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

Mama said that we would be evacuated, that they had given us a cart. We had to take the most necessary things. I remember there was a big wicker hamper in the corridor. We put this hamper on the cart. My little sister took her doll. Mama wanted to leave the doll…It was a big doll…My sister cried, “I won’t leave her!” We rode out of Rossony, and our cart tipped over, the hamper opened, and shoes poured out of it. It turned out that we had taken nothing with us: no food, no changes of clothes. Mama had lost her head and confused the hampers. She had taken the one in which she kept shoes to be repaired.

Before we had time to pick up these shoes, the planes came flying and began to bomb us, to strafe us with machine guns. Our doll was all bullet-riddled, but my sister was perfectly unharmed, without a scratch. She wept: “I still won’t leave her.”

We went back and began to live under the Germans. Mama would go to sell our father’s clothes. I remember the first time when she traded his two-piece suit for some peas. We ate pea soup for a month. We finished the soup. We had a big old quilted blanket. Mama cut it up to make warm boots, and if anyone wanted them, they paid her as they could. Sometimes we ate mash, sometimes we had one egg for all of us…But often we had nothing. Mama just hugged us and caressed us…

Mama didn’t tell us that she was helping the partisans, but I figured it out. She often went off somewhere and didn’t say where. Whenever she went to trade something, we knew about it, but then she would just go off—and that was that. I was proud of mama and said to my sisters, “Soon our troops will come. Uncle Vanya (papa’s brother) will come.” He fought with the partisans.

That day mama poured milk into a bottle, kissed us, and left, and locked the door with a key. The three of us got under the table covered with a big tablecloth, where it was warm, and played “Mothers-and-Daughters.” Suddenly we heard the rattle of motorcycles, then a terrible knocking on the door and a man’s voice calling my mother’s name distortedly. Incorrectly. I had a bad feeling. There was a ladder standing outside our window on the side of the kitchen garden. We climbed down it on the sly. Quickly. I grabbed one sister’s hand, put the other one on my shoulders—we call that “eeny-meeny”—and walked outside.

There were many people gathered there. And children. Those who came to get mama didn’t know us and didn’t find us. They broke down the door…I saw mama appear on the road, so small, so thin. The Germans saw her, ran up the hill, seized her, twisted her arms, and began to beat her. We ran and shouted, all three of us, shouted with all our might: “Mama! Mama!” They shoved her into the motorcycle sidecar, she just called out to a neighbor: “Fenia, dear, look after my children.” The neighbors led us away from the road, but they were afraid to take us: what if the Germans came to get us? So we went to cry in a ditch. We couldn’t go home, we’d already heard that in another village the parents were taken away and the children were burned, locked up in the house and burned. We were afraid to go to our own house…This lasted probably for three days. We sat in the chicken coop, then we’d go to the kitchen garden. We wanted to eat, but we didn’t touch anything in the kitchen garden, because mama scolded us for pulling out carrots before they were grown and picking off the peas. We didn’t take anything, and we said to each other that mama would be upset that without her we destroyed everything in the kitchen garden. Of course that’s what she would think. She wouldn’t know that we hadn’t touched anything. That we were obedient. The adults sent us with their children—some boiled a turnip, some a potato, some a beet…

Then Aunt Arina took us in. She had one boy left, she had lost the other two when she went away with the refugees. We kept remembering mama, and Aunt Arina took us to the prison commandant to ask for a meeting. The commandant said that we couldn’t talk to mama, that he would only allow us to pass by her window.

We went past the window and I saw mama…We were led very quickly, and I was the only one who saw mama, my sisters didn’t have time. Mama’s face was red, I realized she had been badly beaten. She also saw us and only cried out, “Children! My girls!” And she didn’t look out the window anymore. Afterward we were told that she had seen us and fainted…

Several days later we learned that mama had been shot. My sister Raya and I understood that our mama was no more, but the youngest, Tomochka, kept saying that once mama came back she would tell her how we mistreated her and didn’t carry her in our arms. When we were given food, I gave her the best pieces. I remembered mama doing that…