Russia at war 1941-1945

'verdammte Bolshevik' and that cold, contemptuous air with which the Germans talked to us and looked at us, as though we weren't real people, that my nerves began to go to pieces. There was some wild garlic growing outside, and we used to pick it, and rub our gums with it, because we were all developing scurvy, and our teeth were beginning to fall out; but the Director once arrived and said it was verboten to chew garlic because he could not stand the stink. At the railway station one day—we were made to unload coal once a week—there was another row over the garlic; one of the foremen, seeing me

chewing garlic, kicked me in the shins, and hit me over the face; but the other girls began to scream at him; so he stopped. I was so sick at heart, I wanted to throw myself under the train that day; but I remembered my parents, and I felt sorry for them. I sometimes thought I might get one of the Belgians or Frenchmen to make me pregnant, because

sometimes they sent pregnant girls home. But the very thought of it revolted me; was I an animal to have a child from a stranger? I was a virgin, and what would my parents say if I came home to them in that condition?

"I did not throw myself under a train; and yet, as the days went on, I grew more and more desperate. I knew that if I did not do something, I should die a slow death. And then, one morning, without premeditation, I did it. It just occurred to me in a flash. I was working on a machine, with a great knife going up and down and cutting the flax threads. And, almost without thinking, I suddenly put my hand under the knife. I did not lose

consciousness; I was still quite tough then; I only shut my eyes, and then, when it

happened, I was frightened to look. Then I called for the German woman working next to me; and she screamed and ran for the foreman; he was a fat fair-haired man, about thirty-eight and very deaf, and she took some time to explain what had happened. He came

rushing along, and I was taken off to the infirmary, where they made me a tourniquet and bandaged me up. The foreman was very worried; some kind of commission was expected

that day to come and inspect the place, and he thought he might get into trouble. Some Frenchmen and Belgians then led me to our barracks; I was nearly unconscious by the

time we got there. The Director had still not been informed. The foreman went to him to report; and the Director ordered that an ambulance be sent for which would take me to the hospital in Munich, about ten miles away. It was almost a pleasure to be in the

hospital. My hand hurt me; but I was put in a clean bed, with white bed-linen. They did not give me much food, but what I got was nice and tasty. I stayed there about a month; then the Director asked that I be sent back to the factory. He urged me to stay on; said that he would appoint me one of the managers of the camp; I don't know exactly what he was up to, I think he wanted to avoid paying my fare to the Ukraine. For four months he kept me there.

Finally, I was sent home by the Munich Arbeitsamt (Labour Office). It was by pure accident that this happened. One day when I was going to Munich for a dressing, I talked to a German woman who advised me to go to the Arbeitsamt. She was a kind woman, and even paid my fare, and told me exactly where to go. There, at the Arbeitsamt, they gave me a paper, and the police took me off to the station the next day and put me in a goods carriage along with several other Ukrainians. At the factory, the night before I left, the Director seemed much annoyed, but said nothing. I was given a pailful of boiled turnips, and a loaf of bread, and the people in the camp gave me their day's ration, and a few odds and ends they had saved up. But during many days, on that long journey, I had nothing to eat.

Now that I think of it, I realise that for two months they had not paid me anything; and later they paid me seventy pfennigs a week. And when we said to the foreman who was

paying out the money: 'Why so little?' he would shout ' Ruhig'. ('Be quiet!')... God, how they tormented us", Valya said, almost with a shudder. "It was so bitterly insulting, the way these people behaved to us. They looked at us with such contempt. Why? I ask you, Why? Was that the kind of life I was preparing for? I was growng up happily, in our

Ukraine. Why should my life have been broken like this?" And then, as an afterthought:

"There was another girl in the factory, and she decided to follow my example. But the Germans guessed this time that it had been done deliberately; and she was not allowed to go home. So she lost her hand for nothing."

Galina Ivanovna's experience was very similar to Valya's—yet she was, temperamentally, an entirely different woman, and, in a way, more typically Ukrainian with her sarcastic humour, and her singular contempt for the Germans "who did not know what good food was until they got to the Ukraine."