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

They drove the kolkhoz cows out of the barn and pushed people inside. Our mama, too. I sat in the bushes with my little brother, he was two years old, he didn’t cry. And the dog sat there with us.

In the morning we came home, the house was there, but mama wasn’t. There was nobody. We were alone. I went to fetch water. I had to stoke the oven, my little brother was asking to eat. Our neighbors were hanging from the well pole. I turned to the other end of the village, there was an artesian well there, with the best water. The tastiest. There were people hanging there, too. I came home with empty buckets. My little brother cried, because he was hungry. “Give me some bread. Give me a crust.” One time I bit him so he wouldn’t cry.

We lived like that for a few days. Alone in the village. People lay or hung dead. We weren’t afraid of the dead, they were all people we knew. Later we met a woman we didn’t know. We started crying, “Let us live with you. We’re afraid alone.” She sat us on her sledge and drove us to her village. She had two boys and the two of us. We lived like that until our soldiers came.

…At the orphanage, they gave me an orange dress with pockets. I loved it so much that I told everyone, “If I die, bury me in this dress.” Mama died, papa died, and I would die soon. For a long time I waited to die. I always cried when I heard the word mama. Once they scolded me for some reason and stood me in a corner. I ran away from the orphanage. I ran away several times to go and look for mama.

I didn’t remember my birthday…They told me: Choose your favorite day, any one you want. Well, any one you like. And I liked the May holidays. “But,” I thought, “nobody will believe me if I say I was born on the first of May, or on the second, but if I say the third of May, it will seem like the truth.” Every three months they gathered the children who had had birthdays; they set a festive table with candy and tea, and gave them presents: girls got fabric for their dresses, boys got shirts. Once an unknown old man came to the orphanage and brought a lot of boiled eggs, gave them out to everybody, and was so happy to do something nice for us. It was right on my birthday…

I was already a big girl, but I was bored without toys. When we went to bed and everybody fell asleep, I pulled feathers from my pillow and examined them. It was my favorite game. If I was sick, I lay and dreamed of mama. I wanted to be mama’s only child…so she could pamper me.

I was a long time growing up…Everybody in the orphanage had trouble growing up. I think it’s probably from pining. We didn’t grow up because we heard so few tender words. We couldn’t grow up without mamas…

“BUT, LIKE RUBBER BALLS, THEY DIDN’T SINK…”

Valya Yurkevich SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW RETIRED.

Mama was hoping for a boy…And my father wanted a boy. But a girl was born…

Yet they all wanted a boy so much…So I grew up more like a boy than a girl. My parents dressed me in boys’ clothing and cut my hair like a boy’s. I liked boys’ games: “Cops and Robbers,” “War,” “Mumblety-peg.” I especially liked to play “War.” I believed I was brave.

Near Smolensk our train carriage with the evacuated was completely destroyed by bombing. We somehow survived, and we were pulled out from under the rubble. We reached a village, and there a battle had started. We sat in someone’s basement. The house collapsed, and we were buried under it. The battle subsided, and we somehow crawled out of the basement, and the first thing I remember is the cars. Passenger cars drove by, and in them sat smiling people wearing shiny black raincoats. I can’t express that feeling—there was fear, and some kind of morbid curiosity. They drove through the village and disappeared. We children went to see what was happening outside the village. When we went out to the fields, it was something terrible. The entire rye field was strewn with dead bodies. I guess I didn’t have a girlish character, because I wasn’t afraid to look at all this, though I was seeing it for the first time. They lay in black soot. There were so many it was hard to believe these were people lying there. That was my first impression of the war…our blackened soldiers…

We went back to Vitebsk with my mother. Our house was destroyed, but our grandmother was waiting for us…A Jewish family sheltered us, a very sick and very kind old couple. We always worried about them, because all across the city hung announcements saying that Jews had to register at the ghetto; we asked them not to leave the house. One day we were away…My sister and I were playing somewhere. My mother was out, and my grandmother…When we returned, we found a note saying that the owners had left for the ghetto, because they were afraid for us; we had to live, but they were old. Orders were posted across the city: Russians must hand over the Jews to the ghetto, if they knew where they were hiding. Otherwise they, too, would be shot.