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

We reached the Kavkazskaya station. The train was destroyed by bombs. We climbed onto some open flatcar. Where we were going we had no idea. We knew one thing: we were going away from the front line. From the battles. It poured rain. Mama covered me with herself. At the Baladzhary station near Baku we got off wet and black from the engine smoke. And hungry. Before the war we had lived modestly, very modestly. We didn’t have nice things that we could take to the market to exchange or sell. Mama only had her passport with her. We sat at the train station and didn’t know what to decide. Where to go. A soldier walked by, not even a soldier—a very little soldier, dark, with a sack on his shoulders, and carrying a mess tin. You could see he had just been taken into the army and was going to the front. He stopped near us. I clung to mama. He asked, “Where are you going, woman?”

Mama said, “I don’t know. We’re being evacuated.”

He spoke Russian, but with a heavy accent.

“Don’t be afraid of us, go to our aul,^* to my mother. All our men have been taken into the army: my father, me, my two brothers. She’s all alone. Help her, and you’ll survive together. I’ll come back and marry your daughter.”

And he told us his address. We had nowhere to write it down, so we memorized it: Musa Musaev, village of Kum, Evlakh station, Kakh district. I’ve remembered the address all my life, though we didn’t go there. We were taken by a single woman who lived in a makeshift plywood hut, which had room only for a bed and a small bedside table. We slept on the floor sideways with our legs under the bed.

We were lucky to meet nice people…

I’ll never forget how an officer came up to mama. They talked, and he told her that his whole family had been killed in Krasnodar, and that he was going to the front. His comrades shouted, called him to the train, and he stood there and couldn’t leave us.

“I see that you’re in distress. Allow me to leave you my army certificate. I have no one else left,” he said suddenly.

Mama wept. But I understood it all in my own way. I started yelling at him.

“There’s war…Your whole family got killed. You should go to the front and take revenge on the fascists, but you fall in love with my mama. Shame on you!”

He and my mother stand there, and they both have tears in their eyes, and I can’t understand how my good mama can talk with such a bad man: he doesn’t want to go to the front; he talks about love, but there can be love only in peacetime. Why did I decide that he was talking about love? He only mentioned his army certificate…

I also want to tell about Tashkent…Tashkent was my war. We lived in the dormitory of the factory where mama worked. It was in the center of the city, in the former club. Family people lived in the vestibule and the auditorium, and the “bachelors” lived on the stage—they were called “bachelors,” but in fact they were workers whose families had been evacuated elsewhere. Mama and I were placed in a corner of the auditorium.

We were given coupons for thirty pounds of potatoes. Mama worked in the factory from morning till night, and I had to go and get these potatoes. I spent half a day waiting in a line, and then dragged the sack on the ground for four or five blocks, because I couldn’t lift it. Children weren’t allowed on public transportation, because there was flu going around and they had announced a quarantine. Just then…No matter how I begged, they wouldn’t allow me on a bus. When I only had to cross the street to get to our dormitory, I ran out of strength, fell on the sack, and burst into sobs. Some strangers helped me: they brought me and the potatoes to the dormitory. I can still feel that weight. Each of those blocks…I couldn’t abandon those potatoes, they were our salvation. I’d have died before abandoning them. Mama used to come back from work hungry, blue.

We were starving, and mama became as skinny as I was. The thought that I had to help somehow never left me. Once we had nothing to eat at all, and I decided to sell our only flannel blanket and buy some bread with the money. Children weren’t allowed to sell things, and I was taken to the children’s room at the police station. I sat there until they informed mama at the factory. When her shift was over, mama came to get me, but meanwhile I cried my eyes out from shame and from thinking that mama was hungry and there wasn’t a crust of bread at home. Mama had bronchial asthma; during the night she coughed terribly and couldn’t breathe. She had to swallow at least a little something to feel better. I always hid a bit of bread for her under the pillow. I would already be asleep, but even so I would remember that I had bread under the pillow, and I wanted terribly to eat it.