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

He sent us several letters from the front: “We’ll soon be victorious, then we’ll live differently. How is our Ludmilochka behaving?” I can’t remember what I did till the first of September. Of course, I upset my mother by staying at my girlfriends’ for a long time without permission. Air-raid warnings became, one might say, a usual thing. Everyone quickly got used to them: we didn’t go down into the shelter, but stayed at home. Many times I was caught under bombings in the streets downtown. I would just run into a store or into an entryway.

There were many rumors, but they didn’t stay in my memory. In my child’s mind…

My mother was on duty at the hospital. Every day trains arrived with wounded soldiers.

Surprisingly, goods appeared again on the counters, and people bought them. For several days, my mother and I wondered: shouldn’t we buy a new piano? We decided not to for the time being, but to wait for my father. It’s a major purchase, after all.

Incredible as it seems, we went back to school, as usual, on the first of September. Not a word from my father all through August. We had faith, and waited, though we already knew such words as encirclement and partisans. At the end of the month, they announced: Be prepared for evacuation at any moment. We were informed of the exact day, I think, the day before. The mothers had a hard time. Anyway, we were convinced that we would leave for a couple of months, sit it out somewhere in Saratov, and come back. One bundle for the bed things, one bundle for the dishes, and a suitcase with our clothes. We were ready.

I remember this picture on the way: our train leaves without a signal, people grab their pans, there’s no time to put out the cook fires. We get on the train and go, and there is a chain of fires along the embankment. The train arrived in Alma-Ata, then went back to Chimkent. And so several times—there and back. Finally, with sluggish oxen harnessed to carts, we rode into the aul. I saw a kibitka for the first time…^*2 Like in an eastern fairy tale…Everything was so colorful, unusual. I found it interesting.

But when I noticed my mother’s first gray hair, I was dumbstruck. I began to grow up very quickly. Mama’s hands! I don’t know what they couldn’t do. How did mama have the presence of mind at the last moment to grab the sewing machine (without the case, putting it with the pillows) and toss it into the car going to the train? That sewing machine was our breadwinner. Mama managed to sew at night. Did she ever sleep?

On the horizon were the snowy spurs of the Tien Shan mountains. In spring the steppe is red with tulips, and in the fall there are grape clusters, melons. But how could we buy them? And the war! We were looking for our dear papa! Over three years, we wrote three dozen requests: to army headquarters, field post office 116, to the defense commissariat, to the Head Office of Red Army Personnel in Buguruslan…They all sent the same answer: “Not listed among the wounded or the dead.” Since he wasn’t listed, we waited and waited, still hoping.

Good news began to come over the radio. Our troops were liberating one city after another. Now Orsha was liberated. That’s my mother’s birthplace. My grandmother was there, and my mother’s sisters. Voronezh was liberated, too…But Voronezh without papa was foreign to us. We wrote to my grandmother and went to her place. We traveled all the way on the rear platform, it was impossible to get inside. Five days on the platform…

My favorite place in my grandmother’s house was by the warm Russian stove. At school we sat with our coats on. Many girls had coats sewn out of army greatcoats, and the boys simply wore the greatcoats. Early in the morning, I heard from the loudspeaker: victory! I was fifteen years old…I put on my father’s present from before the war—a worsted cardigan—and my brand-new high-heeled shoes, and went to school. We kept these things, we had bought them in bigger sizes, so there was room to grow, and now I had grown.

In the evening we sat at the table, and on the table was a photo of my papa and a battered volume of Pushkin…It was his wedding gift to my mother. I remember how papa and I read poetry together, and when there was something he especially liked, he said, “The wide world is wondrous…” He always repeated those words in good moments.

I can’t imagine such a beloved papa not alive…

*1 The lines are from the tenth scene of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (1825), spoken by Boris Godunov to his son Feodor.

*2 In the Russian far east, a kibitka is a round tent of lattice work covered with felt, sometimes mounted on wheels. In European Russia, a kibitka is a large covered wagon.

“THEY BROUGHT LONG, THIN CANDY…IT LOOKED LIKE PENCILS…”

Leonida Belaya THREE YEARS OLD. NOW A CLOTHES PRESSER.

Does a three-year-old child remember anything? I’ll tell you…

I remember three or four images very clearly.