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

I began my story with a partisan unit, which I did not get to at once. Only by the end of the second year of the war. I didn’t tell you how, a week before the war, mama and I went to Minsk, and she took me to a Pioneer camp near town…

In the camp we sang songs: “If There Is War Tomorrow,” “Three Tankers,” “Over Hill and Dale.” This last one my father liked very much. He often hummed it…Just then the movie The Children of Captain Grant was released, and I liked a song from that movie: “Hey, merry wind, sing us a song…” I sang this song running out to do morning exercise.

That day there was no morning exercise, there were planes roaring over us…I looked up and saw black dots coming down from the planes. We knew nothing about bombs yet. Next to the Pioneer camp was a railroad, and I walked along it to Minsk. My calculation was simple: there was a railroad station near the medical institute where mama worked at the time. If I follow the rails I’ll come to mama. I took with me a boy who lived not far from the station. He was much younger than me and cried a lot. He also walked slowly, while I liked to walk. My father and I walked everywhere in the suburbs of my native Leningrad. Of course I was annoyed…Still we did make it to the Minsk train station, reached the Western Bridge. There another bombing began, and I lost him.

Mama was not in the institute. Not far from there lived Professor Golub, with whom mama worked, and I found his apartment. But it was empty…Many years later I learned what had happened: as soon as the bombing of the city began, mama hitched a ride in a car and went to Ratomka by the high road. She arrived and saw the devastated camp…

Everybody was leaving the city and going somewhere. I decided that Leningrad was farther away than Moscow, and although my papa lived in Leningrad, he was at the front, but I had aunts in Moscow, and they surely wouldn’t go away anywhere. They wouldn’t because they lived in Moscow…In our capital…On the road I kept near a woman with a little girl. I didn’t know the woman, but she realized that I was alone and had nothing and that I was hungry. She called me: “Come to us, we’ll eat together.”

I remember that I ate onion with lard then for the first time in my life. I winced to begin with, but then I ate it. Whenever the bombing began, I always watched for where this woman with her girl was. In the evening we chose a ditch and settled for a rest. We were constantly bombed. The woman looked around and cried out…I also got up and looked in the direction she had just looked in, and saw a low-flying plane and little fires flashing next to the propeller on the wings. And, in the wake of these fires, little spurts of dust rising along the road. Quite instinctively I tumbled to the bottom of the ditch. The machine-gun burst rattled over my head, and the plane flew farther on. I got up and saw that woman lying on the side of the ditch with a bloody spot instead of a face. Then I got frightened, jumped out of the ditch, and ran. The question of what happened to that little girl has tormented me ever since, even now. I never met her again…

I reached some village…German wounded lay outside under the trees. So I saw Germans for the first time…

The villagers had been driven out of their houses, forced to carry water, the German medical orderlies heated it on a bonfire in big buckets. In the morning they put the wounded men in trucks and also one or two boys in each truck. They gave us flasks of water and showed how we should help: one needs to have a handkerchief wetted and placed on his head, another to have his lips wetted. A wounded man begs: “WasserWasser…” You put the flask to his lips, and you shake all over. Even now I can’t determine the feeling I experienced then. Squeamishness? No. Hatred? No again. It was everything together. And pity, too…Hatred is a feeling that gets formed in a man, it’s not an innate thing. At school we were taught to be kind, to love. I’ll skip ahead again…When I was first hit by a German, I didn’t feel pain, it was something else. How can it be that he hit me? By what right? It was a shock.

I went back to Minsk.

And I made friends with Kim. We got acquainted in the street. To my question, “Who do you live with?” he replied, “Nobody.”

I learned that he, too, had gotten lost, and I suggested, “Let’s live together.”

“Yes, let’s.” He was glad because he had no place to live. But I lived in the abandoned apartment of Professor Golub.

Once Kim and I saw a fellow a bit older than us walking down the street carrying a stand for shining shoes. We listened to his advice: what kind of box we needed, how to make shoe polish. To make shoe polish we needed soot, and the city was full of it, far more than we needed. It had to be mixed with some oil. In short, we prepared some sort of stinking mixture, but it was black. And if it was neatly spread it even shone.

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Дмитрий Владимирович Зубов , Дмитрий Михайлович Дегтев , Дмитрий Михайлович Дёгтев

Документальная литература / История / Образование и наука