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

“No, not God. I don’t believe in God. Destiny is the line of life,” mama answered. “I have always believed in your destiny, children.”

The bombings frightened me…Terribly. Later on, in Siberia, I hated myself for my cowardice. By chance, out of the corner of my eye, I read mama’s letter…She was writing to papa. We, too, wrote our first letters ever, and I decided to take a peek at what mama was writing. And mama was precisely writing that Tamara is quiet during the bombings, and Valya cries and is frightened. That was too much for me. When papa came to us in the spring of 1944, I couldn’t raise my eyes to him—I was ashamed. Terrible! But I’ll tell about the reunion with papa later. It’s a long way till then…

I remember a night air raid…Usually there were no raids at night, and the train drove fast. But now there was a raid. A heavy one…Bullets drummed on the roof of the car. Roaring planes. Glowing streaks from flying bullets…From bombshells…Next to me, a woman was killed. I understood only later that she was dead…But she didn’t fall. There was nowhere to fall, because the car was packed with people. The woman stood among us gasping, her blood flooding my face, warm, viscous. My shirt and pants were already wet with blood. When mama cried, touching me with her hand: “Valya, have they killed you?” I couldn’t answer.

That was a turning point for me. I know that after that…Yes…After that I stopped trembling. I didn’t care anymore…No fear, no pain, no sorrow. Some kind of stupor, indifference.

I remember that we didn’t reach the Urals right away. For some time we stayed in the village of Balanda, in the Saratov region. We were brought there in the evening, and we fell asleep. In the morning, at six o’clock, a herdsman cracked his whip, and all the women jumped up, grabbed their children, and ran outside screaming “Air raid!” They screamed until the kolkhoz chairman came and said that it was a herdsman driving cows. Then they came to their senses…

When the grain elevator hummed, our Tolik got scared and trembled. He didn’t let anyone go away from him for a second. Only when he fell asleep could we go outside without him. Mama went with us to the military commissariat to find out about father and ask for help. The commissar said, “Show me the documents stating that your husband is a commander in the Red Army.”

We didn’t have any documents, we only had a photograph of papa, in which he was wearing his uniform. He took it suspiciously.

“Maybe this isn’t your husband. How can you prove it?”

Tolik saw that he was holding the photo and not giving it back. “Give papa back…”

The commissar laughed. “Well, that’s a ‘document’ I can’t help believing.”

My sister went around “piebald,” so mama cut her hair. We checked every morning whether the new hair would be black or white. Our little brother reassured her, “Don’t cwy, Toma…Don’t cwy…” The hair that grew back was white. The boys teased her. Teased her unmercifully. She never took her kerchief off, even in class.

We came back from school. Tolik wasn’t at home.

We ran to mama’s work: “Where’s Tolik?”

“Tolik is in the hospital.”

My sister and I are carrying a blue wreath down the street…Of snowdrops…And our brother’s sailor suit. Mama is with us. She said that Tolik had died. Mama stopped outside the mortuary and couldn’t go in. Couldn’t bring herself to. I went in and recognized little Tolik at once—he lay there naked. I didn’t shed a single tear, I turned to wood.

Papa’s letter caught up with us in Siberia. Mama cried all night, unable to write to papa that their son was dead. In the morning the three of us took a telegram to the post office: “Girls alive. Toma gray-haired.” And papa figured out that Tolik was no more. I had a friend whose father had been killed, and I always wrote at the end of my letters to papa, because she asked me to: “Greetings to you, papa, from me and from my friend Lera.” Everybody wanted to have a papa.

Soon we received a letter from papa. He wrote that he had spent a long time in the rear on a special assignment and had fallen ill. They told him in the hospital that he could be cured only by being with his family: once he saw his dear ones, he’d feel better.

We waited several weeks for papa. Mama got her cherished crepe de chine dress and her shoes from the suitcase. We had made a decision not to sell that dress or the pair of shoes, no matter how hard the times would be. It was out of superstition. We were afraid that if we sold them, papa wouldn’t come back.