Last Witnesses

by Svetlana Alexievich

  I woke up to my mother’s crying. Yes, it felt like I’d been sleeping. I got up and saw mama digging a pit and crying. She stood with her back to me, and I didn’t have the strength to call to her, I only had the strength to look at her. Mama straightened up to rest, turned her head toward me, and cried out, “Innochka!” She threw herself at me, picked me up. She held me with one arm, and with the other she felt the rest of us: what if one of the other children was alive? No, they were cold…

  After I was treated, mama and I counted: I had nine bullet wounds. I learned to count: in one shoulder—two bullets, and in the other—two bullets. That made four. In one leg—two bullets, and in the other—two bullets. That made eight. And on the neck—a wound. That made it nine.

  The war ended. My mother carried me to first grade in her arms…

  “MY DEAR DOG, FORGIVE ME…MY DEAR DOG, FORGIVE ME…”

  Galina Firsova

  TEN YEARS OLD. NOW RETIRED.

  I had a dream—to catch a sparrow and eat it…

  Sometimes, but rarely, birds appeared in the city. Even in spring, everybody looked at them and thought of only one thing, the same thing I thought of. The same thing…Nobody had strength enough to stop thinking about food. From hunger, I constantly felt cold inside, a terrible inner cold. Even on sunny days. No matter how many clothes I put on, I was cold, I couldn’t get warm.

  We really wanted to live…

  I’m telling you about Leningrad, where we lived then. About the siege of Leningrad. They starved us to death, for a long time. Nine hundred days of siege…Nine hundred…When one day could seem like an eternity. You can’t imagine how long a day can seem to a hungry man. Or an hour, a minute…The long wait for lunch. Then for dinner. The daily ration during the siege went down to 125 grams of bread. That was for those who didn’t work. A dependent’s ration. The bread was oozing water…It was divided into three pieces—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We drank only boiled water. Plain boiled water.

  In the dark…From six in the morning, in the winter (I mostly remember the winter), I stood in line at the bakery. We stood for hours. Long hours. When my turn came, it was dark outside again. A candle burns, and the counterman cuts those pieces. People stand and watch him. His every move…with burning, mad eyes…And all this in silence.

  There were no trams. No water, no heating, no electricity. But the worst thing was the hunger. I saw a man chewing his buttons. Small buttons and big ones. People went crazy from hunger…

  There was a moment when I stopped hearing. Then we ate the cat…I’ll tell you how we ate it. Then I went blind…They brought us a dog. That saved me.

  I can’t remember…I’ve forgotten when the idea that we could eat our cat or our dog became normal. Ordinary. It became part of our life. I didn’t keep track of that moment…After the pigeons and swallows, cats and dogs suddenly started disappearing in the city. We didn’t have any, we didn’t take one in, because mama believed it was a great responsibility to have a dog, especially a big one, in the house. But my mama’s friend couldn’t eat her own cat, so she brought it to us. And we ate it. I started hearing again…I had lost my hearing unexpectedly. In the morning I could still hear, but in the evening, mama said something and I didn’t respond.

  Time passed…And we started dying again…Mama’s friend brought us her dog. And we ate it, too. If it weren’t for that dog, we wouldn’t have survived. We certainly wouldn’t have survived. It’s obvious. We had started to swell from hunger. My sister didn’t want to get up in the morning…The dog was big and gentle. For two days, mama couldn’t…How could she make up her mind? On the third day, she tied the dog to the radiator in the kitchen and sent us outside…

  I remember those meatballs…I remember…

  We really wanted to live…

  Often we gathered and sat around papa’s photograph. Papa was at the front. We rarely received letters from him. “My dear girls…” he wrote to us. We answered, but we tried not to upset him.

  Mama kept several pieces of sugar. A small paper bag. It was our golden reserve. One day…I couldn’t resist, I knew where the sugar was, I climbed up and took a piece. Several days later, another one…Then…Some time went by—and again…Soon there was nothing left in mama’s little bag. An empty bag…

  Mama fell ill…She needed glucose. Sugar…She couldn’t stand up anymore…At the family council, we decided to fetch the precious little bag. Our treasure! Well, we had saved it for such a day! Mama would most certainly recover. My older sister went searching, but there was no sugar. We ransacked the entire house. I searched along with everyone.

  But in the evening I confessed…

  My sister beat me. Bit me. Scratched me. And I begged her, “Kill me! Kill me! How can I go on living?!” I wanted to die.

  I’ve told you about a few days. But there were nine hundred.

  Nine hundred days like that…

  Before my eyes a girl stole a bread roll from a woman in the market. A little girl…

  She was caught and knocked to the ground. They started beating her…Beat her terribly. Beat her to death. But she hurried to eat, to swallow the roll. To swallow it before they killed her.

  Nine hundred days like that…

  Our grandfather became so weak that one time he fell down in the street. He had already said goodbye to life. A worker passed by, workers had better ration cards, slightly, but better…Anyhow…So this worker stopped and poured sunflower oil in my grandfather’s mouth—his ration. Grandfather walked back home, told us, and wept: “I don’t even know his name!”

  Nine hundred…

  People moved slowly around the city, like shadows. Like in sleep…In deep sleep…I mean, you see it, but you think you’re dreaming. Those slow…those floating movements…It’s like the person isn’t walking on the ground, but on water…

  People’s voices changed from hunger. Or disappeared completely. It was impossible to identify people by their voices—a man or a woman? Or by their clothes. Everybody was wrapped in some kind of rags. Our breakfast…our breakfast was a piece of wallpaper, old wallpaper, but it still had paste on it. Flour paste. So there was this wallpaper…and boiled water…

  Nine hundred days…

  I walk home from the bakery…I’ve got my daily ration. Those crumbs, those miserable grams…And a dog runs toward me. He comes up to me and sniffs—he smells the bread.

  I understood that this was our chance. This dog…Our salvation! I’ll bring the dog home…

  I gave him a piece of bread, and he followed after me. Near the house I nipped off another piece. He licked my hand. We went through the entryway. But he went up the stairs reluctantly, he stopped on every floor. I gave him all our bread…Piece by piece…So we went up to the fourth floor, and our apartment was on the fifth. There he stopped and wouldn’t go any farther. He looked at me…as if he sensed something. Understood. I hugged him: “My dear dog, forgive me…My dear dog, forgive me…” I asked him, I begged him. And he went.

  We really wanted to live…

  We heard…They said on the radio, “The siege is broken! The siege is broken!” We were the happiest of people. There could be no greater happiness. We had survived! The siege was broken…

  Our soldiers walked down our street. I ran up to them…But I wasn’t strong enough to embrace them.

  There are many monuments in Leningrad, but one that should be there is missing. We forgot about it. It’s a monument to the dogs of the siege.

  My dear dog, forgive me…

  “AND SHE RAN AWAY: ‘THAT’S NOT MY DAUGHTER! NOT MI-I-INE!’ ”

  Faina Lyutsko

  FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. NOW A CINEMA WORKER.

  Every day I remember, but I still live…How do I live? Explain to me…

  I remember that the death squads were all in black, black…With tall
caps…Even their dogs were black. Shiny.

  We clung to our mothers…They didn’t kill everyone, not the whole village. They took those who stood on the right. On the right side. And we were there with mama…We were separated: children here, and parents there. We understood that they were about to execute the parents and leave us to ourselves. Mama was there…I didn’t want to live without mama. I asked to stay with her and cried. Somehow they let me through…

  As soon as she saw me, she shouted, “That’s not my daughter!”

  “Mama dear! Ma…”

  “That’s not my daughter! Not my daughter! Not mi-i-ine…”

  “Mama-a-a!

  Her eyes weren’t filled with tears, but with blood. Eyes full of blood…

  “That’s not my daughter!”

  They dragged me away somewhere…And I saw how they first shot the children. They shot and watched how the parents suffered. My two sisters and my two brothers were shot. Once the children were killed, they began killing the parents. I didn’t see my mama anymore…Mama probably fell down…

  A woman stood holding a young baby in her arms; he was sucking at a little bottle of water. They first shot at the bottle, then at the baby…Only after that did they kill the mother…

  I’m surprised that I can live after all that. I survived as a child…But how do I live as a grown-up? I’ve been a grown-up for a long time now…

  “WERE WE REALLY CHILDREN? WE WERE MEN AND WOMEN…”

  Victor Leshchinsky

  SIX YEARS OLD. NOW DIRECTOR OF AN ENERGY TECHNICAL SCHOOL.

  I went to visit my aunt. She invited me for the summer…

  We lived in Bykhovo, and my aunt in the village of Kommuna, near Bykhovo. In the center of the village there was a long house, for about twenty families—a communal house. That’s all I’ve managed to remember.

  They said “War.” I had to go back to my parents. My aunt didn’t let me go.

  “When the war ends, you can go.”

  “And will it end soon?”

  “Of course.”

  After some time, my parents came on foot: “The Germans are in Bykhovo. People are fleeing to the villages.” We stayed at my aunt’s.

  In the winter partisans came to the house…I asked for a rifle. They were my mother’s nephews, my cousins. They laughed and let me hold one. It was heavy.

  The house always smelled of leather. And warm glue. My father made boots for the partisans. I asked him to make boots for me. He told me, “Wait, I have a lot of work.” And, I remember, I showed him that I needed small boots, I had a small foot. He promised…

  The last memory I have of my father is of how they led him down the street to a big truck…And they hit him on the head with a stick…

  …The war ended, we had no father, and no home. I was eleven, I was the oldest in the family. The other two, my brother and sister, were little. My mother took out a loan. We bought an old house. The roof was in such condition that, if it rained, there was nowhere to hide, it leaked everywhere. The water poured through. At the age of eleven, I repaired the windows myself, covered the roof with straw. I built a shed…

  How?

  The first log I rolled in and placed by myself; with the second one my mother helped. We weren’t strong enough to lift them any higher. Here’s what I did: I would trim the log on the ground, make a notch, and wait until the women set off for work in the fields. In the morning, they would all grab it together and lift it, I would fit it a bit and set it down in the notch. By evening, I would have trimmed another one. They came back from work in the evening, and lifted…And so the little wall grew…

  There were seventy households in the village, but only two men came back from the front. One on crutches. “Baby! My dear baby!” my mother lamented over me. In the evening I fell asleep wherever I sat down.

  Were we really children? By the age of ten or eleven, we were men and women…

  “DON’T GIVE SOME STRANGER PAPA’S SUIT…”

  Valera Nichiporenko

  EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A BUS DRIVER.

  This was already in 1944…

  I was probably eight years old. I think I was eight…We knew by then that we had no father. Others waited. They had received death notices, but they still waited. But we had a trustworthy sign. A proof. A friend of our father’s sent his watch. To his son…To me…That was my father’s request to him before dying. I still have that watch, I cherish it.

  The three of us lived on my mother’s small salary. We got by on bread and water. My sister fell ill. She was diagnosed with open tuberculosis. The doctors told mama that she needed good food, she needed butter. Honey. And that every day. Butter! For us it was like gold. Solid gold…Something unbelievable…At market prices mama’s salary was enough for three loaves of bread. And for that money you could buy maybe two hundred grams of butter.

  We still had my father’s suit. A good suit. We took it to the market with mama. We found a buyer, found him quickly. Because the suit was fancy. My father bought it just before the war and hadn’t gotten to wear it. The suit had hung in the closet…Brand-new…The buyer asked the price, bargained, and gave mama the money, and I started yelling for the whole market to hear, “Don’t give some stranger papa’s suit!” A policeman even came up to us…

  Who can say after that, that children weren’t in the war? Who…

  “AT NIGHT I CRIED: WHERE IS MY CHEERFUL MAMA?…”

  Galya Spannovskaya

  SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A DESIGN TECHNICIAN.

  Memories have colors…

  Everything before the war, I remember in motion: it moves and changes colors. The colors are mostly bright. But the war, the orphanage—it all becomes still. And the colors turn gray.

  We were taken to the rear. Only children. Without mamas. We rode for a long time, somehow very long. We ate cookies and cocoa butter; apparently they didn’t manage to stock up on anything else for the road. Before the war, I loved cookies and cocoa butter—they’re very tasty. But after a month on the road, I stopped liking them forever.

  All through the war I kept wishing mama would come soon, and we could go back to Minsk. I dreamed of the streets, the movie theater near our house, I dreamed of the tramway bells. My mother was very nice, very cheerful. We lived together like girlfriends. I don’t remember papa, we lost him early.

  And then my mother located me and came to the orphanage. It was completely unexpected. What joy! I run to mama…I open the door…There stands a soldier, in boots, trousers, a cap, and an army shirt. Who is it? And it turns out to be my mama. Pure joy! Mama, and what’s more, a soldier!

  I don’t remember her leaving. I cried a lot, that’s obviously why I don’t remember.

  Again I wait and wait for mama. Three years I waited. This time mama came in a dress. In shoes. The joy of being taken back kept me from seeing anything. There was just mama—and this joy! I looked at mama, but I didn’t notice she was missing an eye. Mama—it was such a miracle…Nothing could happen to her…Mama! But mama came back from the front very sick. She was a different mama now. She seldom smiled, she didn’t sing, didn’t joke like she used to. She cried a lot.

  We went back to Minsk and lived a very hard life. We didn’t find our house, which I had loved so much. The movie theater was gone…and our streets…Instead of it all—stones and more stones…

  Mama was always sad. She didn’t joke and spoke very little. She was mostly silent. At night, I cried: where is my cheerful mama? But in the morning I smiled, so that mama wouldn’t guess about my tears…

  “HE WON’T LET ME FLY AWAY…”

  Vasya Saulchenko

  EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A SOCIOLOGIST.

  After the war, the same dream tormented me for a long time…

  A dream about the first German I killed. I killed him myself, I d
idn’t just see him dead. Either I’m flying, and he prevents me. I’m going up…flying…flying…He overtakes me, and we fall together. We fall down into some pit. Or I want to rise, to stand up…and he won’t let me…Because of him I can’t fly away…

  One and the same dream…It haunted me for decades…

  By the time I killed that German, I had already seen a lot…I had seen my grandfather being shot in the street, and my grandmother near the well…Before my eyes, I saw them beat my mother on the head with a rifle butt…Her hair turned red…But when I shot at that German, I had no time to think of it. He was wounded…I wanted to take away his submachine gun, I had been told to take away his submachine gun. I was ten years old, the partisans had already taken me on missions. I ran up to the German and saw a gun dancing before my eyes. The German had seized it with both hands and was aiming it at my face. But he didn’t manage to shoot first. I did…

  I wasn’t frightened that I had killed him…And I didn’t think about him during the war. There were many dead all around, we lived among the dead. We even got used to it. Only once did I get frightened. We walked into a village that had just been burned down. It had been burned in the morning, and we arrived in the evening. I saw a burned woman…She lay, all black, but her hands were white, a living woman’s hands. That’s when I first felt frightened. I could barely keep from screaming.

  No, I wasn’t a child. I don’t remember myself as a child. Although…I wasn’t afraid of the dead, but I was afraid of walking through a graveyard at night. The dead on the ground didn’t frighten me, but those under the ground did. A child’s fear…It stayed with me. Though…though I don’t think children are afraid of anything…