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

Not far from our parts was the town of Kraslava. Aunt Arina said we had to go there and get to the orphanage. She was already very sick, and she asked that we be taken there. We were brought there early in the morning, the gates were still closed, they deposited us by the window of the orphanage and left. The sun rose in the morning…Children ran out of the house, all wearing red shoes, trunks without tops, towels in their hands. They ran to the river, laughing. And we watched…We didn’t believe that there could be a life like that. The children noticed us—we were sitting there raggedy, dirty—and shouted, “New ones have come!” They called the teachers. No one asked us for any papers. They brought some bread and cans of food right away. We didn’t eat, we were afraid that this happiness would suddenly end. This impossible happiness…They reassured us: “Sit here for now, girls, we’ll go to heat the bath house. We’ll wash you and show you where you’ll live.”

In the evening the director came, saw us, and said that they were overcrowded and that we had to be taken to the Minsk children’s center and from there sent to some orphanage. When we heard that again we had to go somewhere, we began to cry and begged them to let us stay. The director said, “Don’t cry, children. I can’t bear the sight of your tears.” She called somewhere, and we were allowed to stay in that orphanage. It was a beautiful, wonderful orphanage; the teachers there were such as probably don’t exist now. With such hearts! How could they have kept such hearts after the war?

They loved us very much. Taught us how to behave with each other. There was this incident. They told us that if you treat someone to candies, don’t take them out of the bag, but offer the whole bag. And the person it’s offered to should take one candy, not the whole bag. One boy was absent when we had this conversation. The sister of one girl came and brought a box of candies. The girl offered the box to that boy, and he took the whole box from her. We laughed. He was embarrassed and asked, “What should I have done?” They told him that he was supposed to take one candy. Then he realized: “I see now—we should always share. Otherwise it’s good for me, but bad for everybody else.” Yes, we were taught to act so that it’s good for everybody, not for some one person. It was easy to teach us, because we had been through a lot.

The older girls made book bags for everybody, they even made them out of old skirts. On holidays the director of the orphanage always rolled out raw dough into a pancake huge as a sheet. Each of us cut off a piece and made a dumpling of whatever shape we wanted: small, big, round, triangular…

When there were many of us together, we rarely remembered our papas and mamas. But when we were sick in a special ward, and lay there with nothing to do, they were all we talked about, and about how we wound up in the orphanage. One boy told me that all his family were burned up while he was riding a horse to the neighboring village. He said he was very sorry for his mama, very sorry for his papa, but most of all he was sorry for little Nadenka. Little Nadenka lay in white swaddling clothes, and they burned her. Or else, when we gathered in a small circle in the clearing, we told each other about home. About how we had lived before the war.

A little girl was brought to the orphanage. They asked her, “What’s your last name?”

“Marya Ivanovna.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Marya Ivanovna.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Marya Ivanovna.”

Her only response was “Marya Ivanovna.” Our teacher was Marya Ivanovna, and this girl was Marya Ivanovna.

For the New Year she recited a poem by Marshak: “I had a pretty little chicken.”^* And the children nicknamed her “Chicken.” Children are children, we were all tired of calling her Marya Ivanovna. Then one of our boys went to see his friend at a vocational school that had taken us under its patronage, and they argued about something, and he called the other boy “Chicken.” The boy was hurt. “Why did you call me ‘Chicken’? Do I look like a chicken?” And our boy said that there was a girl in our orphanage who resembled him very much. She had the same nose, the same eyes, and we called her “Chicken,” and he told him why.

It turned out that the girl was that boy’s sister. When they met, they remembered that they had ridden in a cart…Their grandmother had heated something for them in a can, and then she had been killed during a bombing…And an old neighbor, the grandmother’s friend, called to her when she was already dead: “Marya Ivanovna, get up, you have two grandchildren…How could you die, Marya Ivanovna? Why did you die, Marya Ivanovna?” It turned out that the girl remembered it all, but she wasn’t sure that she did and that it had all happened to her. She only had two words in her ears: Marya Ivanovna.