near Moscow, it’s the retreat, the most difficult time, and he says to us, “Girls, Moscow is close by. I’ll bring you a hairdresser. Dye your eyebrows, eyelashes, curl your hair. That’s not in the rules, but I want you to be pretty. This will be a long war…It won’t end soon…”
And he brought us a hairdresser. We had our hair curled, put on makeup. We were so happy…
Sofya Konstantinovna Dubniakova
MEDICAL ASSISTANT
We raced over the ice of Lake Ladoga…advancing…Right away we came under heavy shelling. There was water all around; a wounded man goes straight to the bottom. I’m crawling around, bandaging. I crawl up to one, his legs are broken, he’s losing consciousness, but he pushes me away and tries to get into his sidor—his kit bag, that is. He’s looking for his reserve rations. To eat, at least, before he dies…When we started to advance over the ice, we got some food supplies. I want to bandage him, but he wants his kit bag and nothing else: men had a very hard time enduring hunger. It was worse than death for them…
And about myself I remember this…At first you’re afraid of death…Amazement and curiosity live side by side in you. Then they both vanish—from fatigue. You’re at the limits of your strength. Beyond the limits. In the end only one fear remains—of being ugly after death. A woman’s fear…Not to be torn to pieces by a shell…I saw it happen…I picked up those pieces…
Liubov Ivanovna Osmolovskaya
PRIVATE, SCOUT
It rained and rained…We ran over the mud, people fell into this mud. Wounded, killed. I didn’t want to die in that swamp. A black swamp. For a young girl to lie in such mud…And another time, this was already in Belorussia…in the Orsha forests, there were small bushes of bird cherry. Blue snowdrops. A whole clearing covered with blue flowers…To perish among such flowers! To lie there…I was a silly goose, seventeen years old…That’s how I imagined death…
I thought that to die was like flying off somewhere. Once during the night we talked about death, but only once. We were afraid to pronounce the word…
Alexandra Semyonovna Popova
LIEUTENANT OF THE GUARDS, PILOT
Our regiment was all women…We flew to the front in May 1942…
The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor.
Later on, toward the end of the war, we were issued parachutes, and a machine gun was installed in the pilot’s cabin, but before there had been no weapon, except for four bomb racks under the wings—that’s all. Nowadays they’d call us kamikazes, and maybe we were kamikazes. Yes! We were! But victory was valued more than our lives. Victory!
You ask how we could endure it? I’ll tell you…
Before I retired, I became ill from the very thought of how I could possibly not work. Why then had I completed a second degree in my fifties? I became a historian. I had been a geologist all my life. But a good geologist is always in the field, and I no longer had the strength for it. A doctor came, took a cardiogram, and asked, “When did you have a heart attack?”
“What heart attack?”
“Your heart is scarred all over.”
I must have acquired those scars during the war. You approach a target, and you’re shaking all over. Your whole body is shaking, because below it’s all gunfire: fighter planes are shooting, antiaircraft guns are shooting…Several girls had to leave the regiment; they couldn’t stand it. We flew mostly during the night. For a while they tried sending us on day missions, but gave it up at once. A rifle shot could bring down a Po-2…
We did up to twelve flights a night. I saw the famous ace Pokryshkin when he returned from a fighting mission. He was a sturdy man, not twenty and not twenty-three like us. But while his plane was refueled, a technician took his shirt off and wrung it out. It was soaked as if he had been in the rain. So now you can easily imagine what it was like for us. You come back and you can’t even get out of the cabin; they used to pull us out. We couldn’t carry the chart case; we dragged it on the ground.
And the work our girl armorers did! They had to attach four bombs to the aircraft by hand—that meant eight hundred pounds. They did it all night: one plane takes off, another lands. The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women…We didn’t have those women’s things…Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children.
We all smoked. I also smoked. It made you feel as if you’d calmed down a little. You come back to earth shaking all over, you light a cigarette—and you calm down. We wore leather jackets, trousers, army shirts, plus a fur jacket in winter. Like it or not something masculine appeared in your gait and your movements. When the war was over, they made us khaki-colored dresses. We suddenly felt we were young girls…
Sofya Adamovna Kuntsevich
SERGEANT MAJOR, MEDICAL ASSISTANT IN AN INFANTRY COMPANY
They gave me a medal recently…from the Red Cross…The Florence Nightingale international gold medal. Everybody congratulates me and wonders, “How could you drag out 147 wounded men? You’re such a diminutive girl in the wartime photos…” Well, maybe I dragged out two hundred, nobody was counting then. It never entered my head, we didn’t understand it that way. A battle was going on, people were losing blood, so should I sit and take notes? I never waited for the attack to be over, I crawled around during the combat picking up the wounded. If a man had a shrapnel wound and I arrived an hour or two later, there would have been nothing for me to do, the man would have lost all his blood.
I was wounded three times and had a concussion three times. People dreamed of all sorts of things during the war: one of going back home, another of getting to Berlin, and I wished for just one thing—to live until my birthday, so as to turn eighteen. For some reason I was afraid to die without having lived at least eighteen years. I used to wear trousers, a forage cap, and I was always in tatters, because I always crawled on my knees, and under the weight of the wounded man. It was hard to believe that a day would come when I would be able to get up and walk, not c
rawl on the ground. That was my dream! One day a division commander arrived, saw me, and asked, “Who is this adolescent boy? Why do you keep him here? He should be sent to school…”
I remember when there weren’t enough bandages…There were such terrible bullet wounds that each needed a whole package. I tore up all my underwear, and I told the boys, “Take off your long johns, your undershirts, I’ve got people dying here.” They took everything off, tore it up. I wasn’t embarrassed in front of them, they were like brothers to me, and I lived among them like a boy. We would march by three holding hands, and the middle one could sleep for an hour or two. Then we’d change places.
I got as far as Berlin. I put my signature on the Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war.”
When I see a common grave, I kneel before it. Before every common grave…always on my knees…
* * *
OF A GIRLISH TREBLE AND SAILORS’ SUPERSTITIONS
* * *
Klara Semyonovna Tikhonovich
SERGEANT, ANTIAIRCRAFT GUNNER
I heard…words…Poison…Words like stones…It was men’s desire—to go and fight. Can a woman kill?! Those were abnormal, defective women…
No! A thousand times no! No, it was a human desire. The war was going on, I lived my usual life. A girl’s life…Then a neighbor received a letter: her husband was wounded and in the hospital. I thought, “He’s wounded, and who will replace him?” One came without an arm—who will replace him? Another came back without a leg—who will go instead of him? I wrote letters, begged, pleaded to be taken into the army. That’s how we were brought up, that nothing in our country should happen without us. We had been taught to love it. To admire it. Since there’s a war, it’s our duty to help in some way. There’s a need for nurses, so we must become nurses. There’s a need for antiaircraft gunners, so we must become antiaircraft gunners.
Did we want to resemble men at the front? At first we did, very much: we cut our hair short, we even changed our way of walking. But later, no, no way! Later we wanted to put on makeup, we saved sugar, instead of eating it, to stiffen our bangs. We were happy to get hold of a pot of water to wash our hair. During a long march we searched for soft grass. We tore up some grass and rubbed our legs…You see, we used the grass to wash off the…We were girls, we had our special needs…The army didn’t think about it…Our legs were green…It was good if the sergeant major was an older man and understood everything, and didn’t confiscate extra underwear from a kit bag. A young one was sure to throw it out. But it wasn’t extra for a girl who had to change underwear twice a day. We used to tear sleeves from the undershirts, and we had only two, meaning only four sleeves…
Klara Vasilyevna Goncharova
PRIVATE, ANTIAIRCRAFT GUNNER
Before the war I loved everything military…Men’s things…I wrote to the school of aviation requesting application forms. I looked good in a military uniform. I liked formation, precision, abrupt words of command. The response from the school was: “First finish high school.”
Of course, when the war began, with my mood I couldn’t stay home. But they wouldn’t take me at the front. By no means, because I was sixteen. The military commissar said, Why, what will the enemy think of us, if the war has only just begun, and we’re sending such children to the front—underaged girls!
“We must crush the enemy.”
“We’ll crush him without you.”
I insisted that I was tall, that no one would know I was sixteen, that they’d think I was older. I stood in his office refusing to leave: “Write that I’m eighteen, not sixteen.” “You say that now, and what will you think of me later?”
After the war I no longer wanted, I couldn’t go into any sort of military specialization. I wanted to take off all the khaki color quickly…I detest trousers to this day. I won’t wear them even to the forest to pick mushrooms or berries. I wanted to wear something ordinary, feminine…
Maria Nesterovna Kuzmenko
SERGEANT MAJOR, ARMORER
We felt the war at once…We graduated from professional school and the very same day the “buyers” came to us. That’s what we called those who came to our school to recruit new people for the reorganized units. They were always men, and you could tell that they pitied us. We looked at them in one way, they looked at us in another. We tried to break the line, to step forward, to be taken, to be noticed, to show ourselves the sooner. They were tired and looked at us knowing where we were going to be sent. They understood everything.
Our regiment was all men, only twenty-two women. It was the 870th Long-range Artillery Regiment. We brought two or three changes of underwear from home, we couldn’t take more. They bombarded us, and we were left with what we had on when we ran away. Men went to the depot and got a change of clothes. But there was nothing for us. They gave us footwraps, and we made panties and bras out of them. The commander found out and yelled at us.
Six months later…We were so overworked we ceased to be women…We stopped having…The biological cycle got thrown off…See? Very frightening! It’s frightening to think that you’ll never be a woman again…
Maria Semyonovna Kaliberda
SERGEANT, RADIO OPERATOR
We tried hard…We didn’t want people to say of us, “Ah, these women!” And we made greater efforts than men did. We had to prove that we were no worse than men. For a long time there was this haughty, condescending attitude to us: “Some warriors, these women…”
But how could we be men? It was impossible. Our thoughts were one thing, our nature—another. Our biology…
We march…About two hundred girls, then about two hundred men. It’s hot. A forced march of twenty miles. Twenty! We march, and leave these red spots behind us in the sand…red traces…The women’s thing. How can you hide anything here? The soldiers come after us and pretend that they don’t notice anything…don’t look under their feet…Our trousers got dry on us and became sharp as glass. They’d cut us. We had wounds and there was always the smell of blood. The army didn’t provide us with anything…We were on the lookout: when the soldiers hung their shirts on the bushes, we’d steal a couple…They figured it out and laughed. “Sergeant, give us spare underwear. The girls took ours.” There wasn’t enough cotton wool and bandaging for the wounded…And nothing for our…Women’s underwear appeared maybe two years later. We wore men’s underpants and tank tops. So, we march…In boots! Our feet are roasted, too. We march…To the crossing, where the ferries are waiting. We reach the crossing, and there the shelling begins. A dreadful shelling, the men all hide wherever they can. They call us…And we don’t even hear the shelling, we can’t be bothered, we quickly run to the river. Into the water…Water! Water! We sat in it till we soaked it off…Under the shrapnel…That’s it…We were more afraid of shame than of death. Several girls were killed in the water…
Maybe for the first time then I wanted to be a man…For the first time…
Then—the Victory. At first I’d go down the street and not believe it was Victory. I’d sit at the table and not believe it was Victory. Victory! Our Victory…
Anna Nikolaevna Khrolovich
LIEUTENANT OF THE GUARDS, PARAMEDIC
We were already liberating Latvia…We were near Daugavpils. It was late at night, I was just about to lie down. I hear the sentinel call to someone, “Halt! Who goes there?” And literally ten minutes later I’m summoned to the commander. I go to the commander’s dugout, our comrades are there and some man in civilian dress. I remember this man well. All those years I saw only men in khaki, in army overcoats, and this one was in a black overcoat with a plush collar.
“I need your help,” the man says to me. “My wife is giving birth a mile and a half from here. She’s alone, there’s no one in the house.”
The commander hesitates. “It’s in no-man’s-land. You know it may be dangerous.”
“A woman is giving birth. I must help her.”
They gave me five riflemen. I packed a bag
of bandage material, also a pair of new flannelette footwraps they issued me recently. We went. There was shelling all the time—now undershot, now overshot. And the forest was so dark, we couldn’t even see the moon. Finally we saw the silhouette of some building. It was a farmstead. When we went into the house, I saw a woman. She was lying on the floor, all covered with some old rags. The husband at once began to curtain the windows. Two riflemen stood outside, two by the door, and one held the flashlight for me. The woman could barely keep from moaning; she was in great pain.
I kept begging her, “Bear with it, dearest. You mustn’t cry. Bear with it.”
It was no-man’s-land. If the enemy noticed anything, they would rain shells down on us. But when the soldiers heard that the baby was born…“Hurray! Hurray!” Very soft, almost a whisper. A baby was born on the front line!
They brought water. There was nowhere to boil it, so I wiped the baby with cold water. Swaddled it in my footwraps. There was nothing in the house except the old rags the mother was lying on.
I slipped away to that farmstead for several nights. The last time I went was before we began to advance, and I said goodbye. “I can’t come to you anymore, I’m leaving.”
The woman asked her husband something in Latvian. He translated, “My wife asks what your name is.”
“Anna.”
The woman said something else. The husband translated again, “She says it’s a very beautiful name. We’ll call our daughter Anna in your honor.”
The Unwomanly Face of War Page 22