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

“WERE WE REALLY CHILDREN? WE WERE MEN AND WOMEN…”

Victor Leshchinsky SIX YEARS OLD. NOW DIRECTOR OF AN ENERGY TECHNICAL SCHOOL.

I went to visit my aunt. She invited me for the summer…

We lived in Bykhovo, and my aunt in the village of Kommuna, near Bykhovo. In the center of the village there was a long house, for about twenty families—a communal house. That’s all I’ve managed to remember.

They said “War.” I had to go back to my parents. My aunt didn’t let me go.

“When the war ends, you can go.”

“And will it end soon?”

“Of course.”

After some time, my parents came on foot: “The Germans are in Bykhovo. People are fleeing to the villages.” We stayed at my aunt’s.

In the winter partisans came to the house…I asked for a rifle. They were my mother’s nephews, my cousins. They laughed and let me hold one. It was heavy.

The house always smelled of leather. And warm glue. My father made boots for the partisans. I asked him to make boots for me. He told me, “Wait, I have a lot of work.” And, I remember, I showed him that I needed small boots, I had a small foot. He promised…

The last memory I have of my father is of how they led him down the street to a big truck…And they hit him on the head with a stick…

…The war ended, we had no father, and no home. I was eleven, I was the oldest in the family. The other two, my brother and sister, were little. My mother took out a loan. We bought an old house. The roof was in such condition that, if it rained, there was nowhere to hide, it leaked everywhere. The water poured through. At the age of eleven, I repaired the windows myself, covered the roof with straw. I built a shed…

How?

The first log I rolled in and placed by myself; with the second one my mother helped. We weren’t strong enough to lift them any higher. Here’s what I did: I would trim the log on the ground, make a notch, and wait until the women set off for work in the fields. In the morning, they would all grab it together and lift it, I would fit it a bit and set it down in the notch. By evening, I would have trimmed another one. They came back from work in the evening, and lifted…And so the little wall grew…

There were seventy households in the village, but only two men came back from the front. One on crutches. “Baby! My dear baby!” my mother lamented over me. In the evening I fell asleep wherever I sat down.

Were we really children? By the age of ten or eleven, we were men and women…

“DON’T GIVE SOME STRANGER PAPA’S SUIT…”

Valera Nichiporenko EIGHT YEARS OLD. NOW A BUS DRIVER.

This was already in 1944…

I was probably eight years old. I think I was eight…We knew by then that we had no father. Others waited. They had received death notices, but they still waited. But we had a trustworthy sign. A proof. A friend of our father’s sent his watch. To his son…To me…That was my father’s request to him before dying. I still have that watch, I cherish it.

The three of us lived on my mother’s small salary. We got by on bread and water. My sister fell ill. She was diagnosed with open tuberculosis. The doctors told mama that she needed good food, she needed butter. Honey. And that every day. Butter! For us it was like gold. Solid gold…Something unbelievable…At market prices mama’s salary was enough for three loaves of bread. And for that money you could buy maybe two hundred grams of butter.

We still had my father’s suit. A good suit. We took it to the market with mama. We found a buyer, found him quickly. Because the suit was fancy. My father bought it just before the war and hadn’t gotten to wear it. The suit had hung in the closet…Brand-new…The buyer asked the price, bargained, and gave mama the money, and I started yelling for the whole market to hear, “Don’t give some stranger papa’s suit!” A policeman even came up to us…

Who can say after that, that children weren’t in the war? Who…

“AT NIGHT I CRIED: WHERE IS MY CHEERFUL MAMA?…”

Galya Spannovskaya SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A DESIGN TECHNICIAN.

Memories have colors…

Everything before the war, I remember in motion: it moves and changes colors. The colors are mostly bright. But the war, the orphanage—it all becomes still. And the colors turn gray.

We were taken to the rear. Only children. Without mamas. We rode for a long time, somehow very long. We ate cookies and cocoa butter; apparently they didn’t manage to stock up on anything else for the road. Before the war, I loved cookies and cocoa butter—they’re very tasty. But after a month on the road, I stopped liking them forever.

All through the war I kept wishing mama would come soon, and we could go back to Minsk. I dreamed of the streets, the movie theater near our house, I dreamed of the tramway bells. My mother was very nice, very cheerful. We lived together like girlfriends. I don’t remember papa, we lost him early.