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

Mama prepared his campaign trunk. My father was often called in when the alarm was raised. Nothing seemed unusual…I wanted to sleep…I fell back in my bed, because I didn’t understand anything. My sister and I went to bed late—we had gone to the movies. Before the war, “going to the movies” was quite different than now. Films were brought only before holidays, and there weren’t many: We Are from Kronstadt, Chapaev, If There Is War Tomorrow, Jolly Fellows. The screening was set up in the Red Army mess hall. We children didn’t miss a single show and knew all the films by heart. We even gave the cue to the artists on the screen or skipped ahead and interrupted them. There was no electricity in the village, nor in the army unit; we “rolled” the film with a portable motor. The motor crackled—we dropped everything and ran to take seats in front of the screen, and even brought along our own stools.

Watching movies was lengthy: the first part ends, everybody waits patiently while the projectionist winds the next reel. It’s all right if the film is new, but if it’s old, it keeps breaking. We wait while they glue it back and the glue dries. Or, even worse, the film would catch fire. When the motor stalled, it was a totally lost cause. Often we didn’t have time to watch a movie to the end. The order would be given: “First company—prepare for action! Second company—fall in!”

And if the alarm was raised, the projectionist ran off. When the breaks between the parts were too long, the spectators lost their patience, agitation set in, whistling, shouts…My sister would climb on a table and announce, “The concert begins.” She herself liked terribly to declaim, as we used to say. She didn’t always know the words perfectly, but she climbed on the table fearlessly.

She had been like that ever since kindergarten, when we lived in the military garrison near Gomel. After the poems, my sister and I would sing. For an encore we would sing “Our Armor Is Strong and Our Tanks Are Swift.” The windows shook in the mess hall when the soldiers picked up the refrain:

With fiery thunder, steel armor gleaming,

The tanks will furiously enter the fray…

And so, on June 21, 1941…the night before the war…for maybe the tenth time, we watched the movie If There Is War Tomorrow. After the movie, we didn’t disperse for a long time, father barely managed to herd us home: “So you’ll sleep tonight? Tomorrow is a day off…”

I woke up finally when there was an explosion nearby and the windows in the kitchen shattered. Mama was wrapping my half-awake little brother Tolik in a blanket. My sister was already dressed. Papa wasn’t home.

“Hurry, girls,” mama urged us. “There’s been a provocation at the border.”

We ran to the forest. Mama was out of breath. She was carrying my little brother, and she kept repeating, “Don’t fall behind, girls…Duck down, girls…” For some reason I remember how the sun hit me straight in the eyes. It was very bright. Birds were singing. And there was that piercing roar of airplanes…

I trembled, but then I felt ashamed that I was trembling. I had always wanted to be like the brave heroes from the book Timur and His Gang, by Arkady Gaidar,^* and here I was trembling. I took my little brother in my arms and started rocking him and even singing “And the young girl…” There was this love song in the movie The Goalkeeper. Mama often sang it, and it perfectly suited my mood and condition in that moment. I was…in love! I don’t know what science says, what the books about adolescent psychology say, but I was constantly in love. There was a time when I loved several boys at once. But at that moment, I liked only one—Vitya, from the Grayevo garrison. He was in the sixth grade. The sixth graders were in the same classroom with the fifth. Fifth graders in the first row of desks, sixth graders in the second. I can’t imagine how the teachers managed to conduct classes. I didn’t care about studying. How was it I didn’t break my neck staring at Vitya!

I liked everything about him: that he was short—we were well matched; that he had blue, blue eyes, like my papa’s; and that he was well-read—not like Alka Poddubnyak, who gave painful “flicks” and who liked me. Vitya especially liked Jules Verne! So did I. The Red Army library had his complete works, and I read them all…