Last Witnesses : An Oral History of the Children of World War II

“It would be beautiful, if it weren’t for the war,” the commander said and looked away for some reason.

I was fourteen years old…

* The Solovetsky Islands (also known collectively as Solovki), in the White Sea, were the location of a fortified monastery founded in 1436, then of a notorious Soviet hard-labor camp from 1926 to 1939. A naval academy was set up there just prior to the start of WWII.

“MY LITTLE BROTHER CRIES, BECAUSE HE WASN’T THERE WHEN PAPA WAS THERE…”

Larissa Lisovskaya SIX YEARS OLD. NOW A LIBRARIAN.

I remember my papa…And my little brother…

Papa was with the partisans. The fascists captured him and shot him. Some women told mama where they had been executed—papa and several other people. She ran to where they lay…All her life she remembered that it was cold, the puddles were glazed with ice. They lay in their stocking feet…

Mama was pregnant. She was expecting our little brother.

We had to hide. The families of the partisans were arrested. They seized them with the children. Took them away in canvas-covered trucks…

We stayed for a long time in our neighbors’ cellar. Spring was already beginning…We lay on potatoes, and the potatoes sprouted…You fall asleep and during the night a sprout pops up and tickles you near the nose. Like a little bug. I had bugs living in my pockets. In my socks. I wasn’t afraid of them—either by day or by night.

We got out of the cellar and mama gave birth to our little brother. He grew, began to speak, and we used to remember papa:

“Papa was tall…”

“Strong…How he used to toss me in his arms!”

That was me and my sister talking, and our little brother would ask, “And where was I?”

“You weren’t there yet…”

He begins to cry, because he wasn’t there when papa was there…

“THAT GIRL WAS THE FIRST TO COME…”

Nina Yaroshevich NINE YEARS OLD. NOW TEACHER OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION.

There was a big event in our home…

In the evening a suitor came to propose to my eldest sister. There was a discussion well into the night about when the wedding would take place, where the couple would register their marriage, how many guests to invite. And early in the morning my father was summoned to the recruiting office. The noise spread over the village—war! Mama was at a loss—what were we to do? I thought of just one thing: living through that day. No one had explained to me yet that war was not for a day or two, but maybe for a very long time.

Now it’s summer, a hot day. I’d like to go to the river, but mama prepares us for the road. We also had a brother who was just discharged from the hospital; he had had an operation on his foot, and he came home on crutches. But mama said, “We all must go.” Where? Nobody knew anything. We walked some three miles. My brother hobbled and cried. How could we go with him? We turned back. At home our father was waiting for us. The men who went to the recruiting office in the morning all came back; the Germans had already taken our regional center. The town of Slutsk.

The first shells came flying. I stood and watched them before they hit the ground. Someone taught us that you should open your mouth so as not to be deafened. So we opened our mouths, stopped our ears, and could still hear them coming. Whining. It’s so frightening that the skin on your face and your whole body gets taut. There was a bucket hanging in our yard. When everything became quiet, we took it down: we counted fifty-eight holes. The bucket was white, they thought someone was standing there in a white kerchief, and they shot at it…Just for fun…

The first Germans rode into the village in big trucks adorned with birch branches. The way we did when there was a wedding. We used to break a lot of birch branches…We watched them through the wattle fences. We didn’t have fences then, but wattle fences. Made of vines. We tried to get a look at them…They seemed like ordinary people…I wanted to see what kind of heads they had. For some reason I had this idea that they had inhuman heads…Rumors were already going around that they killed people. Burned them. But they rode about laughing. Pleased, suntanned.

In the morning they did exercises in the schoolyard. Doused themselves with cold water. Rolled up their sleeves, got on their motorcycles—and off they went.

A few days later they dug a big pit outside the village next to the milk factory. Every day at around five or six in the morning shots were heard from there. Whenever they started shooting, even the cocks stopped crowing and hid themselves. One evening my father and I were riding in the cart, and he stopped the horse not far from that pit. “I’ll go and have a look,” he said. His cousin had been shot there. He went, and I followed him.