Our house stood near an army hospital. The hospital was bombed, and I saw wounded men on crutches fall out of the windows. Our house caught fire…Mama ran into the flames: “I’ll get some clothes for the children.”
Our house burned…Our mama burned…We rushed after her, but people caught us and held us back: “You won’t save your mama, children.” We ran where everybody else did. There were dead people lying around…The wounded moaned, asked for help. How could we help them? I was eleven, my sister nine. We lost each other…
We met again in the orphanage of Ostroshitsk village, near Minsk. Before the war our father took us there to a Pioneer camp. A beautiful place. The Germans turned the Pioneer camp into an orphanage. Everything was both familiar and alien. For several days there was nothing but weeping, nothing but tears: we were left without parents, our house was burned down. The house mistresses were the same, but the rules were German. A year later…I think it was a year later…they began selecting children to be taken to Germany. They selected not by age but by size, and unfortunately I was tall, like our father, while my sister was short, like our mother. The trucks came. They were surrounded by Germans with submachine guns. I was driven onto a truck. My sister cried, they pushed her, fired under her feet to keep her from coming to me. So we were separated…
The train car. Jam-packed…A whole car full of children, none older than thirteen. Our first stop was Warsaw. No one gave us anything to eat or drink, only some little old man came with his pockets full of folded pieces of paper on which the prayer “Our Father” was written in Russian. He gave each of us one of these papers.
After Warsaw we rode for two more days. Were brought to what seemed to be a sanitation center. Were all stripped naked, boys and girls together. I wept from shame. The girls wanted to be on one side, the boys on the other, but we were all herded together and they aimed a hose at us…With cold water…With some strange smell I never met with afterward, and I don’t know what disinfectant was in it. They paid no attention whether it was eyes, or mouth, or ears—they performed their sanitary treatment. Then they handed us striped trousers and tops like pajamas, wooden sandals for our feet, and on our chests were pinned metal labels saying Ost (“East”).
They drove us outside and lined us up as for a roll call. I thought they would take us somewhere, to some camp, but someone whispered behind me, “We’re going to be sold.” An old German man came over, selected three girls and myself, paid the money and pointed to a wagon with some straw in it: “Get in!”
We were brought to some estate…There was a big, tall house with an old park around it. We were housed in a shed. Half of it was occupied by twelve dogs, the other half by us. At once there was work for us in the field—to gather stones, so that plows and seeders didn’t break. The stones had to be stacked neatly in one place. In our wooden sandals, our feet got all covered with blisters. We were fed with bad bread and skim milk.
One girl couldn’t bear it and died. They drove her body to the forest on a horse drawn cart and put her in the ground just like that. The wooden sandals and striped pajamas were brought back to the estate. I remember her name was Olya.
There was a very old German man there who fed the dogs. He spoke very poor Russian, but he tried to encourage us saying, “Kinder, Hitler kaput. Russky kom.” He would go to the chicken coop, steal some eggs in his hat, and hide them in his toolbox—he also did carpentry on the estate. He’d take an ax and pretend to go and do some work, but instead he’d put his toolbox next to us and look around, gesturing to us to make us eat quickly. We sucked the eggs and buried the shells.
Two Serbian boys who also worked on this estate talked to us. They were slaves like us. They told us their secret…They confessed that they had a plan. “We must escape, otherwise we’ll all die, like Olya. They’ll put us in the ground in the forest and bring back the wooden clogs and pajamas.” We were afraid, but they persuaded us. It was like this…Behind the estate was a swamp. We snuck off there in the morning unnoticed and then ran for it. We ran in the direction of the sunrise, to the east.
In the evening we all collapsed in the bushes and fell asleep. We were exhausted. In the morning we opened our eyes—it was quiet, only toads croaking. We got up, washed with dew, and started on our way. We walked a little and saw a high road ahead of us and on the other side a dense and beautiful forest. Our salvation. One boy crawled over, looked at the road, and called to us, “Let’s run!” We ran out onto the road, and a German truck with armed soldiers drove out of the forest to meet us. They surrounded us and started beating and trampling the boys.
They threw them dead into the truck, and put me and another girl next to them. They said that the boys were lucky, and you’ll be luckier still, Russian swine. They knew by the labels that we were from the east. We were so frightened that we didn’t even cry.
They brought us to a concentration camp. There we saw children sitting on straw with lice crawling on them. The straw was brought from the fields that began right behind the barbed wire with live electric current.
Every morning an iron bar clanged, in came a laughing officer and a beautiful woman, who said to us in Russian, “Whoever wants kasha quickly line up by twos. We’ll take you to eat…”
The children stumbled, shoved, everybody wanted kasha.
“We only need twenty-five,” the woman said as she counted. “Don’t quarrel, the rest of you can wait till tomorrow.”
At first I believed her, and ran and shoved along with the little children, but then I became afraid: “Why did those who were led away to eat kasha not come back?” I started sitting right by the steel door at the entrance, and even when there were only a few of us left, the woman still didn’t notice me. She always stood and counted with her back to me. I can’t tell how long it went on. I think…I lost memory then…
I never saw a single bird or even a beetle in the concentration camp. I dreamed of seeing at least a worm. But they didn’t live there…
One day we heard noise, shouts, shooting. The iron bar clanged—and our soldiers burst in shouting, “Dear children!” They took us on their shoulders, in their arms, several children at a time, because we weighed nothing by then. They kissed us, embraced us, and wept. They took us outside…
We saw the black chimney of the crematorium…
They fed us, treated us medically for several weeks. They asked me, “How old are you?”
I replied, “Thirteen…”
“And we thought, maybe eight.”
When we became stronger, they took us in the direction of the sunrise.
Home…
“A WHITE SHIRT SHINES FAR OFF IN THE DARK…”
Efim Friedland
NINE YEARS OLD. NOW DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF A SILICATE FACTORY.
My childhood ended…with the first gunshots. A child still lived inside me, but now alongside someone else…
Before the war, I was afraid to be left alone in the apartment, but then the fear went away. I no longer believed in my mother’s hobgoblins crouching behind the stove, and she stopped mentioning them. We left Khotimsk on a cart. My mother had bought a basket of apples; she set it beside my sister and me and we ate. The bombing started. My sister was holding two nice apples in her hands, and we began fighting over them. She wouldn’t give them up. My mother yelled, “Hide!”—but we were quarreling over the apples. We fought until I asked my sister, “Give me at least one apple, or I’ll die without having tasted them.” She gave me one, the nicest one. Then the bombing stopped. I didn’t eat the lucky apple.
We rode on the cart, and ahead of us went a herd. We knew from our father (before the war, in Khotimsk, he was the director of the stockyard) that they weren’t ordinary cows, but a breeding herd, which had been purchased abroad for big money. I remember that my father was unable to explain how much “big money” it was, until he gave the example that each cow
was worth a tractor. A tank. If it’s a tank, that means it’s a lot. We cherished each cow.
Since I grew up in the family of a zootechnician, I liked animals. After the umpteenth bombing, we were left without our cart, and I walked in front of the herd, tied to the bull Vaska. He had a ring in his nose with a rope tied to it, and I tied myself to the end of the rope. For a long time, the cows couldn’t get used to the bombings. They were heavy, not suited for these long marches; their hooves cracked, and they got terribly tired. After the shelling, it was hard to round them up, but if the bull went on the road, they all followed him. And the bull obeyed only me.
During the night, my mother would wash my white shirt somewhere…At dawn First Lieutenant Turchin, who led the convoy, shouted, “Rise and shine!” I would put on the shirt and set off with the bull. I remember that I always wore a white shirt. It shone in the dark, everybody could see me from far off. I slept next to the bull, under his front legs—it was warmer that way. Vaska never got up first; he waited until I got up. He sensed that a child was next to him, and he could cause him harm. I lay with him and never worried.
We reached Tula on foot. Nearly a thousand miles. We walked for three months, walked barefoot by then, everything we had on was in shreds. There were few herdsmen left. The cows had swollen udders, we had no time to milk them. The udder is sore, the cow stands next to you and looks. I had cramps in my hands from milking fifteen or twenty cows a day. I can still see it: a cow lay on the road with a broken hind leg, milk dripping from her bruised udder. She looked at people. Waited. The soldiers stopped—and took up their rifles to shoot her, so she wouldn’t suffer. I asked them to wait…
I went over and let the milk out on the ground. The cow gratefully licked my shoulder. “Well.” I stood up. “Now shoot.” But I ran off so as not to see it…
In Tula we learned that the entire breeding herd we had brought would go to the slaughterhouse—there was nowhere else to put them. The Germans were nearing the city. I put on my white shirt and went to say goodbye to Vaska. The bull breathed heavily in my face…
…May 1945…We were returning home. Our train was approaching Orsha. At that moment I was standing by the window. My mother came over to me. I opened the window. My mother said, “Can you smell our swamps?” I rarely cried, but here I sobbed. During our evacuation, I even dreamed of how we cut the swamp hay, how it was gathered in haystacks, and how it smelled, having dried and cured a bit. Our very own inimitable smell of swamp hay. It seems to me that only we in Belorussia have this pungent smell of swamp hay. It followed me everywhere. I even smelled it in my sleep.
On Victory Day, our neighbor Uncle Kolya ran outside and started firing into the air. The boys surrounded him.
“Uncle Kolya, let me!”
“Uncle Kolya, let me…”
He let everybody. And I fired a shot for the first time…
“ON THE CLEAN FLOOR THAT I HAD JUST WASHED…”
Masha Ivanova
EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER.
We had a close-knit family. We all loved each other…
My father fought in the Civil War. After that he walked with crutches. But he was head of a kolkhoz; his was a model farm. When I learned to read, he showed me clippings from the newspaper Pravda about our kolkhoz. As best chairman, he was sent before the war to a congress of “shock kolkhozniks” and to an agricultural exposition in Moscow. He brought me back pretty children’s books and a tin of chocolates.
Mama and I loved our papa. I adored him, and he adored us. Mama and me. Maybe I’m embellishing my childhood? But in my memory, everything from before the war is joyful and bright. Because…it was childhood. Real childhood…
I remember songs. The women return from the fields singing songs. The sun is setting over the horizon, and from behind the hill, drawn-out singing reaches us:
It’s time to go home. It’s time.
Twilight is upon us…
I run to meet the song—there is my mama, I hear her voice. Mama picks me up, I embrace her tightly around the neck, jump back down and run ahead, and the song catches up, filling the entire world around me—and it’s so joyful, so good!
After such a happy childhood…suddenly…all at once—war!
My father went off in the early days…He was assigned to work in the underground. He didn’t live at home, because everyone here knew him. He came home only at night.
One day I heard him talking with my mother.
“We blew up a German truck on the road near…”
I coughed on the stove, my parents were startled.
“Nobody must know about this, dear daughter,” they warned me.
I started being afraid of the night. Father comes to us at night, and the fascists find out and take away our papa, whom I love so much.
I always waited for him. I would climb to the farthest corner of our big stove, hugging my grandmother, but I was afraid to fall asleep, and if I did, I kept waking up. A storm howled through the chimney, the damper trembled and clanked. I had one thing in mind: don’t oversleep and miss papa.
Suddenly it seemed to me that it wasn’t a storm howling, but my mother crying. I had a fever. Typhus.
My father came back late at night. I was the first to hear him, and I called to my grandmother. My father was cold, and I was burning hot. He sat by my side and couldn’t leave. Weary, aged, but my own, my very own. There was unexpected knocking at the door. Loud knocking. My father didn’t even have time to slip on his coat. Polizei broke into the house. They pushed him outside. I went after him, he reached out for me, but they hit his hands with their guns. They beat him on the head. I ran after him barefoot through the snow as far as the river and shouted, “Papa! Dear papa…” My grandmother was wailing in the house: “And where is God? Where is He hiding?”
My father was killed…
My grandmother couldn’t bear such grief. She cried more and more softly, and after two weeks she died at night, on the stove. I was sleeping next to her and held her in my arms, dead. There was no one left in the house; my mother and brother were hiding in a neighbor’s house.
After my father’s death, my mother, too, became quite different. She never left the house. She only talked about my father, and got tired quickly, though before the war she had been a Stakhanovite, always the very best.* She didn’t notice me, though I always tried to catch her attention. To gladden her somehow. But she brightened up only when we remembered papa.
I remember how happy women came running: “A boy from the nearby village has been sent on horseback—the war is over. Our men will come home soon.”
My mother collapsed on the clean floor that I had just washed…
* A Stakhanovite was a follower of the example of Alexei Stakhanov (1906–1977), a coal miner who in less than six hours dug fourteen times his daily quota of coal. The Stakhanovite movement started in 1935, and the title was highly honored.
“DID GOD WATCH THIS? AND WHAT DID HE THINK?…”
Yura Karpovich
EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A DRIVER.
I saw what shouldn’t be seen…What a man shouldn’t see. And I was little…
I saw a soldier who was running and seemed to stumble. He fell. For a long time he clawed at the ground, he clung to it…
I saw how they drove our prisoners of war through our village. In long columns. In torn and burned greatcoats. Where they stayed overnight, the bark was gnawed off the trees. Instead of food, they threw them a dead horse. The men tore it to pieces.
I saw a German train go off the rails and burn up during the night, and in the morning they laid all those who worked for the railroad on the tracks and drove a locomotive over them…
I saw how they harnessed people to a carriage. They had yellow stars on their backs. They drove them with whips. They rode along merrily.
/> I saw how they knocked children from their mother’s arms with bayonets. And threw them into the fire. Into a well…Our turn, mama’s and mine, didn’t come…
I saw my neighbor’s dog crying. He sat in the ashes of our neighbor’s house. Alone. He had an old man’s eyes…
And I was little…
I grew up with this…I grew up gloomy and mistrustful, I have a difficult character. When someone cries, I don’t feel sorry; on the contrary, I feel better, because I myself don’t know how to cry. I’ve been married twice, and twice my wife has left me. No one could stand me for long. It’s hard to love me. I know it…I know it myself…
Many years have passed…Now I want to ask: Did God watch this? And what did He think?
“THE WIDE WORLD IS WONDROUS…”
Ludmila Nikanorova
TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.
I wish I could remember…Did we talk about war before the war?
Songs played on the radio: “If There Is War Tomorrow” and “Our Armor Is Strong and Our Tanks Are Swift.” Children could sleep peacefully…
Our family lived in Voronezh. The city of my childhood…In the schools, many teachers were part of the old intelligentsia. A high level of musical culture. The children’s choir of our school, where I sang, was very popular in the city. I believe everyone loved the theater.
Our house was inhabited by military families. A four-story house with rooms along the corridors; in summer, a sweet-scented acacia bloomed in the yard. We played a lot in the little park in front of the house. There were hiding places there. I was very lucky with my parents. My father was a career soldier. All through my childhood, I had seen military uniforms. My mother had a gentle character, golden hands. I was their only daughter. As expected in such cases, I was persistent, capricious, and shy at the same time. I took lessons of music and ballet dancing at the House of the Red Army. On Sundays—the only day when he wasn’t busy—papa loved walking around the city with us. My mother and I had to walk to his left, as my father kept greeting oncoming officers and raising his right hand to his visor.
Last Witnesses Page 18