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

Time passed, I don’t remember how much…Maybe four months. I remember that that day I gathered last year’s frozen potatoes in a field. I came home wet, hungry, but I brought a full bucket. I had just taken my wet bast shoes off, when there was knocking on the door of the cellar we lived in. Somebody asked, “Is Baikachev here?” When I appeared in the cellar door, I was ordered to come out. I hurriedly put on a budenovka instead of a winter hat, for which I got a whipping at once.

By the cellar stood three horses, with Germans and polizei^* mounted on them. One of the polizei dismounted, put a strap around my neck, and tied me to the saddle. Mother began to beg: “Let me feed him.” She went back to the cellar to get a flatbread of defrosted potatoes, and they whipped up the horses and set off at a trot. They dragged me like that for three miles to the village of Vesely.

At the first interrogation the fascist officer asked simple questions: last name, first name, date of birth…Who are your father and mother? The interpreter was a young polizei. At the end of the interrogation he said, “Now you’ll go and clean the torture room. Take a good look at the bench there…” They gave me a bucket of water, a broom, a rag, and took me there…

There I saw a terrible picture: in the middle of the room stood a wide bench with three leather straps nailed to it. Three straps to tie a man by the neck, the waist, and the legs. In the corner stood thick birch rods and a bucket of water. The water was red. On the floor were pools of blood…of urine…of excrement…

I kept bringing more and more water. The rag I used was red anyway.

In the morning the officer summoned me.

“Where are the weapons? Who are you connected with in the underground? What were your assignments?” The questions poured out one after the other.

I denied everything, saying that I knew nothing, that I was young and gathered frozen potatoes in the field, not weapons.

“Take him to the cellar,” the officer ordered the soldier.

They took me down into a cellar with cold water. Before that they showed me a partisan who had just been taken out of there. He couldn’t stand the torture and drowned…Now he lay in the street…

The water came up to my neck…I felt my heart beat and the blood in my veins pulsate and heat the water around my body. My fear was to lose consciousness. To inhale the water. To drown.

The next interrogation: the barrel of a pistol was shoved against my ear, fired—a dry floorboard cracked. They shot at the floor! The blow of a stick at my neck vertebra, I fall down…Someone big and heavy stands over me. He smells of sausage and cheap vodka. I feel nauseous, but I have nothing to throw up. I hear: “Now you’re going to lick up what you did on the floor…With your tongue, understand…Understand, you red whelp?!”

Back in the cell I didn’t sleep, but lost consciousness from pain. Now it seemed to me that I was at a school lineup and my teacher Liubov Ivanovna Lashkevich was saying, “In the fall you’ll enter the fifth grade, and now, children, goodbye. You’ll all grow up over the summer. Vasya Baikachev is now the smallest, and he’ll become the biggest.” Liubov Ivanovna smiled…

And then my father and I are walking in the fields, looking for our dead soldiers. Father is somewhere ahead of me, and I find a man under a pine tree…Not a man, but what’s left of him. He has no arms, no legs…He’s still alive and he begs, “Finish me off, sonny…”

The old man who lies next to me in the cell wakes me up.

“Don’t shout, sonny.”

“What did I shout?”

“You asked me to finish you off…”

Decades have passed, and I’m still wondering: am I alive?!

* Russians who served as police under the German occupation were given the German name of polizei, which in Russian became both singular and plural.

“AND I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A SCARF ON…”

Nadia Gorbacheva SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW WORKS IN TELEVISION.

I’m interested in the inexplicable in the war…I still think a lot about it…

I don’t remember how my father left for the front…

We weren’t told. They wanted to spare us. In the morning he took me and my sister to kindergarten. Everything was the same as ever. In the evening we asked, of course, why father wasn’t there, but mama reassured us: “He’ll come back soon. In a few days.”