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

We entered the forest, and it became less frightening. From the forest I saw big trucks. It was the Germans coming, and they were laughing loudly. I heard unfamiliar speech. There was a lot of r-r-r in it…

My parents kept asking each other: where are our soldiers? our army? I pictured to myself that at any moment Budenny would come galloping on his warhorse, and the Germans would flee in terror. There was nothing to equal our cavalry—so my father had convinced me recently.

We walked for a long time. At night we stopped at farms. They fed us, kept us warm. Many of them knew my father, and my father knew many of them. We stopped at one farm, I still remember the name of the teacher who lived there—Pauk [“Spider”]. They had two houses—a new and an old one side by side. They offered to let us stay; they would give us one of the houses. But my father declined. The owner drove us to the high road. Mama tried to give him money, but he shook his head and said that he could not take money for friendship at a difficult moment. I remembered that.

So we reached the town of Uzda, my father’s native area. We lived at my grandfather’s in the village of Mrochki.

I saw partisans in our house for the first time that winter, and ever since, my picture of them has been of people in white camouflage smocks. Soon my father left with them for the forest, and mama and I stayed with my grandfather.

Mama was sewing something…No…She was sitting at the big table and doing embroidery on a tambour, and I was sitting on the stove. The Germans came into the cottage with the village headman, and the headman pointed at mama: “Here she is.” They told mama to get ready. Then I became very frightened. Mama was taken outside, she called me to say goodbye, but I huddled under a bench and they couldn’t pull me out from there.

They took mama and two other women whose husbands were with the partisans, and drove somewhere. No one knew where. In which direction. The next day they were found not far outside the village. They lay in the snow…It had snowed all night…What I remember, from when my mama was brought home, was that for some reason they had shot her in the face. She had several black bullet holes in her cheek. I kept asking my grandfather, “Why did they shoot her in the face? My mama was so beautiful…” Mama was buried…My grandfather, my grandmother, and I followed the coffin. People were afraid. They came to take leave of her during the night…All night our door stayed open, but during the day we were by ourselves. I couldn’t understand why they had killed my mama, if she hadn’t done anything bad. She was sitting and embroidering…

One night my father came and said he was taking me with him. I was happy. At first my partisan life was not much different from my life with grandfather. Father would go on a mission and leave me with someone in a village. I remember a woman I was staying with had her dead husband brought to her on a sledge. She beat her head against the table on which the coffin stood and repeated the one word, fiends.

Father was absent for a very long time. I waited for him and thought, “I have no mama, grandpa and grandma are somewhere far away, what will I, a little boy, do, if they bring me my dead father on a sledge?” It seemed like an eternity before my father returned. While I was waiting, I promised myself to address him only formally from then on. I wanted to emphasize how I loved him, how I missed him, and that he was my only one. At first my father probably didn’t notice how I addressed him, but then he asked, “Why do you address me formally?” I confessed to him what I had promised myself and why. But he explained to me, “You, too, are my only one, so we should address each other informally. We’re the closest to each other in the world.” I also asked him that we never part from each other. “You’re already an adult, you’re a man,” my father persuaded me.

I remember my father’s gentleness. We were under fire…We lay on the cold April ground, there was no grass yet…Father found a deep depression and told me, “You lie underneath and I’ll lie on top. If they kill me, you’ll stay alive.” Everybody in the unit pitied me. I remember an older partisan came up, took my hat off, and caressed my head for a long time, saying to my father that he had a boy like that running around somewhere. And when we walked through a swamp, up to our waists in water, father tried to carry me on his back, but quickly became tired. Then the partisans started taking turns carrying me. I’ll never forget that. I won’t forget how they found a little sorrel and gave it all to me. And went to sleep hungry.