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

Our train was speedier than the war. It got ahead of it…When we stopped at stations, people there didn’t know about the war, hadn’t seen it. And we children told the adults about the war: how Minsk was burning, how our camp was bombed, how our planes burned. But the farther we moved away from home, the more we expected our parents to come and take us, and we didn’t suspect that many of us no longer had any parents. This thought couldn’t even occur to us. We talked about the war, but we were still children of peace.

From the train we were transferred to a steamboat, The Paris Commune, and taken down the Volga. By then we had been traveling for two weeks, and we had not undressed even once. On the steamboat I took off my sneakers for the first time. They allowed us to. I had rubber-soled lace-up sneakers. When I took them off, they really stank! I tried to wash them and then threw them out. I came to Khvalynsk barefoot.

So many of us had arrived that two Belorussian orphanages were created, one for schoolchildren, the other for preschoolers. How do I know about it? Because those who had to be separated from a brother or a sister cried very much, especially the younger ones, who were afraid to lose the older ones. When we were left without our parents in the Pioneer camp, it was interesting, like a game, but now we all became frightened. We had been raised at home, were used to having parents, parental care. My mother always woke me up in the morning and kissed me goodnight. Near us was an orphanage for “real” orphans. We were very different from them. They were used to living without parents, but we had to get used to it.

I remember the food in 1943: a spoonful of scalded milk and a piece of bread a day, boiled beets, in summer a soup made from watermelon rinds. We saw a film, March–April. There was a story in it about our scouts cooking kasha from birch bark. Our girls also learned to cook birch-bark soup.

In the fall we stocked up on firewood ourselves. Each one had a norm—three cubic feet. The forest was in the hills. We had to fell the trees, trim them, then cut them into three-foot lengths and stack them up. The norm was supposed to be for an adult, but we also had girls working with us. We boys had a bigger share of the work. At home we never had to use a saw, because we were all city boys, but here we had to saw very thick logs. Split them.

We were hungry day and night, while working and while sleeping. We were always hungry, especially in winter. We used to run over from the orphanage to an army unit, and often were lucky to get a ladle of soup there. But there were many of us, they couldn’t feed us all. If you came first, you got something; if you were late, you got nothing. I had a friend, Mishka Cherkasov. We were sitting once and he said, “I’d go fifteen miles now if I knew I’d get a bowl of kasha.” It was minus twenty outside, but he got dressed and ran to the army unit. He asked the soldiers for something to eat. They said they had a little soup—go, boy, fetch your tin. He went out and saw children from the other orphanage coming, so if he ran to get a tin, there’d be nothing left.

He went back and said to the soldiers, “Pour it here!” And he took his hat off and held it out to them instead of a tin. He looked so resolute that the soldier just poured a whole ladle for him. With a heroic air, Misha went past the orphans who were left with nothing and came running back to his orphanage. His ears were frostbitten, but he brought us the soup, which was no longer soup, but a hatful of ice. We turned this ice out onto a plate, and while the girls rubbed Misha’s ears, we ate it as it was, without waiting for it to thaw. There was so much joy on his face over bringing it for everybody that he didn’t even start eating first!

The tastiest food for us was oil cake. We distinguished it by varieties according to taste, and one variety was called “halva.” We conducted “Operation Cake.” Several of us got onto a moving truck and threw down chunks of cake, and the others picked them up. We came back to the orphanage covered with bruises, but we had eaten. And of course there were the summer and autumn markets! That was a good time for us. We’d try a bit of everything: a piece of apple from one market woman, a piece of tomato from another. To steal something at a market wasn’t regarded as shameful, on the contrary—it was heroism! We didn’t care what we pilfered, so long as it was something to eat. What it was didn’t matter.

There was a boy studying in our class who was the son of the director of an oil factory. We were children, we sat in class and played “naval battle.” And he sat behind us eating bread with vegetable oil. The smell filled the whole classroom.

We exchanged whispers, shook our fists at him, meaning just wait till the class is over…