Last Witnesses

by Svetlana Alexievich

  I remember a big, long coffin, yet my father wasn’t tall. “Why does he need such a big coffin?” I wondered. Then I decided that father had been badly wounded, and it would be less painful for him this way. That’s how I explained it to the neighbors’ boy.

  Sometime later, also in the morning, some Germans came and took mama and me. They put us on the square in front of the factory where my father had worked before the war (in the village of Smolovka, Vitebsk region). We stood there with two more partisan families. There were more children than adults. Everybody knew that mama had a big family, five brothers and five sisters, all of them with the partisans.

  They started beating mama. The whole village watched her being beaten, and we did, too. Some woman kept bending my head down toward the ground. “Lower your eyes, lower your eyes.” I kept wiggling out of her hands. I watched…

  Beyond the village was a woody hill. They left the children and led the adults there. I clung to mama, she kept pushing me away and cried out, “Farewell, children!” I remember her dress rising in the wind as she fell into the trench…

  Our troops came, and I saw an officer with epaulettes. I liked it so much that I made epaulettes for myself out of birch bark and drew the insignia with coal. I fixed them on the peasant coat my aunt had made for me, and went as I was—in my best shoes—to report to Captain Ivankin (my aunt told me his name) that Vanya Sigalev wanted to fight the Germans together with him. First there was joking, laughing, then they asked my aunt about my parents. When they discovered that I was an orphan, the soldiers sewed little tarpaulin boots for me overnight, shortened an army coat, made a smaller hat, smaller epaulettes. Someone even fabricated an officer’s shoulder strap. Thus I became a son of the special demining unit No. 203. They enlisted me as a liaison. I tried to do my best, but I couldn’t read or write. When mama was still alive, my uncle had told me, “Go to the railway bridge and count how many Germans are there…” How could I count? He poured a handful of grain into my pocket, and I put the grains one by one from the right pocket to the left. And my uncle counted them afterward.

  “War is war, but you’ve still got to learn to read and write,” said the party organizer Shaposhnikov.

  The soldiers got hold of some paper, he made a notebook out of it, and wrote the alphabet and the multiplication table in it. I memorized it and recited it for him. He would bring an empty shell box, draw lines on it, and say, “Write.”

  In Germany there were already three of us boys—Volodia Pochivadlov, Vitia Barinov, and me. Volodia was fourteen years old, Vitia seven, and by then I was nine. We were great friends, like brothers, because we had no one else.

  But when I saw Vitia Barinov play “war” with German boys and give one of them his forage cap with a little star, I shouted that he was no longer a brother to me. He would never again be a brother to me! I grabbed my trophy pistol and ordered him to go to our unit’s bivouac. And there I put him under arrest in some closet. He was a private and I was a junior sergeant, so I conducted myself like a superior in rank.

  Someone told Captain Ivankin about it. He summoned me. “Where is Private Vitia Barinov?”

  “Private Barinov is in the guardhouse,” I reported.

  The captain spent a long time explaining to me that all children are good, that they’re not to blame for anything, that Russian and German children will be friends once the war is over.

  The war ended. I was awarded three medals: “For the Taking of Königsberg,” “For the Taking of Berlin,” and “For Victory over Germany.” Our unit returned to Zhitkovichi, and there we demined the fields. I learned by chance that my older brother was alive and living in Vileika.

  With a recommendation for a Suvorov School, I escaped to Vileika. I found my brother there, and soon a sister came to join us. So we already had a family. We set up house in some attic. But it was hard with provisions until I put on my uniform, pinned my three medals to it, and went to the town council.

  I came. Found a door with a sign plate: CHAIRMAN. Knocked. Went in and reported according to regulations: “Junior Sergeant Sigalev comes to petition for state provisions.”

  The chairman smiled and rose to meet me.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “In an attic.” And I gave him the address.

  In the evening they brought us a sack of cabbage, two days later a sack of potatoes.

  Once the chairman met me in the street and gave me an address: “Come in the evening, someone will be expecting you.”

  I was met by a woman. She was his wife. Her name was Nina Maximovna, his Alexei Mikhailovich. They gave me something to eat, I washed myself. My army things were now too small for me, so they gave me a couple of shirts.

  I started coming to see them, first occasionally, then more often, then every day. A military patrol would meet me and ask, “Whose medals have you pinned on, lad? Where’s your father?”

  “I have no father…”

  I had to carry my papers with me.

  When Alexei Mikhailovich asked me, “Would you like to be our son?” I answered, “I’d like it very much.”

  They adopted me, gave me their last name—Kniazev.

  For a long time I couldn’t call them “papa” and “mama.” Nina Maximovna loved me straight off, pitied me. If there was something sweet, it was always for me. She wanted to caress me. To be nice to me. But I didn’t like sweets, because I had never eaten them. Our life before the war was poor, and in the army I got used to everything soldiers get. And I wasn’t a gentle boy, because I had lived among men and hadn’t seen any special gentleness for a long time. I didn’t even know any gentle words.

  Once I woke up during the night and heard Nina Maximovna weeping behind the partition. She had probably wept before, but she did it when I didn’t see or hear it. She wept and complained, “He’ll never be our own, he won’t be able to forget his parents…His blood…There’s so little of the child in him, and he isn’t gentle.” I went up to her quietly and put my arm around her neck: “Don’t cry, mama.” She stopped crying, and I saw her glistening eyes. It was the first time I had called her “mama.” After a while I called my father “papa.” Only one thing remained: I couldn’t stop addressing them rather formally.

  They didn’t try to make me into a pampered boy, and I’m grateful to them for that. I had clear duties: to tidy up the house, to shake out the doormats, to bring firewood from the shed, to light the stove after school. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to get a higher education. They instilled it in me that one must study, and after the war one must study well. Only well.

  While still in the army, when our unit was stationed in Zhitkovichi, the commander had ordered Volodia Pochivadlov, Vitia Barinov, and me to study. The three of us sat at the same desk in the second grade. We carried weapons, and we didn’t recognize any authority. We didn’t want to obey civilian teachers: how can they give us orders if they’re not in military uniform? The only authorities for us were commanders. A teacher walks in, the whole class rises, we go on sitting.

  “Why are you sitting?”

  “We’re not going to answer you. We only obey our commander.”

  During the long break we lined up all the students by platoons and taught them to march and sing soldiers’ songs.

  The director of the school came to the unit and told the political commissar about our behavior. We were put in the guardhouse and demoted. Vovka Pochivadlov, who had been a sergeant major, became a sergeant; I had been a sergeant and became a junior sergeant. Vitka Barinov had been junior sergeant and became corporal. The commander had a long talk with each of us, trying to bring home to us that As and Bs in arithmetic were more important for us then than any medals. Our combat mission was to study well. We wanted to shoot, but they told us we had to study.

  Even so we wore our medals to school. I keep a
photo of myself wearing medals, sitting at the desk drawing for our Pioneer newspaper.

  Whenever I brought an A home from school, I shouted from the porch, “Mama, I got an A!”

  And it was so easy for me to say “mama”…

  “WE EVEN FORGOT THAT WORD…”

  Anya Gurevich

  TWO YEARS OLD. NOW A RADIO ENGINEER.

  Either I remember it, or mama told me later…

  We walk down the street. It’s hard for us to walk: mama is sick, my sister and I are small—my sister is three years old, I’m two. How could we be saved?

  Mama wrote a note: last name, first name, year of birth. She put the note in my pocket and said, “Go.” She showed me the house. There were children running around there…She wanted me to be evacuated with the orphanage; she was afraid we’d all be killed. She wanted to save at least one of us. I had to go alone: if mama were to take me there, they would send us both away. They took only children who had been left without parents, but I had mama. My whole fate lay in my going without looking back. Otherwise I would never have left mama, I would have thrown myself on her neck in tears, and no one would have forced me to stay in a strange house. My fate…

  Mama said, “Go and open that door.” So I did. But this orphanage did not have time to evacuate…

  I remember a big room…And my little bed by the wall. And many such little beds. We had to make them ourselves, very carefully. The pillow always had to be in the same place. If we did it differently, the house mistresses scolded us, especially when some men in black suits came. Policemen or Germans—I don’t know, I remember black suits. I don’t remember that we were beaten, but there was the fear that you could be beaten for something. I don’t remember our games…mischief…We were very active—tidied up, washed—but that was work. No childhood memories…laughter…fretting…

  No one ever caressed us, but I didn’t weep about mama. No one around me had a mama. We didn’t even remember the word. We forgot it.

  Here’s how they fed us: they gave us a bowl of mash and a piece of bread a day. I didn’t like mash and I gave my portion to a girl, and she gave me her piece of bread. We became friends because of it. Nobody paid any attention until one house mistress noticed our exchange. They put me on my knees in the corner. I spent a long time kneeling by myself. In a big empty room…To this day whenever I hear the word mash I immediately want to weep. When I grew up I couldn’t understand why this word provoked such revulsion in me. I forgot about the orphanage…

  I was already sixteen, no, probably seventeen…I met my house mistress from the orphanage. There was a woman sitting on a bus…I looked at her and felt drawn to her as if by a magnet, drawn so much that I missed my stop. I didn’t know the woman, I didn’t remember her, but I was drawn to her. I finally couldn’t stand it, burst into tears, and got angry with myself: what’s the matter with me? I looked at her as at a painting I had seen once, but had forgotten, and wanted to look at again. And there was something dear, maybe like mama…closer than mama, but who she was I didn’t know. And this anger, these tears just gushed out of me! I turned away, went to the exit, stood there, and cried.

  The woman saw it all, came up to me and said, “Don’t cry, Anechka.”

  I cried still more from those words of hers. “But I don’t know you.”

  “Look better!”

  “I swear I don’t know you.” And I howled.

  She led me off the bus.

  “Look closely at me, you’ll remember everything. I’m Stepanida Ivanovna…”

  I stood my ground.

  “I don’t know you. I’ve never met you.”

  “Do you remember the orphanage?”

  “What orphanage? You must be taking me for someone else.”

  “No, remember the orphanage…I was your house mistress.”

  “My papa was killed, but I have mama. What orphanage?”

  I had forgotten about the orphanage, because I was already living with mama. At home. This woman gently stroked my head, but all the same my tears poured down. Then she said, “Here’s my phone number…Call me if you want to learn about yourself. I remember you well. You were our littlest girl…”

  She went away, and I couldn’t move from the spot. I should, of course, have run after her, asked all sorts of questions. I didn’t run and catch up with her.

  Why didn’t I? I was a wild thing, simply a wild thing. For me people were something alien, dangerous, I didn’t know how to speak with anybody. I sat for hours talking to myself. Was afraid of everything.

  Mama found me only in 1946…I was eight years old. She had been taken to Germany together with my sister, where they somehow survived. When they came back, mama searched in all the orphanages in Belarus. She lost all hope of finding me. Yet I was right there…in Minsk. But evidently the little note mama had given me got lost, and I was registered under another last name. Mama looked at all the girls called Anya in the Minsk orphanages. She decided that I was her daughter by my eyes, and because I was tall. For a week she kept coming and looking at me: was I her Anechka or not? My first name had stayed with me. When I saw mama, some incomprehensible feelings came over me, I began to cry for no reason. No, those were not memories of something familiar, it was something else…People around me said, “Mama. Your mama.” And some new world opened for me—mama! A mysterious door was thrown open…I knew nothing about people called “mama” and “papa.” I was frightened, while others rejoiced. Everybody smiled at me.

  Mama invited our prewar neighbor to come with her: “Find my Anechka here.”

  The neighbor immediately pointed at me.

  “Here’s your Anka! Don’t hesitate, take her. Your eyes, your face…”

  In the evening the house mistress came up to me: “Tomorrow you’ll be picked up, you’ll leave.”

  I was terrified.

  In the morning they washed me, dressed me, everybody was nice to me. Our gruff old nanny smiled at me. I realized that this was my last day with them, that they were taking leave of me. Suddenly I didn’t even feel like going anywhere. They changed me into everything mama brought—mama’s shoes, mama’s dress—and that way I was already separated from my orphanage friends…I stood among them like a stranger. And they gazed at me as if they were seeing me for the first time.

  My greatest impression at home was the radio. There were no radio sets yet, but a black dish hung in the corner, and the sound came from there. I looked at it every moment. I ate and looked at it, went to bed and looked at it. How could people be there, how did they all get inside? Nobody could explain it to me, because I was unsociable. In the orphanage I had been friends with Tomochka. I liked her because she was cheerful, smiled often, and nobody liked me, because I never smiled. I began to smile when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. At school I used to hide my smile. I didn’t want people to see me smile, I was embarrassed. I didn’t know how to communicate, even with the girls: they would talk about all sorts of things during recess, and I couldn’t say anything. I sat and was silent.

  Mama took me from the orphanage, and a couple of days later we went to a market together. There I saw a policeman and had hysterics. I shouted, “Mama, Germans!”—and started to run.

  Mama rushed after me, people surrounded me, and I was shaking all over: “Germans!”

  After that I refused to go out for two days. Mama tried to explain to me that it was a policeman, who protects us and keeps order in the street, but I refused to be persuaded. No way…The Germans who came to our orphanage wore black army coats…True, when they took blood from us, they led us to a separate room and wore white smocks, but I didn’t remember the white smocks. I remembered their black uniforms…

  At home I couldn’t get used to my sister. She should have been someone close, but I was seeing her for the first time in my life, and for some reason s
he was my sister. Mama was at work all day long. We woke up in the morning and she was already gone. There were two pots of kasha in the oven, we had to serve ourselves. I waited for mama all day long—as something extraordinary, as some sort of happiness. But she came home late, when we were already asleep.

  I found a doll somewhere, not really a doll, only a doll’s head. I loved it. It was my joy. I carried it around from morning till night. It was my only toy. I dreamed of having a ball. I would come out to the yard, all the children had balls, they carried them in special nets, that’s how they were sold. I would ask, and they would let me hold it for a while.

  I bought myself a ball when I was eighteen and got my first salary at the clock factory. My dream came true: I brought the ball and hung it up in its net. I was ashamed to go outside with it, because I was grown up, so I sat at home and looked at it.

  Many years later I decided to go to Stepanida Ivanovna. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, but my husband insisted: “Let’s go together. How is it you don’t want to find out anything about yourself?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to. I’m afraid.”

  I dialed her home number and heard the response: “Stepanida Ivanovna Dediulia has died…”

  I can’t forgive myself…

  “YOU SHOULD GO TO THE FRONT, BUT YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH MY MAMA…”

  Yania Chernina

  TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER.

  An ordinary day…That day began as usual…

  But while I was riding on the tram, people were already saying, “How awful! How awful!” and I couldn’t understand what had happened. I came running home and saw my mama. She was kneading dough, and tears poured from her eyes. I asked, “What’s happened?” The first thing she said was, “War! Minsk has been bombed…” And we had just come back to Rostov from Minsk, after visiting my aunt.

  On the first of September we still went to school, but on the tenth the school was closed. The evacuation of Rostov began. Mama said that we must prepare to leave, but I protested: “What evacuation can there be?” I went to the regional Komsomol Committee and asked to join ahead of time. They refused, because the age for joining Komsomol was fourteen and I was only twelve. I thought that if I became a Komsomol member, I would be able to take part in everything right away, would become an adult at once. Would be able to go to the front.