Last Witnesses Read online

  I don’t remember how many days we were on the road…But we couldn’t breathe anymore, because there was no toilet in this car. So for number one and number two…The train was bombarded…the roof was blown off our car. I wasn’t alone, I was with my buddy Grishka; he was ten like me, and before the war we had been in the same class. From the first moments of the bombing, we held on to each other, so as not to get lost. When the roof was blown off, we decided to climb out of the car through the top and escape. Escape! It was clear by then that we were being taken to the west. To Germany.

  It was dark in the forest, and we kept turning to look—our train was burning, it was all a big bonfire. High flames. We walked all night. By morning we came upon some village, but there was no village. Instead of the houses…it was the first time I saw it: only black stoves stood there. There was low fog…We walked as if in a cemetery…among black monuments…We looked for something to eat, but the stoves stood empty and cold…We walked on and on…Grisha suddenly fell down and died; his heart stopped. I sat over him all night waiting for morning. In the morning I dug a hole in the sand with my hands and buried Grisha. I wanted to remember the spot, but how could I remember it if everything around was unfamiliar?

  I walk along feeling dizzy from hunger. Suddenly I hear, “Stop! Where are you going, boy?” I asked, “Who are you?” “We’re Russians,” they say, “partisans.” From them I learned that I was in the Vitebsk region, and so I wound up in the Alexeevsky partisan brigade…

  When I got a little stronger, I started asking to fight. They joked in response and sent me to help in the kitchen. But then a chance came…Such a chance…Scouts had been sent three times to a railway station and had never come back. After the third time, our commander lined us all up and said, “I can’t send anybody for a fourth time. Only volunteers will go…”

  I stood in the second row and when I heard, “Are there any volunteers?” I raised my hand like at school. I had a long jacket on, the sleeves hung to the ground. I raised my hand, but it wasn’t seen, because of the hanging sleeves, and I couldn’t get out of them.

  The commander ordered, “Volunteers, step forward.”

  I stepped forward.

  “Dear boy…” the commander said to me. “Dear boy…”

  They gave me a little bag and an old hat with one ear flap torn off.

  As soon as I came out on the high road, I had the feeling that I was being watched. I looked around—no one was there. Then I noticed three thick bushy pines. I cautiously took a better look at them and saw German snipers sitting in them. They would “skim off” anyone who came out of the forest. But when a boy appeared at the edge carrying a little bag, they didn’t touch him.

  I returned to the unit and reported to the commander that German snipers were sitting in the pine trees. During the night we took them without a single shot and brought them to the unit alive. That was my first scout mission…

  At the end of 1943…SS soldiers caught me in the village of Old Chelnyshki, Beshenkovichi district…They beat me with ramrods. With their feet in iron-shod boots. Hard as stone…After torturing me, they dragged me outside and poured water on me. It was winter, and I was covered by a bloody crust of ice. I couldn’t figure what the hammering was I heard above me. They were building a gallows. I saw it when they picked me up and put me on a block of wood. The last thing I remember? The smell of fresh wood…A living smell…

  The noose tightened, but they had time to tear it off…There were partisans in ambush. When I regained consciousness, I recognized our doctor. “Two more seconds—and that’s it, I wouldn’t have been able to save you,” he said. “You’re lucky to be alive, dear boy.”

  They carried me to the unit in their arms. I was all one bruise from head to foot. I hurt so badly that I wondered: will I ever grow up?

  “AND WHY AM I SO SMALL?…”

  Sasha Streltsov

  FOUR YEARS OLD. NOW A PILOT.

  My father had never seen me…

  I was born without him. He had two wars: he came back from the Finnish War, and the Patriotic War began.*1 He left home for the second time.

  Of my mama I have kept the memory of how we walked in the forest, and she taught me: “Don’t hurry. Listen to how the leaves fall. How the forest sounds…” And we sat on the road and she drew little birds for me in the sand with a twig.

  I also remember that I wanted to be tall and I asked mama, “Is papa tall?”

  Mama replied, “Very tall and handsome. But he never shows it off.”

  “And why am I so small?”

  I was still growing up…We didn’t have any photographs of my father left, but I needed a confirmation that I was like him.

  “You’re like him. Very much like him,” mama reassured me.

  In 1945 we learned that my father had been killed. Mama loved him so much that she went mad…She didn’t recognize anybody, not even me. And as far back as I can remember, I always had only my grandmother with me. Grandmother’s name was Shura, and so as not to get confused, we decided I would be Shurik, and she Grandma Sasha.*2

  Grandma Sasha didn’t tell me any fairy tales, she spent the time from morning to late at night doing laundry, plowing, cooking, bleaching. Tending the cow. On holidays she liked to recall how I was born. Here I am telling you, and there’s my grandmother’s voice in my ears: “It was a warm day. Uncle Ignat’s cow calved, and thieves broke into old Yakimshchuk’s garden. And you came into the world…”

  Planes kept flying over our cottage…Our planes. In the second grade I firmly decided to become a pilot.

  My grandmother went to the recruiting office. They asked for my documents. She didn’t have any, but she had my father’s death notice with her. She came home and said, “We’ll dig potatoes, and you’ll go to the Suvorov School in Minsk.”*3

  Before sending me on my way, she borrowed flour from somebody and baked little pies. The military commissar put me in a truck and said, “You’re honored on account of your father.”

  It was the first time in my life that I rode in a truck.

  After a few months my grandmother came to visit me at school and brought me an apple as a treat. She asked me to eat it.

  But I didn’t want to part with her gift so soon…

  *1 The Soviet name for WWII was the Great Patriotic War (or Great Fatherland War).

  *2 Shura, Sasha, and Shurik are all diminutives of the names Alexander and Alexandra.

  *3 Suvorov Schools, founded in the Soviet Union in 1943 and still operating, are boarding schools for boys fourteen to eighteen years old, with an emphasis on military training. They give preference to boys from military families, particularly war orphans. The name comes from Alexander Suvorov (1730–1800), the last generalissimo of the Russian army, who was reputed never to have lost a battle.

  “THEY WERE DRAWN BY THE HUMAN SCENT…”

  Nadia Savitskaya

  TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A WORKER.

  We were waiting for my brother to come home from the army. He wrote in a letter that he would come in June…

  We thought my brother would return and we’d build him a house. Father had already transported some beams by horses, and in the evenings we all sat on these beams, and I remember mama telling father that they would put up a big house. They’d have many grandchildren.

  The war began, and my brother didn’t come home from the army. We were five sisters and one brother, and he was the oldest. All through the war mama wept, and all through the war we waited for our brother. I remember that: we waited for him every day.

  Whenever we heard that our prisoners of war were being driven somewhere, we’d quickly go there. Mama would bake a dozen potatoes, tie them up in a bundle, and we would go. Once we had nothing to bring, and there was ripe rye in the field. We broke off some ears, rubbed them to get the grains out. And we ran
into a German patrol that guarded the field. They poured our grains out and indicated to us that we should line up to be shot. We began to howl, and our mama kissed their boots. They were on horseback, high up, and she clutched at their feet, kissed them, and begged, “Dear sirs! Have pity…Dear sirs, these are my children. You see, all girls.” They didn’t shoot us and rode off.

  As soon as they rode off, I began to laugh. I laughed and laughed, ten minutes went by and I still laughed. Twenty minutes…I fell down laughing. Mama scolded me—it didn’t help; mama begged me—it didn’t help. I laughed all the while we walked. I came home and laughed. I buried my face in the pillows and couldn’t calm down—I laughed. And I laughed like that the whole day. They thought that I…Well, you know…They were all frightened…They were afraid I’d lost my mind. Turned lunatic.

  It has stayed with me to this day: whenever I’m frightened, I start laughing loudly. Very loudly.

  In 1945…We were liberated, and then we received a letter that my brother had been killed. Mama wept and wept, and went blind. We lived outside the village in German bunkers, because our village had all burned down, our old cottage had burned down and the beams for the new house. Nothing of ours was left. We found some army helmets in the forest and cooked in them. German helmets were big as cauldrons. We found food in the forest. It was scary going for berries and mushrooms. There were lots of German shepherds left; they attacked people and killed little children. They were used to human flesh and human blood. To its fresh scent…When we went to the forest, we gathered in a big group. Some twenty of us…Our mothers taught us that we should shout as we walked in the forest, so that the dogs would get scared. While you were picking a basket of berries, you’d shout so much that you’d lose your voice. Get hoarse. Your throat would be all swollen. The dogs were big as wolves.

  They were drawn by the human scent…

  “WHY DID THEY SHOOT HER IN THE FACE? MY MAMA WAS SO BEAUTIFUL…”

  Volodia Korshuk

  SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A PROFESSOR, A DOCTOR IN HISTORY.

  We lived in Brest. Right on the border…

  In the evening all three of us were at the movies: mama, papa, and I. It rarely happened that we went anywhere together, because my father was always busy. He was the director of the regional department of education, and was always on business trips.

  The last evening without war…The last night…

  When mama roused me in the morning, everything around rumbled, banged, boomed. It was very early. I remember that outside the windows it was still dark. My parents bustled about, packing suitcases; for some reason they couldn’t find anything.

  We had our own house, a big garden. My father went somewhere. Mama and I looked out the window: there were some military people in the garden speaking broken Russian and dressed in our uniforms. Mama said they were saboteurs. I couldn’t quite figure out how it was possible that in our garden, where a samovar was still standing on a little table from the evening before, there were suddenly saboteurs! And where were our frontier guards?

  We left the city on foot. Before my eyes a stone house ahead of us fell to pieces and a telephone flew out of a window. In the middle of the street stood a bed; on it lay a dead little girl under a blanket. As if the bed had been taken out and put there: everything was intact, only the blanket was slightly singed. Just outside the city were rye fields. Planes fired at us with machine guns, and everybody moved, not along the road, but over those fields.

  We entered the forest, and it became less frightening. From the forest I saw big trucks. It was the Germans coming, and they were laughing loudly. I heard unfamiliar speech. There was a lot of r-r-r in it…

  My parents kept asking each other: where are our soldiers? our army? I pictured to myself that at any moment Budenny would come galloping on his warhorse, and the Germans would flee in terror. There was nothing to equal our cavalry—so my father had convinced me recently.

  We walked for a long time. At night we stopped at farms. They fed us, kept us warm. Many of them knew my father, and my father knew many of them. We stopped at one farm, I still remember the name of the teacher who lived there—Pauk [“Spider”]. They had two houses—a new and an old one side by side. They offered to let us stay; they would give us one of the houses. But my father declined. The owner drove us to the high road. Mama tried to give him money, but he shook his head and said that he could not take money for friendship at a difficult moment. I remembered that.

  So we reached the town of Uzda, my father’s native area. We lived at my grandfather’s in the village of Mrochki.

  I saw partisans in our house for the first time that winter, and ever since, my picture of them has been of people in white camouflage smocks. Soon my father left with them for the forest, and mama and I stayed with my grandfather.

  Mama was sewing something…No…She was sitting at the big table and doing embroidery on a tambour, and I was sitting on the stove. The Germans came into the cottage with the village headman, and the headman pointed at mama: “Here she is.” They told mama to get ready. Then I became very frightened. Mama was taken outside, she called me to say goodbye, but I huddled under a bench and they couldn’t pull me out from there.

  They took mama and two other women whose husbands were with the partisans, and drove somewhere. No one knew where. In which direction. The next day they were found not far outside the village. They lay in the snow…It had snowed all night…What I remember, from when my mama was brought home, was that for some reason they had shot her in the face. She had several black bullet holes in her cheek. I kept asking my grandfather, “Why did they shoot her in the face? My mama was so beautiful…” Mama was buried…My grandfather, my grandmother, and I followed the coffin. People were afraid. They came to take leave of her during the night…All night our door stayed open, but during the day we were by ourselves. I couldn’t understand why they had killed my mama, if she hadn’t done anything bad. She was sitting and embroidering…

  One night my father came and said he was taking me with him. I was happy. At first my partisan life was not much different from my life with grandfather. Father would go on a mission and leave me with someone in a village. I remember a woman I was staying with had her dead husband brought to her on a sledge. She beat her head against the table on which the coffin stood and repeated the one word, fiends.

  Father was absent for a very long time. I waited for him and thought, “I have no mama, grandpa and grandma are somewhere far away, what will I, a little boy, do, if they bring me my dead father on a sledge?” It seemed like an eternity before my father returned. While I was waiting, I promised myself to address him only formally from then on. I wanted to emphasize how I loved him, how I missed him, and that he was my only one. At first my father probably didn’t notice how I addressed him, but then he asked, “Why do you address me formally?” I confessed to him what I had promised myself and why. But he explained to me, “You, too, are my only one, so we should address each other informally. We’re the closest to each other in the world.” I also asked him that we never part from each other. “You’re already an adult, you’re a man,” my father persuaded me.

  I remember my father’s gentleness. We were under fire…We lay on the cold April ground, there was no grass yet…Father found a deep depression and told me, “You lie underneath and I’ll lie on top. If they kill me, you’ll stay alive.” Everybody in the unit pitied me. I remember an older partisan came up, took my hat off, and caressed my head for a long time, saying to my father that he had a boy like that running around somewhere. And when we walked through a swamp, up to our waists in water, father tried to carry me on his back, but quickly became tired. Then the partisans started taking turns carrying me. I’ll never forget that. I won’t forget how they found a little sorrel and gave it all to me. And went to sleep hungry.

  …In the orphanage of Gomel, where I was transported
by plane with several other partisan children as soon as the town was liberated, someone handed me money sent by my father, a big red paper note. I went with the boys to the market and spent all the money on candy. It was a lot of candy, enough for everybody. The teacher asked, “What did you do with the money your father sent you?” I confessed that I bought candy. “That’s all?” she asked, surprised.

  Minsk was liberated…A man came and said he would take me to my father. It was hard to get on the train. The man got in and people handed me to him through the window.

  I met with my father and asked him again that he and I should never part, because it is bad to be alone. I remember he met me not alone, but with a new mama. She pressed my head to herself, and I missed my mother’s caress so much and so enjoyed her touch that I fell asleep in the car at once. On her shoulder.

  I was ten when I went to first grade. I was big, and I knew how to read, and after six months they transferred me to second grade. I knew how to read, but not how to write. I was called to the blackboard and had to write a word with the letter Ю in it. I stood there terrified, thinking that I didn’t know how to write the letter Ю. But I knew how to shoot. I was a good shot.

  One day I didn’t find my father’s pistol in the closet. I turned everything in it upside down—the pistol wasn’t there.

  “How come? What are you going to do now?” I asked my father when he came home from work.