Last Witnesses Read online

  …After the war we were sent to an orphanage that stood near the road. There were many German prisoners. They walked down the road for days. We threw dirt and stones at them. The convoy soldiers chased us away and scolded us.

  In the orphanage all the children waited for their parents to come and take them home. An unknown man or woman would appear; we’d all run to them and shout, “My papa…My mama…”

  “No, it’s my papa!”

  “They came to take me!”

  “No, it’s me they’ll take!”

  We envied very much those who were found by their parents. They wouldn’t let us come near their mamas and papas: “Don’t touch her, she’s my mama” or “Don’t touch him, he’s my papa.” They wouldn’t let go of them for a moment, afraid someone would take them away. Or for fear they would suddenly go off somewhere again.

  Children from the orphanage and ordinary children went to school together. At that time everybody lived poorly, but a child would come from home and have a slice of bread in his bag or a potato, while we had nothing. We were all dressed the same way when we were little, but once we grew up, we would get upset. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you want a pretty dress, pretty shoes, but we all wore ankle-high laced shoes. Both boys and girls. A girl wanted a bright ribbon in her braids, colored pencils. A book bag. We wanted candy, but we had it only for the New Year—fruit drops. Whenever we had a lot of black bread, we sucked it like candy—we thought it was very tasty.

  We had one young teacher, the rest were elderly women, so we all loved her very much. We adored her. Lessons wouldn’t begin until she came to school. We sat by the window and waited: “She’s co-o-oming! She’s co-o-oming…” She came into the classroom, and each one of us wanted to touch her, each of us thought, “My mama is like that…”

  My dream: I’ll grow up, start working, and buy myself many dresses—a red one, a green one, a polka-dot one, with a little bow. The little bow was a must! In the seventh grade they asked me what I wanted to study, and I had long since decided: dress-making.

  I sew dresses.

  “HOW DID HE DIE, IF THERE WAS NO SHOOTING TODAY?…”

  Eduard Voroshilov

  ELEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW WORKS IN TELEVISION.

  I only told mama about the war…My mama…Only someone close…

  In the village where our partisan unit was stationed, an old man died. I was living in his cottage. When we were burying him, a boy of about seven stopped by and asked, “Why is the grandpa lying on the table?”*

  “Grandpa died,” they answered.

  The boy was terribly surprised.

  “How did he die, if there was no shooting today?”

  The boy was seven years old, but he’d been hearing for two years already that people die only when there’s shooting.

  I remembered that…

  I began my story with a partisan unit, which I did not get to at once. Only by the end of the second year of the war. I didn’t tell you how, a week before the war, mama and I went to Minsk, and she took me to a Pioneer camp near town…

  In the camp we sang songs: “If There Is War Tomorrow,” “Three Tankers,” “Over Hill and Dale.” This last one my father liked very much. He often hummed it…Just then the movie The Children of Captain Grant was released, and I liked a song from that movie: “Hey, merry wind, sing us a song…” I sang this song running out to do morning exercise.

  That day there was no morning exercise, there were planes roaring over us…I looked up and saw black dots coming down from the planes. We knew nothing about bombs yet. Next to the Pioneer camp was a railroad, and I walked along it to Minsk. My calculation was simple: there was a railroad station near the medical institute where mama worked at the time. If I follow the rails I’ll come to mama. I took with me a boy who lived not far from the station. He was much younger than me and cried a lot. He also walked slowly, while I liked to walk. My father and I walked everywhere in the suburbs of my native Leningrad. Of course I was annoyed…Still we did make it to the Minsk train station, reached the Western Bridge. There another bombing began, and I lost him.

  Mama was not in the institute. Not far from there lived Professor Golub, with whom mama worked, and I found his apartment. But it was empty…Many years later I learned what had happened: as soon as the bombing of the city began, mama hitched a ride in a car and went to Ratomka by the high road. She arrived and saw the devastated camp…

  Everybody was leaving the city and going somewhere. I decided that Leningrad was farther away than Moscow, and although my papa lived in Leningrad, he was at the front, but I had aunts in Moscow, and they surely wouldn’t go away anywhere. They wouldn’t because they lived in Moscow…In our capital…On the road I kept near a woman with a little girl. I didn’t know the woman, but she realized that I was alone and had nothing and that I was hungry. She called me: “Come to us, we’ll eat together.”

  I remember that I ate onion with lard then for the first time in my life. I winced to begin with, but then I ate it. Whenever the bombing began, I always watched for where this woman with her girl was. In the evening we chose a ditch and settled for a rest. We were constantly bombed. The woman looked around and cried out…I also got up and looked in the direction she had just looked in, and saw a low-flying plane and little fires flashing next to the propeller on the wings. And, in the wake of these fires, little spurts of dust rising along the road. Quite instinctively I tumbled to the bottom of the ditch. The machine-gun burst rattled over my head, and the plane flew farther on. I got up and saw that woman lying on the side of the ditch with a bloody spot instead of a face. Then I got frightened, jumped out of the ditch, and ran. The question of what happened to that little girl has tormented me ever since, even now. I never met her again…

  I reached some village…German wounded lay outside under the trees. So I saw Germans for the first time…

  The villagers had been driven out of their houses, forced to carry water, the German medical orderlies heated it on a bonfire in big buckets. In the morning they put the wounded men in trucks and also one or two boys in each truck. They gave us flasks of water and showed how we should help: one needs to have a handkerchief wetted and placed on his head, another to have his lips wetted. A wounded man begs: “Wasser…Wasser…” You put the flask to his lips, and you shake all over. Even now I can’t determine the feeling I experienced then. Squeamishness? No. Hatred? No again. It was everything together. And pity, too…Hatred is a feeling that gets formed in a man, it’s not an innate thing. At school we were taught to be kind, to love. I’ll skip ahead again…When I was first hit by a German, I didn’t feel pain, it was something else. How can it be that he hit me? By what right? It was a shock.

  I went back to Minsk.

  And I made friends with Kim. We got acquainted in the street. To my question, “Who do you live with?” he replied, “Nobody.”

  I learned that he, too, had gotten lost, and I suggested, “Let’s live together.”

  “Yes, let’s.” He was glad because he had no place to live. But I lived in the abandoned apartment of Professor Golub.

  Once Kim and I saw a fellow a bit older than us walking down the street carrying a stand for shining shoes. We listened to his advice: what kind of box we needed, how to make shoe polish. To make shoe polish we needed soot, and the city was full of it, far more than we needed. It had to be mixed with some oil. In short, we prepared some sort of stinking mixture, but it was black. And if it was neatly spread it even shone.

  Once a German came up to me and put his foot on the box. His boots were dirty, with old, caked dirt. We had already had to deal with such footwear, and I had a special scraper to scrape the dirt off first and then apply the polish. I took the scraper, passed it over just twice, but he didn’t like it. He kicked the box, and then me in the face…

  I had never been hit in
my life. I don’t count boys’ fights, there was plenty of that in Leningrad schools. But no adult had ever hit me before.

  Kim saw my face and shouted, “Don’t you dare look at him like that! Don’t! He’ll kill you…”

  Just then we encountered people in the streets who had yellow stars sewn on their jackets and coats. We had heard about the ghetto…This word was always uttered in a whisper…Kim was a Jewish boy, but he shaved his head, and we decided to pass him off as a Tatar. When his hair began to grow in, his curly black hair, who would believe that he was a Tatar? I suffered over my friend. During the night I would wake up, see his curly head and couldn’t go back to sleep: something had to be devised so that Kim wouldn’t be taken to the ghetto.

  We found a hair clipper, and I shaved Kim again. It was already getting cold, and it was useless to polish shoes in winter. We had a new plan. The German authorities set up a hotel in the city for arriving officers. They used to come with big backpacks, suitcases, and the hotel wasn’t near. By some miracle we got hold of a big sled, and we waited at the station for the arriving trains. The train would arrive, we would load the sled with two or three persons’ luggage, and pull it across the whole city. For that we were given bread or cigarettes, and cigarettes could be exchanged for anything at the market, any food.

  Kim was taken one night when the train came very late. We were freezing cold, but couldn’t leave the station because the curfew was already in effect. We were chased out of the building and waited in the street. At last the train arrived, we loaded the sled and set out. We pulled, the belts cut into our bodies, and the Germans urged us on: “Schnell! Schnell!” We couldn’t go quickly, and they began to beat us.

  We brought the things into the hotel and waited for them to pay us. One man ordered, “Get out!” and he pushed Kim. Kim’s hat fell off. Then they shouted “Jude!” They seized him…

  A few days later I found out that Kim was in the ghetto. I went there…I spent whole days circling around it…I saw him several times through the wire. I brought him bread, potatoes, carrots. The sentry turns his back, goes to the corner, and I toss in a potato. Kim comes, picks it up…

  I lived several miles away from the ghetto, but during the night such shouting came from there that the whole city heard it. I would wake up with the thought: is Kim alive? How can I save him? After the next pogrom, I came to the appointed place, and they made signs to me: “Kim isn’t there!”

  I felt miserable…But I still had hope…

  One morning someone knocked on my door. I jumped out of bed…My first thought was: Kim! No, it wasn’t him. The boy from downstairs woke me up. He said, “Come outside with me, there are dead people lying there. Let’s look for my father.” We went outside. The curfew was over, but there were almost no people. The street was covered with light snow and, covered with this snow, at a distance of fifteen to twenty yards from each other, lay our captive soldiers. They had been driven through the city during the night, and those who lagged behind had been shot in the back of the head. They all lay face down.

  The boy was unable to touch the dead men, he was afraid that his father was somewhere among them. It was then that I caught myself thinking that for some reason I had no fear of death. Mentally I was already used to it. I turned them over and he looked at each face. We went along the whole street that way…

  Since then…there have been no tears in me…Not even when maybe there should have been. I don’t know how to cry. I cried only once during the whole war. When our partisan nurse Natasha was killed…She loved poetry, and I loved poetry. She loved roses, and I loved roses, and in summer I used to bring her bouquets of wild roses.

  Once she asked me, “How many grades did you finish before the war?”

  “Four…”

  “When the war is over, will you go to a Suvorov School?”

  Before the war I liked my father’s military uniform, I also wanted to bear arms. But I told her, no, I wouldn’t be an officer.

  Dead, she lay on pine branches by a tent, and I sat over her and cried. Cried for the first time at the sight of a dead human being.

  …I met my mama…When we met, she only looked at me, didn’t even caress me, and repeated, “You? Can it be you?”

  Many days passed before we could tell each other about the war…

  * It is traditional in Russian funerary practice to lay out the body of the dead person on a table until the coffin is brought.

  “BECAUSE WE’RE GIRLS, AND HE’S A BOY…”

  Rimma Pozniakova (Kaminskaya)

  SIX YEARS OLD. NOW A WORKER.

  I was in kindergarten…Playing with dolls…

  They call me: “Your papa’s come to take you. It’s war!” I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to play. I cry.

  What is this war? How is it that I’m killed? How is it that papa’s killed? There was another unfamiliar word—refugees. Mama hung little bags on our necks with our birth certificates and notes with our address. In case she was killed, strangers would know who we were.

  We walked for a very long time. We lost papa. Were frightened. Mama said that papa was taken to the concentration camp, but that we would go to papa. And what was a concentration camp? We gathered food, but what kind of food? Baked apples. Our house burned down, our garden burned down, there were baked apples hanging on the apple trees. We gathered them and ate them.

  The concentration camp was in Drozdy, near Komsomol Lake. Now it’s in Minsk, but then it was the countryside. I remember the black barbed wire. People’s faces were also all black, all looking the same. We didn’t recognize father, but he recognized us. He wanted to caress me, but for some reason I was afraid to get near the barbed wire and tugged at mama to go home.

  When and how father came home I don’t remember. I know that he worked at a mill, and mama sent us to him to carry lunch—me and my little sister Toma. Tomochka was still a tiny thing. I was bigger, I already wore a little bra—there were these little girls’ bras before the war. Mama gave us a bundle with food and put some leaflets inside my bra. The leaflets were small, a page from a school notebook, written by hand. Mama led us to the gate, wept, and instructed us, “Don’t go near anybody except your father.” Then she stood waiting for us to return, till she saw us come back alive.

  I don’t remember being afraid…Mama said we had to go, and we went. Mama said this was the main thing. We were afraid not to obey mama, not to do what she asked us to do. She was our beloved mama. We couldn’t even imagine not obeying her.

  When it was cold we all climbed on the stove. We had a big sheepskin coat, and we all got under this coat. To heat the stove we had to go to the train station and steal coal. We had to crawl on our knees so that the watchman didn’t notice. We crawled and helped ourselves along with our elbows. We would bring back a bucket of coal, and we looked like chimneysweeps: knees and elbows and nose and forehead all black.

  At night we slept together, nobody wanted to sleep alone. There were four of us: myself, my two sisters, and four-year-old Boris, whom mama adopted. Only later did we find out that Boris was the son of the underground fighter Lelia Revinskaya, mama’s friend. At the time mama told us that there was this little boy who was often left at home by himself, was frightened and had nothing to eat. She wanted us to accept him and come to love him. She realized that it wasn’t easy. Children are capable of not loving. She did a smart thing: she didn’t bring Boris, but sent us to get him. “Go and bring this boy and be friends with him.” We went and brought him.

  Boris had many books with pretty pictures. He took them all with him, we helped him carry them. We would sit on the stove, and he would tell us fairy tales. We liked him so much that he became as dear to us as could be, maybe because he knew so many fairy tales. We told everybody in the yard, “Don’t bully him.”

  We were all blond, and Boris was dark-haired. His mama had
a thick black braid, and when she came to us, she gave me a present of a little mirror. I put it away and decided to look at it in the mornings and then I’d have a braid like hers.

  We run around in the yard, and the children shout, “Whose child is Boris?”

  “Boris is ours.”

  “Why are you all blond and he’s dark-haired?”

  “Because we’re girls, and he’s a boy.” That’s what mama told us to answer.

  Boris was in fact ours, because his mama had been killed and his papa had been killed, and he could have been thrown into the ghetto. Somehow we already knew that much. Our mama was afraid he’d be recognized and taken. We’d go somewhere and we’d all call our mama “mama,” but Boris called her “aunt.” She kept begging him, “Say ‘mama,’ ” and she’d give him some bread.

  He’d take the bread, step back: “Thank you, Aunt.”

  And his tears poured down…

  “YOU’RE NO BROTHER OF MINE IF YOU PLAY WITH GERMAN BOYS…”

  Vasya Sigalev-Kniazev

  SIX YEARS OLD. NOW AN ATHLETIC COACH.

  It was early dawn…

  Shooting began. Father leaped out of bed, ran to the door, opened it, and cried out. We thought he was frightened, but he fell, he had been hit by an exploding bullet.

  Mama found some rags. She didn’t turn the light on, because there was still shooting. Father moaned, tossed from side to side. A faint light came through the window, fell on his face…

  “Lie down on the floor,” mama said.

  And suddenly she burst into sobs. We rushed to her with a cry. I slipped in my father’s blood and fell. I smelled blood and also some other heavy smell—father’s intestines had exploded…