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

…May 1945…We were returning home. Our train was approaching Orsha. At that moment I was standing by the window. My mother came over to me. I opened the window. My mother said, “Can you smell our swamps?” I rarely cried, but here I sobbed. During our evacuation, I even dreamed of how we cut the swamp hay, how it was gathered in haystacks, and how it smelled, having dried and cured a bit. Our very own inimitable smell of swamp hay. It seems to me that only we in Belorussia have this pungent smell of swamp hay. It followed me everywhere. I even smelled it in my sleep.

On Victory Day, our neighbor Uncle Kolya ran outside and started firing into the air. The boys surrounded him.

“Uncle Kolya, let me!”

“Uncle Kolya, let me…”

He let everybody. And I fired a shot for the first time…

“ON THE CLEAN FLOOR THAT I HAD JUST WASHED…”

Masha Ivanova EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER.

We had a close-knit family. We all loved each other…

My father fought in the Civil War. After that he walked with crutches. But he was head of a kolkhoz; his was a model farm. When I learned to read, he showed me clippings from the newspaper Pravda about our kolkhoz. As best chairman, he was sent before the war to a congress of “shock kolkhozniks” and to an agricultural exposition in Moscow. He brought me back pretty children’s books and a tin of chocolates.

Mama and I loved our papa. I adored him, and he adored us. Mama and me. Maybe I’m embellishing my childhood? But in my memory, everything from before the war is joyful and bright. Because…it was childhood. Real childhood…

I remember songs. The women return from the fields singing songs. The sun is setting over the horizon, and from behind the hill, drawn-out singing reaches us:

It’s time to go home. It’s time.

Twilight is upon us…

I run to meet the song—there is my mama, I hear her voice. Mama picks me up, I embrace her tightly around the neck, jump back down and run ahead, and the song catches up, filling the entire world around me—and it’s so joyful, so good!

After such a happy childhood…suddenly…all at once—war!

My father went off in the early days…He was assigned to work in the underground. He didn’t live at home, because everyone here knew him. He came home only at night.

One day I heard him talking with my mother.

“We blew up a German truck on the road near…”

I coughed on the stove, my parents were startled.

“Nobody must know about this, dear daughter,” they warned me.

I started being afraid of the night. Father comes to us at night, and the fascists find out and take away our papa, whom I love so much.

I always waited for him. I would climb to the farthest corner of our big stove, hugging my grandmother, but I was afraid to fall asleep, and if I did, I kept waking up. A storm howled through the chimney, the damper trembled and clanked. I had one thing in mind: don’t oversleep and miss papa.

Suddenly it seemed to me that it wasn’t a storm howling, but my mother crying. I had a fever. Typhus.

My father came back late at night. I was the first to hear him, and I called to my grandmother. My father was cold, and I was burning hot. He sat by my side and couldn’t leave. Weary, aged, but my own, my very own. There was unexpected knocking at the door. Loud knocking. My father didn’t even have time to slip on his coat. Polizei broke into the house. They pushed him outside. I went after him, he reached out for me, but they hit his hands with their guns. They beat him on the head. I ran after him barefoot through the snow as far as the river and shouted, “Papa! Dear papa…” My grandmother was wailing in the house: “And where is God? Where is He hiding?”

My father was killed…

My grandmother couldn’t bear such grief. She cried more and more softly, and after two weeks she died at night, on the stove. I was sleeping next to her and held her in my arms, dead. There was no one left in the house; my mother and brother were hiding in a neighbor’s house.

After my father’s death, my mother, too, became quite different. She never left the house. She only talked about my father, and got tired quickly, though before the war she had been a Stakhanovite, always the very best.^* She didn’t notice me, though I always tried to catch her attention. To gladden her somehow. But she brightened up only when we remembered papa.

I remember how happy women came running: “A boy from the nearby village has been sent on horseback—the war is over. Our men will come home soon.”

My mother collapsed on the clean floor that I had just washed…

* A Stakhanovite was a follower of the example of Alexei Stakhanov (1906–1977), a coal miner who in less than six hours dug fourteen times his daily quota of coal. The Stakhanovite movement started in 1935, and the title was highly honored.

“DID GOD WATCH THIS? AND WHAT DID HE THINK?…”

Yura Karpovich EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A DRIVER.

I saw what shouldn’t be seen…What a man shouldn’t see. And I was little…