The Unwomanly Face of War Read online

  —N-no…I’m a witness. No! Let’s remember the catastrophe of the first months of the war: our air force was destroyed on the ground, our tanks burned like matchboxes. The rifles were old. Millions of soldiers and officers were captured. Several million! In six weeks Hitler was already near Moscow…University professors signed up to serve in the militia. Old professors! And girls were eager to get to the front voluntarily—a coward won’t volunteer to go and fight. Those were brave, extraordinary girls. There are statistics: the losses at the front line among medical personnel were in second place after the losses in the riflemen’s battalions. In the infantry. What is it, for instance, to haul a wounded man from a battlefield? I’m going to tell you.

  We mounted an attack, and the Germans started to mow us down with submachine-gun fire. And our battalion was no more. Everybody fell. They weren’t all killed, many were wounded. The Germans didn’t let up. Quite unexpectedly a girl leaped out of the trench, then a second, a third…They started bandaging and carrying the wounded men away. Even the Germans went dumb with astonishment for a moment. By ten o’clock in the evening all the girls had been badly wounded, but each of them had saved as many as two or three men. They were meagerly decorated; at the beginning of the war decorations weren’t just thrown around. A wounded man had to be saved along with his personal weapons. The first question in the medical unit was: where are the weapons? We didn’t have enough of them then. Rifles, submachine guns, machine guns—they had to carry all that as well. In 1941 Order No. 281 was issued concerning decorations for saving soldiers’ lives: for saving fifteen badly wounded men, carried from a battlefield along with their personal weapons—the medal “For Distinguished Service”; for saving twenty-five men—the Order of the Red Star; for saving forty—the Order of the Red Banner; for saving eighty—the Order of Lenin. And I just told you what it meant to save at least one wounded man…Under fire…

  —There’s that, of course…I also remember…Well, yes…We sent our scouts to a village where a German garrison was stationed. Two of them went…Then one more…Nobody came back. The commander summoned one of our girls: “You go, Liusya.” We dressed her as a cowherd, led her to the road…What could we do? There was no other solution. A man would be killed, but a woman could get through. Right…But to see a rifle in a woman’s hands…

  —Did the girl come back?

  —I forget her last name…I just remember her first name—Liusya. She was killed…The peasants told us afterward…

  —

  There was a long silence. Then we gave a toast to those who had been killed. The conversation took another turn: we talked about Stalin, how before the war he had destroyed the best commanders, the military elite. About the brutal collectivization and about 1937.*3 The camps and exiles. That without 1937 there would have been no 1941. There would have been no retreat all the way to Moscow. But after the war that was forgotten. The Victory overshadowed everything.

  “Was there love during the war?” I asked.

  —

  —I met many pretty girls at the front, but we didn’t look at them as women. Though, in my view, they were wonderful girls. But they were our friends, who dragged us off the battlefield. Who saved us, took care of us. I was hauled off wounded twice. How could I have bad feelings about them? But could you marry your brother? We called them little sisters.

  —And after the war?

  —The war ended, and they all turned out to be terribly defenseless…Take my wife—an intelligent woman, but she has bad feelings about girls who were in the war. She thinks they went to the war to find husbands, that they all had love affairs there. Though, in fact, since we’re having a sincere conversation, they were mostly honest girls. Pure. But after the war…After all the dirt, and lice, and death…We wanted something beautiful. Bright. Beautiful women…I had a friend, at the front there was a wonderful girl, as I now understand, who loved him. A nurse. But he didn’t marry her; he was demobilized and found another, prettier one. And he’s unhappy with his wife. Now he remembers the other one, his wartime love; she would have been a good companion to him. But after the front he left her. Because for four years he had seen her only in old boots and a man’s padded jacket…We wanted to forget the war. And we forgot our girls, too…

  —There’s that, of course…We were all young. We wanted to live…

  —

  None of us slept that night. We talked till morning.

  …I made my way straight from the subway to a quiet Moscow courtyard. With a sandbox and children’s seesaw. I walked and recalled the astonished voice on the phone: “You’ve come? And straight to me? You’re not going to verify anything in the Veterans’ Council? They have all my data, they’ve checked me.” I was taken aback. I used to think that the sufferings a person goes through made him free; he belonged only to himself. He was protected by his own memory. Now I discovered: no, not always. Often this knowledge and even superknowledge (there’s no such thing in ordinary life) exist separately, as some sort of an emergency reserve or the specks of gold in layers of ore. You need to spend a long time removing the empty rock, rummaging together in the alluvial trifles, and in the end—a flash! A gift!

  Then what are we in reality—what are we made of, what material? How durable is it—that I want to understand. That is why I’m here…

  The door is opened by a short, plump woman. She offers me one hand in a manly greeting; the other is held by her little grandson. From his coolness and accustomed curiosity, I understand that there are frequent visitors to this house. They are expected here.

  The big room is uncluttered; there is almost no furniture. Books on a homemade shelf—mostly war memoirs, many enlarged military photographs; a tank helmet hangs on an elk horn; on a polished table there is a row of little tanks with gift labels: “From the soldiers of N. Unit,” “From the students of tank school”…Beside me on the sofa “sit” three dolls—in military uniforms. Even the curtains and the wallpaper in the room are of khaki color.

  I realize that here the war hasn’t ended and never will.

  Nina Yakovlevna Vishnevskaya

  SERGEANT MAJOR, MEDICAL ASSISTANT OF A TANK BATTALION

  Where shall I begin? I’ve even prepared a text for you. Well, all right, I’ll speak from the heart…This is how it was…I’ll tell you as I would a friend…

  I’ll begin by saying that girls were accepted reluctantly into the tank forces. One could even say they weren’t accepted at all. How did I get there? We lived in the town of Konakovo, in the Kalinin region. I had just passed my exams to go from junior high to high school. None of us understood then what war was; for us it was some sort of game, something from a book. We had been brought up on the romanticism of the revolution, on ideals. We believed the newspapers: the war would soon end in our victory. At any moment…

  Our family lived in a big communal apartment. There were many families in it, and every day somebody left for the war: Uncle Petya, Uncle Vasya. We saw them off, and we, the children, were mostly overcome by curiosity. We went all the way to the train with them…Music played, women wept, but none of that frightened us; on the contrary, it amused us. The brass band always played the march “The Slav Girl’s Farewell.” We, too, wanted to get on the train and leave. To that music. The war as we pictured it was somewhere far away. I, for instance, liked uniform buttons, the way they shone. I was already taking courses to become a medical volunteer, but that was also like some sort of child’s game. Then our school was closed, and we were mobilized to build defensive constructions. We were housed in a shed, in an open field. We were even proud that we had been sent to do something connected to the war. We were assigned to a battalion of weaklings. We worked from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, twelve hours a day. We dug antitank trenches. We were all girls and boys of fifteen or sixteen…And so once, as we were working, we heard voices, some shouting “Air raid!” and some “Germans!” The adults ran to hide, but we were interested in seeing German planes, in seei
ng what Germans were. They flew over us, but we couldn’t see anything. We were even upset. After a while they turned and flew lower. We all saw black crosses. There was no fear; again there was only curiosity. And suddenly they opened machine-gun fire and started rattling away, and before our eyes our own boys and girls, with whom we had been studying and working, began to fall. We were petrified; we simply couldn’t understand what was happening. We stood and watched…As if rooted to the spot…The adults ran up to us and threw us to the ground, and still there was no fear in us…

  Soon the Germans came very close to our town; they were some seven miles away, we could hear the cannon fire. All of us girls ran to the recruiting office: we, too, had to go and defend the town, to be together. Nobody had any doubts. But they didn’t take all of us; they took only the strong, sturdy girls, and above all those who were already eighteen. Good Komsomol girls. Some captain chose girls for a tank unit. He didn’t even listen to me, of course, because I was seventeen, and I was only five foot three inches tall.

  “An infantry soldier gets wounded,” he explained. “He will fall to the ground. You can crawl to him, bandage him on the spot, or drag him to cover. It’s not the same with a tank soldier…If he gets wounded inside the tank, he has to be pulled out of it through the hatch. How are you going to do that? Tank soldiers are all big and sturdy, you know. You have to climb up on the tank, it’s being shelled, there are bullets, shells flying. And do you know how it is when a tank catches fire?”

  “But I’m a Komsomol girl like all the others, aren’t I?” I began to cry.

  “Of course you’re also a Komsomol girl. But a very small one.”

  And my girlfriends, the ones I studied with at school and at the medical courses—big, strong girls—were taken. I was offended that they were going and I was left behind.

  I said nothing to my parents, of course. I went to see the girls off, and they took pity on me: they hid me in the back under a tarpaulin. We traveled in an open truck, all wearing different colored kerchiefs—black, blue, red…And I had mama’s blouse tied on my head instead of a kerchief. As if I was going not to the war, but to an amateur concert. Quite a sight! Like a movie…I can’t think of it now without smiling…Shura Kisseleva even took her guitar along. We rode for a while; the trenches were already in sight. The soldiers saw us and shouted, “Actors are coming! Actors are coming!”

  We drove up to the headquarters. The captain ordered us to fall in. We all fell in; I was the last. The girls with their things, and me just so. Since I had left unexpectedly, I had nothing with me. Shura gave me her guitar: “So you won’t be empty-handed.”

  The superior officer came out, and the captain reported to him: “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel! Twelve girls have arrived to serve under your command.”

  The man looked us over. “There are thirteen in all, not twelve.”

  The captain insisted, “No, twelve, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.” He was so sure there were twelve of us. Then he turned, looked, and asked me straight out, “Where did you come from?”

  I answered, “I’ve come to fight, Comrade Captain.”

  “Step forward!”

  “I’ve come with a friend…”

  “You go to a dance with a friend. Here it’s war…Come closer.”

  As I was, with my mother’s blouse on my head, I went up to them. I showed my certificate as a medical volunteer. I began to beg: “Don’t doubt, sirs, I’m strong. I worked as a nurse…I gave blood…Please, let me…”

  They looked over all my papers, and the lieutenant colonel ordered, “To be sent home! In the first vehicle going that way!”

  And till the vehicle came, they assigned me temporarily to a medical platoon. I sat and made cotton swabs. The moment I saw some vehicle approaching headquarters, I’d run into the forest. I’d sit there for an hour or two, the vehicle would leave, I’d come back out. And I did that for three days, until our battalion went into combat. The 1st Tank Battalion of the 32nd Tank Brigade…Everybody went to fight, and I was preparing dugouts for the wounded. Half an hour hadn’t gone by before they started bringing the wounded…and the dead…One of our girls was killed in that battle. And they all forgot that I was to be sent home. They got used to me. The superiors no longer mentioned it…

  Now what? Now I had to get into military dress. We were all given kit bags to put our things in. They were brand-new. I cut off the straps, ripped out the bottom, and put it on. It looked like a military skirt…Somewhere I found an army shirt that wasn’t too ragged, put on a belt, and decided to show myself off to the girls. I had just started turning around before them, when the sergeant major came into our dugout, followed by the commander of the unit.

  The sergeant major: “Ten-hut!”

  The lieutenant colonel entered, and the sergeant said to him, “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, permission to speak, sir! There has been an incident with the girls. I issued them kit bags to keep their things in, and they got into them themselves.”

  At this point the commander of the unit recognized me. “Ah, it’s you, the ‘stowaway’! Well, then, sergeant, we must put the girls in uniforms.”

  What did they issue us? Tank soldiers have canvas trousers with thick pads on the knees, but we got thin cotton overalls. The ground there was half mixed with metal, stones were sticking up everywhere—so again we went around ragged, because we didn’t sit in the tank, but crawled outside on the ground. Tanks often burned. A tank soldier, if he survives, is all covered with burns. We, too, used to get burned, because to pull them out of burning tanks we had to go into the fire. It’s very hard to get a man through the hatch, especially a turret gunner. A dead man is heavier than a living one. Much heavier. I learned all that quickly…

  We were untrained, didn’t understand who was which rank, and the sergeant major kept teaching us that we were now real soldiers, had to salute anyone of higher rank, and go about trim, with buttoned overcoats.

  The soldiers, seeing we were such young girls, liked to make fun of us. Once I was sent from the medical platoon to get some tea. I came to the cook. He looked at me.

  “What have you come for?”

  I say, “T-tea…”

  “The tea isn’t ready yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “The cooks are washing in the cauldrons. Once they’re done washing, we’ll make tea…”

  I believed him. I took it quite seriously, picked up my buckets, and went back. I met the doctor.

  “Why are you coming back empty-handed? Where’s the tea?”

  “The cooks are washing in the cauldrons,” I answered. “The tea isn’t ready yet.”

  He clutched his head. “Which cooks are washing in the cauldrons?”

  He went back with me, gave that cook a good going-over, and they poured me two buckets of tea.

  I was carrying this tea, and I met the head of the political section and the commander of the brigade. I remembered at once how they taught us that we had to salute everybody, because we were rank-and-file soldiers. And here there are two of them. How am I to greet them both? I tried to decide as I went. When I came up to them, I set the buckets down, put both hands to my visor, and saluted the two of them. They had been walking along without noticing me, but when I did that they froze in astonishment.

  “Who taught you to salute that way?”

  “The sergeant major. He said we were to salute everybody. And there were two of you coming at once…”

  For us girls, everything in the army was difficult. It was very hard for us to sort out the different insignia. When we came to the army, there were still diamonds, cubes, stripes, so just try figuring out what his rank is. They say, “Take this letter to the captain.” And how can I tell he’s a captain? The word itself slips out of your mind on the way. I go.

  “Sir, the other sir told me to give you this…”

  “What other sir?”

  “The one who always wears a soldier’s shirt. Without a tunic.”

  What we remembered was
not whether this or that officer was a lieutenant or a captain, but whether he was handsome or not, red-headed, tall…“Ah, him, the tall one!” Of course, when I saw singed overalls, burned hands, burned faces…I…It’s astonishing…I lost the ability to cry…The gift of tears, the woman’s gift…When tank soldiers jumped out of burning vehicles, everything on them was burning. Smoking. They often had broken arms or legs. Those were very badly wounded. A man would lie there and ask, “If I die, write to my mother, write to my wife…” And I wasn’t able. I didn’t know how to tell someone about death…

  When the tank soldiers picked me up with my legs crippled and brought me to a Ukrainian village—it was in the Kirovograd region—the woman who owned the cottage that housed the medical platoon kept repeating, “What a young lad!”

  The tank soldiers laughed. “What do you mean ‘lad,’ granny, she’s a girl!”

  She sat down beside me and looked me over. “What do you mean ‘girl’? That’s not a girl. It’s a young lad…”

  My hair was cut short, I was wearing overalls, a tank helmet—a lad. She yielded me her warm place over the stove and even slaughtered a young pig, so I’d recover more quickly. And she kept pitying me. “Don’t they have enough men, that they recruit such children?…Little girls?…”

  From her words, her tears…I lost all courage for a while, I felt so sorry for myself, and for mama. What am I doing here among men? I’m a girl. What if I come home with no legs? I had all kinds of thoughts…Yes, I did…I don’t conceal it…

  At the age of eighteen, at the Kursk Bulge, I was awarded the medal “For Distinguished Service” and the Order of the Red Star; at nineteen, the Order of the Patriotic War, second degree. When fresh reinforcements arrived, all of them young boys, they were surprised, of course. They were also eighteen or nineteen, and sometimes they asked me mockingly, “What did you get your medals for?” or “Have you been in combat?” Or they would taunt me: “Can a bullet pierce the armor of a tank?”