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

I had to carry my papers with me.

When Alexei Mikhailovich asked me, “Would you like to be our son?” I answered, “I’d like it very much.”

They adopted me, gave me their last name—Kniazev.

For a long time I couldn’t call them “papa” and “mama.” Nina Maximovna loved me straight off, pitied me. If there was something sweet, it was always for me. She wanted to caress me. To be nice to me. But I didn’t like sweets, because I had never eaten them. Our life before the war was poor, and in the army I got used to everything soldiers get. And I wasn’t a gentle boy, because I had lived among men and hadn’t seen any special gentleness for a long time. I didn’t even know any gentle words.

Once I woke up during the night and heard Nina Maximovna weeping behind the partition. She had probably wept before, but she did it when I didn’t see or hear it. She wept and complained, “He’ll never be our own, he won’t be able to forget his parents…His blood…There’s so little of the child in him, and he isn’t gentle.” I went up to her quietly and put my arm around her neck: “Don’t cry, mama.” She stopped crying, and I saw her glistening eyes. It was the first time I had called her “mama.” After a while I called my father “papa.” Only one thing remained: I couldn’t stop addressing them rather formally.

They didn’t try to make me into a pampered boy, and I’m grateful to them for that. I had clear duties: to tidy up the house, to shake out the doormats, to bring firewood from the shed, to light the stove after school. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to get a higher education. They instilled it in me that one must study, and after the war one must study well. Only well.

While still in the army, when our unit was stationed in Zhitkovichi, the commander had ordered Volodia Pochivadlov, Vitia Barinov, and me to study. The three of us sat at the same desk in the second grade. We carried weapons, and we didn’t recognize any authority. We didn’t want to obey civilian teachers: how can they give us orders if they’re not in military uniform? The only authorities for us were commanders. A teacher walks in, the whole class rises, we go on sitting.

“Why are you sitting?”

“We’re not going to answer you. We only obey our commander.”

During the long break we lined up all the students by platoons and taught them to march and sing soldiers’ songs.

The director of the school came to the unit and told the political commissar about our behavior. We were put in the guardhouse and demoted. Vovka Pochivadlov, who had been a sergeant major, became a sergeant; I had been a sergeant and became a junior sergeant. Vitka Barinov had been junior sergeant and became corporal. The commander had a long talk with each of us, trying to bring home to us that As and Bs in arithmetic were more important for us then than any medals. Our combat mission was to study well. We wanted to shoot, but they told us we had to study.

Even so we wore our medals to school. I keep a photo of myself wearing medals, sitting at the desk drawing for our Pioneer newspaper.

Whenever I brought an A home from school, I shouted from the porch, “Mama, I got an A!”

And it was so easy for me to say “mama”…

“WE EVEN FORGOT THAT WORD…”

Anya Gurevich TWO YEARS OLD. NOW A RADIO ENGINEER.

Either I remember it, or mama told me later…

We walk down the street. It’s hard for us to walk: mama is sick, my sister and I are small—my sister is three years old, I’m two. How could we be saved?

Mama wrote a note: last name, first name, year of birth. She put the note in my pocket and said, “Go.” She showed me the house. There were children running around there…She wanted me to be evacuated with the orphanage; she was afraid we’d all be killed. She wanted to save at least one of us. I had to go alone: if mama were to take me there, they would send us both away. They took only children who had been left without parents, but I had mama. My whole fate lay in my going without looking back. Otherwise I would never have left mama, I would have thrown myself on her neck in tears, and no one would have forced me to stay in a strange house. My fate…

Mama said, “Go and open that door.” So I did. But this orphanage did not have time to evacuate…

I remember a big room…And my little bed by the wall. And many such little beds. We had to make them ourselves, very carefully. The pillow always had to be in the same place. If we did it differently, the house mistresses scolded us, especially when some men in black suits came. Policemen or Germans—I don’t know, I remember black suits. I don’t remember that we were beaten, but there was the fear that you could be beaten for something. I don’t remember our games…mischief…We were very active—tidied up, washed—but that was work. No childhood memories…laughter…fretting…

No one ever caressed us, but I didn’t weep about mama. No one around me had a mama. We didn’t even remember the word. We forgot it.