Last Witnesses

by Svetlana Alexievich

  “I’ll teach children,” he said.

  I was puzzled…I thought the only work was war…

  “YOU ASKED ME TO FINISH YOU OFF…”

  Vasya Baikachev

  TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER OF MANUAL EDUCATION.

  I’ve often remembered it…Those were the last days of my childhood…

  During the winter vacation our whole school took part in a military game. Before that we studied drilling, made wooden rifles, sewed camouflage coats, clothes for medical orderlies. Our chiefs from the military unit came flying to us in biplanes. We were completely thrilled.

  In June German planes were already flying over us dropping scouts. They were young fellows in gray checkered jackets and caps. Together with some adults we caught several of them and handed them over to the village council. We were proud of having taken part in a military operation, it reminded us of our winter game. But soon others appeared. They did not wear checkered jackets and caps, but green uniforms with the sleeves rolled up, boots with wide tops and iron-shod heels. They had calfskin packs on their backs, long gas-mask canisters at their sides, and held submachine guns at the ready. Well-fed, hefty. They sang and shouted, “Zwei Monat—Moskva kaput.” My father explained, “Zwei Monat” means two months. Only two months? Only? This war was not at all like the one we had played at just recently and which I had liked.

  In the first few days the Germans didn’t stop in our village of Malevichi, they drove on to the Zhlobin station. My father worked there. But he no longer went to the station, he waited for our troops to come any day and drive the Germans back to the border. We believed father and also waited for our soldiers. We expected them any day. And they…our soldiers…lay all around: on the roads, in the forest, in the ditches, in the fields…in the kitchen gardens…in the peat pits…They lay dead. They lay with their rifles. With their grenades. It was warm, and they grew bigger from the warmth, and there seemed to be more and more of them every day. A whole army. No one buried them…

  Father hitched up the horse and we went to the field. We began to collect the dead men. We dug holes…Put them in rows of ten to twelve men…My school bag was filling with papers. I remember from the addresses that they were natives of the city of Ulyanovsk, in the Kuibyshev region.

  Several days later I found my father and my best friend, fourteen-year-old Vasya Shevtsov, killed outside the village. My grandfather and I came to that spot…Bombing began…We buried Vasya, but had no time to bury father. After the bombing we found nothing left of him. Not a trace. We put a cross at the cemetery—that’s all. Just a cross. We buried father’s best Sunday suit under it…

  A week later we could no longer collect the soldiers…We couldn’t lift them…There was water sloshing under the army shirts…We collected their rifles. Their army cards.

  Grandfather was killed in the bombing…

  How were we to go on living? Without father? Without grandfather? Mama wept and wept. What to do with the weapons we gathered and buried in a safe place? Who to give them to? There was nobody to ask. Mama wept.

  In winter I got in touch with some underground fighters. They were happy to have my gift. They sent the weapons to the partisans…

  Time passed, I don’t remember how much…Maybe four months. I remember that that day I gathered last year’s frozen potatoes in a field. I came home wet, hungry, but I brought a full bucket. I had just taken my wet bast shoes off, when there was knocking on the door of the cellar we lived in. Somebody asked, “Is Baikachev here?” When I appeared in the cellar door, I was ordered to come out. I hurriedly put on a budenovka instead of a winter hat, for which I got a whipping at once.

  By the cellar stood three horses, with Germans and polizei* mounted on them. One of the polizei dismounted, put a strap around my neck, and tied me to the saddle. Mother began to beg: “Let me feed him.” She went back to the cellar to get a flatbread of defrosted potatoes, and they whipped up the horses and set off at a trot. They dragged me like that for three miles to the village of Vesely.

  At the first interrogation the fascist officer asked simple questions: last name, first name, date of birth…Who are your father and mother? The interpreter was a young polizei. At the end of the interrogation he said, “Now you’ll go and clean the torture room. Take a good look at the bench there…” They gave me a bucket of water, a broom, a rag, and took me there…

  There I saw a terrible picture: in the middle of the room stood a wide bench with three leather straps nailed to it. Three straps to tie a man by the neck, the waist, and the legs. In the corner stood thick birch rods and a bucket of water. The water was red. On the floor were pools of blood…of urine…of excrement…

  I kept bringing more and more water. The rag I used was red anyway.

  In the morning the officer summoned me.

  “Where are the weapons? Who are you connected with in the underground? What were your assignments?” The questions poured out one after the other.

  I denied everything, saying that I knew nothing, that I was young and gathered frozen potatoes in the field, not weapons.

  “Take him to the cellar,” the officer ordered the soldier.

  They took me down into a cellar with cold water. Before that they showed me a partisan who had just been taken out of there. He couldn’t stand the torture and drowned…Now he lay in the street…

  The water came up to my neck…I felt my heart beat and the blood in my veins pulsate and heat the water around my body. My fear was to lose consciousness. To inhale the water. To drown.

  The next interrogation: the barrel of a pistol was shoved against my ear, fired—a dry floorboard cracked. They shot at the floor! The blow of a stick at my neck vertebra, I fall down…Someone big and heavy stands over me. He smells of sausage and cheap vodka. I feel nauseous, but I have nothing to throw up. I hear: “Now you’re going to lick up what you did on the floor…With your tongue, understand…Understand, you red whelp?!”

  Back in the cell I didn’t sleep, but lost consciousness from pain. Now it seemed to me that I was at a school lineup and my teacher Liubov Ivanovna Lashkevich was saying, “In the fall you’ll enter the fifth grade, and now, children, goodbye. You’ll all grow up over the summer. Vasya Baikachev is now the smallest, and he’ll become the biggest.” Liubov Ivanovna smiled…

  And then my father and I are walking in the fields, looking for our dead soldiers. Father is somewhere ahead of me, and I find a man under a pine tree…Not a man, but what’s left of him. He has no arms, no legs…He’s still alive and he begs, “Finish me off, sonny…”

  The old man who lies next to me in the cell wakes me up.

  “Don’t shout, sonny.”

  “What did I shout?”

  “You asked me to finish you off…”

  Decades have passed, and I’m still wondering: am I alive?!

  * Russians who served as police under the German occupation were given the German name of polizei, which in Russian became both singular and plural.

  “AND I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A SCARF ON…”

  Nadia Gorbacheva

  SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW WORKS IN TELEVISION.

  I’m interested in the inexplicable in the war…I still think a lot about it…

  I don’t remember how my father left for the front…

  We weren’t told. They wanted to spare us. In the morning he took me and my sister to kindergarten. Everything was the same as ever. In the evening we asked, of course, why father wasn’t there, but mama reassured us: “He’ll come back soon. In a few days.”

  I remember the road…Trucks drove, in them cows mooed, pigs oinked, in one truck a boy held a cactus in his hands and was tossed from one side of the truck to the other…My sister and I found it funny the way he ran back and forth…We were children…We saw the fields, we saw the butterflies. We liked the ride. M
ama protected us, we sat under mama’s “wings.” Somewhere deep in our minds was the awareness of a calamity, but mama was with us and everything would be good in the place we were going to. She shielded us from the bombs, from the frightened adult conversations, from everything bad. If we could have read mama’s face, we would have read everything on it. But I don’t remember it, I remember a big dragonfly that landed on my sister’s shoulder, and I shouted, “A plane!” and all the adults for some reason jumped off the wagon and threw their heads back.

  We arrived at our grandfather’s in the village of Gorodets, in the Sennensky region. He had a big family, and we lived in the summer kitchen. People started calling us “summer folk,” and it stayed with us till the end of the war. I don’t remember us playing; at least in the first year of the war we didn’t play any summer games. Our little brother was growing up. We had him on our hands, because mama dug, planted, sewed. She would leave us by ourselves, and we had to wash the spoons and the dishes, the floors, to stoke the stove, to gather brushwood for the next day, to bring water: we carried half a bucket because we couldn’t carry a full one. In the evening mama assigned us our responsibilities: you for the kitchen, you for your brother. And we each answered for our duties.

  We were hungry, yet we acquired a cat and then a dog. They were members of the family; we shared everything with them. Sometimes there wasn’t enough for the cat and the dog, so each of us tried to secretly stash away a little piece for them. And when the cat was killed by shrapnel, it was such a loss that it seemed impossible to survive. We wept for two days. We carried her in tears to be buried. Set up a cross, planted flowers, watered them.

  Even now, when I remember all the tears we shed, I can’t bring myself to have a cat. When my daughter was little, she asked us to buy a dog, but I couldn’t.

  Then something happened to us. We stopped being afraid of death.

  Big German trucks drove in. We were all summoned from the cottages. They lined us up and counted: “Ein, zwei, drei…” Mama was the ninth, and the tenth person was shot. Our neighbor…Mama was holding our brother in her arms, and she dropped him.

  I remember smells…Now, when I see movies about the fascists, I sense the soldiers’ smell. Leather, good broadcloth, sweat…

  That day my sister was responsible for our brother, and I weeded the kitchen garden. When I bent down among the potatoes, I couldn’t be seen. You know how it is in childhood—everything seems big and tall. When I noticed the plane, it was already circling over me. I saw the pilot quite distinctly. His young face. A brief submachine gun volley—bang-bang! The plane circles for a second round…He wasn’t seeking to kill me, he was having fun. I already understood it then, with my child’s mind. And I didn’t even have a scarf on to cover my head…

  So, what is it? How to explain it? I wonder: is that pilot still alive? And what does he remember?

  The moment when it was decided whether you die from a bullet or from fear would pass, and an in-between time would come: one disaster would blow over, and the next wasn’t known yet. Then we laughed a lot. We began to tease one another, to joke: who hid where, how we ran, how the bullet flew by and missed. I remember that well. Even we children would gather and poke fun at one another: who was scared, who wasn’t. We laughed and cried at the same time.

  I remember the war in order to figure it out…Otherwise why do it?

  We had two chickens. When we said, “Quiet—Germans!” they were quiet. They sat very quietly with us under the bed and wouldn’t cluck even once. However many trained chickens I saw later in the circus, I wasn’t surprised. On top of that, ours diligently laid eggs in a box under the bed—two eggs a day. We felt so rich!

  Still we did set up some sort of a Christmas tree. It was mama, of course, who remembered that we were children. We cut bright pictures out of books, made paper balls—one side white, the other black, made garlands out of old threads. On that day we especially smiled to each other, and instead of presents (we didn’t have any), we left little notes under the tree.

  In my notes I wrote to mama: “Mama dear, I love you very much. Very, very much!” We gave each other presents of words.

  Years have passed…I’ve read so many books. But I don’t know much more about the war than when I was a child.

  “NO ONE TO PLAY OUTSIDE WITH…”

  Valya Nikitenko

  FOUR YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.

  Everything gets stamped in a child’s memory like in a photo album. As separate snapshots…

  Mama begs, “Run, let’s run! Stomp, stomp!” Her hands are full. I fuss: “My little legs hurt.”

  My three-year-old brother pushes me: “Let’s lun” (he can’t pronounce r), “the Gelmans will catch us!” We “lun” together in silence.

  I hide my head and my doll from the bombs. My doll already has no arms or legs. I weep and ask mama to bandage her…

  Someone brought mama a leaflet. I already know what that is. It’s a big letter from Moscow, a nice letter. Mama talks with grandma, and I understand that our uncle is with the partisans. Among our neighbors there was a family of polizei. You know how children are: they go out and each one boasts of his papa. Their boy says, “My papa has a submachine gun…”

  I, too, want to boast: “And we got a leaflet from our uncle…”

  The polizei’s mother heard it and came to mama to warn her: it would be death to our family if her son heard my words or one of the children told him.

  Mama called me in from outside and begged: “Darling daughter, you won’t talk about it anymore?”

  “I will, too!”

  “You shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “So he can, and I can’t?”

  Then she pulled a switch from the broom, but she was sorry to whip me. She stood me in the corner.

  “If you talk about it, your mama will be killed.”

  “Uncle will come from the forest in a plane and save you.”

  I fell asleep there in the corner…

  Our house is burning. Someone carries me out of it, sleepy. My coat and shoes get burned up. I wear mama’s blazer; it reaches to the ground.

  We live in a dugout. I climb out of the dugout and smell millet kasha with lard. To this day nothing seems tastier to me than millet kasha with lard. Somebody shouts, “Our troops have come!” In Aunt Vasilisa’s kitchen garden—that’s what mama calls her, but the children call her “Granny Vasya”—stands a soldiers’ field kitchen. They give us kasha in mess tins, I remember precisely that it was mess tins. How we ate it I don’t know, there were no spoons…

  They held out a jug of milk to me, and I had already forgotten about milk during the war. They poured the milk into a cup, I dropped it and it broke. I cried. Everybody thought I was crying because of the broken cup, but I was crying because I spilled the milk. It was so tasty, and I was afraid they wouldn’t give me more.

  After the war, sicknesses began. Everybody got sick, all the children. There was more sickness than during the war. Incomprehensible, isn’t it?

  An epidemic of diphtheria…Children died. I escaped from a locked-up house to bury twin brothers who were our neighbors and my friends. I stood by their little coffins in mama’s blazer and barefoot. Mama pulled me away from there by my hand. She and grandma were afraid that I, too, was infected with diphtheria. No, it was just a cough.

  There were no children left in the village at all. No one to play outside with…

  “I’LL OPEN THE WINDOW AT NIGHT…AND GIVE THE PAGES TO THE WIND…”

  Zoya Mazharova

  TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A POSTAL WORKER.

  I saw an angel…

  He appeared…Came to me in a dream when we were transported to Germany. In a boxcar. Nothing could be seen there, not a spot of sky. But he came…

  You’re not afraid of me? Of my words? I hear voic
es, then I see an angel…Once I start talking about it, not everybody wants to listen for very long. People rarely invite me to visit. To a festive table. Not even the neighbors. I keep talking, talking…Maybe I’ve grown old? I can’t stop…

  I’ll begin from the beginning…The first year of the war I lived with papa and mama. I reaped and plowed, mowed and threshed. We gave it all to the Germans: grain, potatoes, peas. They came in the fall on horseback to collect—what’s it called? I’ve forgotten the word—quitrent. Our polizei also came with them. We all knew them, they were from the next village. That’s how we lived. We were used to it, one might say. Hitler was already near Moscow, we were told. Near Stalingrad.

  During the night the partisans used to come…They told us otherwise: Stalin won’t give up Moscow for anything. And he won’t give up Stalingrad.

  And we plowed and reaped. On Sundays and holidays in the evenings we had dances. We danced in the street. We had an accordion.

  I remember it happened on Palm Sunday…We broke off pussy willow branches,* went to church. Gathered in the street. Waiting for the accordionist. Then a whole lot of Germans arrived. In big covered trucks, with German shepherds. They surrounded us and ordered us to get into the trucks. They pushed us with their rifle butts. Some of us wept, some shouted…Before our parents came running, we were already in the trucks. Under the tarpaulins. There was a railway station nearby. They brought us there. Empty boxcars were already standing there waiting. A polizei pulled me into a boxcar. I tried to break loose. He wound my braid around his hand.

  “Don’t shout, fool. The Führer is delivering you from Stalin.”

  “What do we care about that foreign place?” They had already agitated us before then about going to Germany. Promised us a beautiful life.