The Unwomanly Face of War Read online

  Do you understand that? Can it be understood now? I want you to understand my feelings…You can’t shoot unless you hate. It’s a war, not a hunt. I remember at political classes they read us the article “Kill Him!” by Ilya Ehrenburg.*4 As many times as you meet a German, so many times you kill him. A famous article, everybody read it then, learned it by heart. It made a strong impression on me. I carried it in my bag all through the war, that article and papa’s death notice…Shoot! Shoot! I had to take revenge…

  I completed a short-term course, very short-term—three months of studies. I learned to shoot. And I became an artillery commander. They sent me to the 1357th Antiaircraft Regiment. At first I kept bleeding from the nose and ears, my stomach was completely upset…My throat was so dry I was nauseous…At night it wasn’t too bad, but in daytime it was very frightening. It seemed the plane was flying straight at you, precisely at your gun. About to ram you! Another moment and it would reduce you to nothing. It’s all over! That wasn’t for a young girl…Not for her ears, not for her eyes…First we had the eighty-five millimeters. They proved good around Moscow. Then they were sent against tanks, and we were given thirty-seven millimeters. That was at the Rzhevsk front…*5 There were such battles there…In spring the ice began to break up on the Volga…and what did we see? We saw a red-and-black ice block floating along, and on it two or three Germans and one Russian soldier…They had perished like that, clutching each other. They were frozen into this ice block, and the ice block was all bloody. All our Mother Volga was bloody…

  —

  She suddenly stopped. “I need to catch my breath…Or else I’ll start sobbing, and our meeting will be ruined…” She turned to the window to get control of herself. A moment later she was already smiling. “Honestly, I don’t like to cry. As a child I learned not to cry…”

  “And listening to Valya, I remembered besieged Leningrad.” Alexandra Fyodorovna, who had been silent till then, entered the conversation. “Especially one incident that astounded us all. They told us about an old woman who opened her window every day and threw water out with a dipper, and each time she managed to throw it further and further. First we thought: well, she’s probably crazy, all sorts of things happened during the siege, and we went to her to find out what was the matter. Listen to what she said to us: ‘If the fascists come to Leningrad, and set foot on my street, I’ll scald them with boiling water. I’m old, there’s nothing else I can do, so I’ll scald them with boiling water.’ And she practiced…Every day…The siege had just begun, there was still hot water…She was a very cultivated woman. I even remember her face.

  “She chose a way of fighting for which she was still strong enough. Imagine that moment. The enemy was already close to the city, combat went on at the Narva Gates, the Kirov Factory was being shelled…Each person thought of doing something to defend the city. To die was too easy; you had to do something. To act. Thousands of people thought the same…”

  “I want to find the words…How can I express it all?” Valentina Pavlovna asked either us or herself.

  —

  I came back from the front crippled. I had been wounded in the back by shrapnel. The wound wasn’t big, but I had been thrown way off into a snowdrift. And for several days I hadn’t dried my felt boots. Maybe there wasn’t enough firewood, or it wasn’t my turn to dry them at night. Our stove was small, and there were many of us. Before they found me, my feet got badly frostbitten. I was obviously covered with snow, but I could breathe, and an opening formed itself in the snow…A sort of pipe…The first-aid dogs found me. They dug into the snow and took my ear-flapped hat. My death passport was in it; we all had these passports: which family members to inform, and where. They dug me out, put me on a tarpaulin, my jacket was soaked with blood…But nobody paid attention to my feet…

  I spent six months in the hospital. They wanted to amputate my leg, amputate it above the knee, because gangrene was setting in. And here I turned a little fainthearted, I didn’t want to go on living as a cripple. What should I live for? Who needs me? No father, no mother. A burden in life. Who needs a stump like me? I’ll strangle myself…And I asked the nurse-aide for a big towel instead of a small one…They all teased me in the hospital: “And here’s granny…Old granny’s lying here.” Because when the head of the hospital saw me for the first time, he asked: “Well, and how old are you?” I said quickly, “Nineteen…I’ll be nineteen soon…” He laughed: “Oh! That’s old, old. A ripe old age.” So the nurse-aide Aunt Masha also teased me that way. She said to me, “I’ll give you the towel, because they’re preparing you for surgery. But I’ll keep an eye on you. I don’t like your look, girl. Have you got something naughty in mind?” I said nothing…But I saw it was true: they were preparing me for surgery. And I didn’t know what surgery was, I had never once been under the knife, not like now, when my body’s a geographical map, but I could guess. I hid the big towel under my pillow and waited till everybody left or fell asleep. We had iron beds. I thought I’d tie the towel to the bed and strangle myself. If I had strength enough. But Aunt Masha didn’t leave my side all night. She saved my young life. She didn’t sleep…She saved foolish me…

  My ward doctor, a young lieutenant, went after the head doctor and asked, “Let me try. Let me try…” And the head doctor: “What are you going to try? One of her toes is already black. The girl’s nineteen. She’ll die because of you and me.” It turned out that my ward doctor was against the surgery. He suggested another treatment, new at the time. To inject oxygen under the skin with a special needle. Oxygen nourishes…Well, I don’t quite know how it works, I’m not a medic…And he, this young lieutenant, persuaded the head doctor. They didn’t cut off my leg. They started using that treatment. And after two months I began to walk. With crutches, of course; my legs were like rags, no support at all. I saw them, but I didn’t feel them. Then I learned to walk without the crutches. They congratulated me: you’ve been born for the second time. After the hospital I was supposed to rest. Rest how? Where? I had no one. I went back to my unit, to my gun. There I joined the Party. At the age of nineteen…

  I met Victory Day in East Prussia. For two days it was quiet, there was no shooting, then in the middle of the night a sudden signal: “Alert!” We all jumped up. And there came a shout: “Victory! Capitulation!” Capitulation was all right, but victory—that really got to us. “The war’s over! The war’s over!” We all started firing whatever we had: submachine guns, pistols…We fired our gun…One wiped his tears, another danced: “I’m alive, I’m alive!” A third fell to the ground and embraced it, embraced the sand, the stones. Such joy…And I was standing there and I slowly realized: the war’s over, and my papa will never come home. The war was over…The commander threatened later, “Well, there won’t be any demobilization till the ammunition’s paid for. What have you done? How many shells have you fired?” We felt as if there would always be peace on earth, that no one would ever want war, that all the bombs should be destroyed. Who needed them? We were tired of hatred. Tired of shooting.

  How I wanted to go home! Even if papa wasn’t there, and mama wasn’t there. Home is something greater than the people who live in it, and greater than the house itself. It’s something…a human being should have a home…But I bow down to my stepmother…She met me like a mother. I’ve called her mama ever since. She waited for me, waited so much. Although the hospital director had written that my leg had been amputated, that I’d be brought to her a cripple. He wanted to prepare her. He promised that I could stay with her for a while, and afterward I’d be taken away…But she wanted me to come home…

  She waited for me…I resembled my father very much…

  We left for the front at the age of eighteen or twenty and came back at twenty or twenty-four. First there was joy, but then fear: what were we going to do in civilian life? There was a fear of peaceful life…My girlfriends had managed to finish various institutes, but what about us? Unfit for anything, without any professions. All we knew was
war, all we could do was war. I wanted to get rid of the war as quickly as possible. I hastily remade my uniform coat into a regular coat; I changed the buttons. Sold the tarpaulin boots at a market and bought a pair of shoes. When I put on a dress for the first time, I flooded myself with tears. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. We had spent four years in trousers. There was no one I could tell that I had been wounded, that I had a concussion. Try telling it, and who will give you a job then, who will marry you? We were silent as fish. We never acknowledged to anybody that we had been at the front. We just kept in touch among ourselves, wrote letters. It was later that they began to honor us, thirty years later…to invite us to meetings…But back then we hid, we didn’t even wear our medals. Men wore them, but not women. Men were victors, heroes, wooers, the war was theirs, but we were looked at with quite different eyes. Quite different…I’ll tell you, they robbed us of the victory. They quietly exchanged it for ordinary women’s happiness. Men didn’t share the victory with us. It was painful…Incomprehensible…Because at the front men treated us marvelously well; they always protected us. I’ve never encountered such an attitude toward women in peaceful life. When we retreated, we’d lie down to rest on the bare ground, they stayed in their army shirts and gave us their overcoats: “The girls…The girls need to be covered…” They’d find a piece of cotton wool or a bandage somewhere: “Take it, you might need it…” They’d share a last little rusk. We saw and knew nothing but kindness and warmth during the war. And after the war? I’m silent…Silent…What keeps us from remembering? The unbearableness of the memories…

  My husband and I arrived in Minsk. We had nothing, not even a sheet, or a mug, or a fork…Two overcoats, two army shirts. We found a good map, mounted on cotton fabric. We soaked it…it was a big map…This cotton was our first sheet. Later, when our daughter was born, we cut it up for diapers. This map…I still remember, it was a political map of the world…And our daughter slept in a suitcase…The plywood suitcase my husband brought from the front served as a cradle. Besides love there was nothing in the house. I’ll say that…Once my husband came: “Let’s go, I saw a discarded old sofa”…And we went to get the sofa—at night, so that nobody would see us. How we rejoiced over that sofa!

  All the same we were happy. I now had so many girlfriends! It was a hard time, but we were never downcast. We’d get food with our coupons and call each other: “Come, I got some sugar. We’ll have tea…” We had nothing over our heads, nothing under us, no rugs, no crystal, nothing…And we were happy. Happy because we were still alive. We talked, we laughed. We walked in the streets…I admired things all the time, though there was nothing to admire—broken stones all around, even the trees were crippled. But we were warmed by the feeling of love. People somehow needed people; we all needed each other very much then. It was later that we separated, each on his own, in his own home, his own family, but then we were still together. Shoulder to shoulder, like in a trench at the front…

  Now I’m often invited to meetings at the war museum…Asked to lead excursions. Yes, now. Forty years later! Forty! Recently I appeared before some young Italians. They asked me questions: What kind of doctor treated me? What were my illnesses? For some reason they wanted to know whether I consulted a psychiatrist. And what sort of dreams did I have? Did I dream about the war? A Russian woman who fought with weapons was a riddle to them. Who is this woman who not only saved people and bandaged wounds, but herself shot guns and blew things up…Killed men…They were also interested in whether I was married. They were sure that I wasn’t. That I was single. And I laughed, “Everybody brought trophies home from war, and I brought my husband…I have a daughter. Now my grandchildren are growing up…” I haven’t told you about love…I won’t be able to, my heart isn’t strong enough. Some other time…There was love! There was! Can a human being live without love? Survive without love? Our battalion commander fell in love with me at the front…During the whole war he protected me, wouldn’t let anyone go near me, but once he was demobilized he sought me out in the hospital. Then he declared himself…Well, about love later…You come, be sure to come. You’ll be my second daughter…Of course, I dreamed of having many children, I love children. But I have only one daughter…My dear daughter…I had no health, no strength. And I couldn’t study—I was often sick. My feet, always my feet…They’re my weak point…Before I retired I worked as a technician in the Polytechnical Institute. Everybody liked me, professors and students. Because there was a lot of love in me, a lot of joy. That’s how I understood life, that’s how I wanted to live after the war. God didn’t make us for shooting, He made us for love. What do you think?

  Two years ago our chief of staff, Ivan Mikhailovich Grinko, visited me. He retired long ago. He sat at this same table. I also baked pies. He talked with my husband, reminisced…Mentioned our girls. And I burst into tears: “Honor, you say, respect. But those girls are almost all single. Unmarried. They live in communal apartments. Who pitied them? Defended them? Where did you all disappear to after the war? Traitors!!” In short, I ruined their festive mood…

  The chief of staff was sitting where you are now. “Show me,” he pounded his fist on the table, “show me who offended you. Just show him to me!” He asked my forgiveness. “I can’t say anything to you, Valya, I can only weep.” But there’s no need to pity us. We’re proud. Let them rewrite history ten times. With Stalin or without Stalin. But this remains—we were victorious! And our sufferings. What we lived through. This isn’t junk and ashes. This is our life.

  Not a word more…

  —

  Before I leave she hands me a packet of pies. “They’re Siberian. Special. You can’t buy them in any store.” I also get a long list of addresses and phone numbers. “They’ll all be glad to see you. They’re waiting. I’ll explain to you: it’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible not to remember.”

  Now I understand why they speak all the same…

  * * *

  *1 Nikolai Yezhov (1895–1940) was head of the NKVD and directed the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938, which was called “Yezhovshchina” (“Yezhov’s thing”) after him

  *2 Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946), an early Bolshevik and close ally of Stalin’s, became chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in 1919, a position he held until his retirement in 1946.

  *3 Stalin took his name from the Russian word сталь, “steel.”

  *4 Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was a prolific Soviet writer and journalist. His article “Kill Him!” (the actual title was simply “Kill!”), published in 1942, was widely read.

  *5 The Rzhevsk front, around the town of Rzhev to the west of Moscow, was the scene of a series of battles from October 1941 to March 1943. The front came to be known as the “Rzhev meat grinder” owing to the immense loss of both military and civilian lives.

  Every morning I open my mailbox…

  My personal mail resembles more and more the mail of a recruiting office or a museum. “Greetings from the women pilots of the Marina Raskova Air Regiment.” “I am writing to you on behalf of the women partisans of the Zhelezniak Brigade.” “The women of the Minsk Underground congratulate you…We wish you success in the work you are beginning…” “The privates of the Women’s Field Bath-and-Laundry Detachment address you…” In all the time of my search I have had only a few desperate refusals: “No, it’s like a terrible dream…I can’t! I won’t!” or “I don’t want to remember! I don’t want to! It took me so long to forget…”

  I remember yet another letter, with no return address: “My husband, a chevalier of the Order of Glory, got ten years in the labor camps after the war…That is how the Motherland met her heroes. The victors! He had written in a letter to his university friend that he had difficulty being proud of our victory—our own and other people’s land was covered with heaps of Russian corpses. Drowned in blood. He was immediately arrested…His epaulettes were torn off…

  “He came back from Kazakhstan after
Stalin’s death…Sick. We have no children. I don’t need to remember the war, I’ve been at war all my life…”

  Not everyone ventures to write down their memories, and not everyone succeeds in entrusting to paper their feelings and thoughts. “Tears hamper me…” (A. Burakova, sergeant, radio operator). And so the correspondence, against my expectations, provides only addresses and new names.

  V. Gromova

  MEDICAL ASSISTANT

  I have enough metal in me…I carry a fragment from a wound I received near Vitebsk in my lung, within an inch of my heart. A second fragment in the right lung. Two in the region of the stomach…

  Here is my address…Come. I cannot write more, I don’t see anything for my tears…

  V. Voronova

  TELEPHONE OPERATOR

  I have no big decorations, only medals. I don’t know whether you would be interested in my life, but I would like to tell it to somebody…

  Alexandra Leontievna Boiko

  FIRST LIEUTENANT, TANKMAN

  My husband and I lived in the Far North, in Magadan. My husband worked as a driver, I as a ticket collector. As soon as the war began, we both asked to be sent to the front. We were told to work where we were needed. Then we sent a telegram addressed to Comrade Stalin, saying that we were contributing fifty thousand rubles (a lot of money at the time, it was all we had) to the construction of a tank, and we both wanted to go to the front. We received an expression of gratitude from the government. And in 1943 my husband and I were sent to the Chelyabinsk tank training school, which we finished as externs.

  In that school they also assigned us a tank. We were both senior driver mechanics, and a tank needs only one. The superiors decided to appoint me commander of an IS-122 tank, and my husband a senior driver mechanic. We went through the whole war as far as Germany. Both wounded. Have decorations.