Last Witnesses Page 15

  Mama and I got on the train. We had only one suitcase, and there were two dolls in it, a big one and a little one. I remember mama didn’t even resist when I put them in. I’ll tell later how these dolls saved us…

  We reached the Kavkazskaya station. The train was destroyed by bombs. We climbed onto some open flatcar. Where we were going we had no idea. We knew one thing: we were going away from the front line. From the battles. It poured rain. Mama covered me with herself. At the Baladzhary station near Baku we got off wet and black from the engine smoke. And hungry. Before the war we had lived modestly, very modestly. We didn’t have nice things that we could take to the market to exchange or sell. Mama only had her passport with her. We sat at the train station and didn’t know what to decide. Where to go. A soldier walked by, not even a soldier—a very little soldier, dark, with a sack on his shoulders, and carrying a mess tin. You could see he had just been taken into the army and was going to the front. He stopped near us. I clung to mama. He asked, “Where are you going, woman?”

  Mama said, “I don’t know. We’re being evacuated.”

  He spoke Russian, but with a heavy accent.

  “Don’t be afraid of us, go to our aul,* to my mother. All our men have been taken into the army: my father, me, my two brothers. She’s all alone. Help her, and you’ll survive together. I’ll come back and marry your daughter.”

  And he told us his address. We had nowhere to write it down, so we memorized it: Musa Musaev, village of Kum, Evlakh station, Kakh district. I’ve remembered the address all my life, though we didn’t go there. We were taken by a single woman who lived in a makeshift plywood hut, which had room only for a bed and a small bedside table. We slept on the floor sideways with our legs under the bed.

  We were lucky to meet nice people…

  I’ll never forget how an officer came up to mama. They talked, and he told her that his whole family had been killed in Krasnodar, and that he was going to the front. His comrades shouted, called him to the train, and he stood there and couldn’t leave us.

  “I see that you’re in distress. Allow me to leave you my army certificate. I have no one else left,” he said suddenly.

  Mama wept. But I understood it all in my own way. I started yelling at him.

  “There’s war…Your whole family got killed. You should go to the front and take revenge on the fascists, but you fall in love with my mama. Shame on you!”

  He and my mother stand there, and they both have tears in their eyes, and I can’t understand how my good mama can talk with such a bad man: he doesn’t want to go to the front; he talks about love, but there can be love only in peacetime. Why did I decide that he was talking about love? He only mentioned his army certificate…

  I also want to tell about Tashkent…Tashkent was my war. We lived in the dormitory of the factory where mama worked. It was in the center of the city, in the former club. Family people lived in the vestibule and the auditorium, and the “bachelors” lived on the stage—they were called “bachelors,” but in fact they were workers whose families had been evacuated elsewhere. Mama and I were placed in a corner of the auditorium.

  We were given coupons for thirty pounds of potatoes. Mama worked in the factory from morning till night, and I had to go and get these potatoes. I spent half a day waiting in a line, and then dragged the sack on the ground for four or five blocks, because I couldn’t lift it. Children weren’t allowed on public transportation, because there was flu going around and they had announced a quarantine. Just then…No matter how I begged, they wouldn’t allow me on a bus. When I only had to cross the street to get to our dormitory, I ran out of strength, fell on the sack, and burst into sobs. Some strangers helped me: they brought me and the potatoes to the dormitory. I can still feel that weight. Each of those blocks…I couldn’t abandon those potatoes, they were our salvation. I’d have died before abandoning them. Mama used to come back from work hungry, blue.

  We were starving, and mama became as skinny as I was. The thought that I had to help somehow never left me. Once we had nothing to eat at all, and I decided to sell our only flannel blanket and buy some bread with the money. Children weren’t allowed to sell things, and I was taken to the children’s room at the police station. I sat there until they informed mama at the factory. When her shift was over, mama came to get me, but meanwhile I cried my eyes out from shame and from thinking that mama was hungry and there wasn’t a crust of bread at home. Mama had bronchial asthma; during the night she coughed terribly and couldn’t breathe. She had to swallow at least a little something to feel better. I always hid a bit of bread for her under the pillow. I would already be asleep, but even so I would remember that I had bread under the pillow, and I wanted terribly to eat it.

  In secret from mama I went to get a job at the factory. I was such a little thing, a real starveling, and they didn’t want to take me. I stood there and cried. Somebody took pity on me. They sent me to the accounting office to fill out work assignments and calculate salaries. I worked on a special machine, which was a prototype of the present-day calculator. Now it works noiselessly, but then it was like a tractor, and it worked with a lamp on. For twelve hours a day my head was like in the hot sun, and toward the end of the day I was deaf from the noise.

  Something terrible happened to me: instead of 280 rubles salary, I calculated 80 for a worker who had six children. Nobody noticed my mistake till payday. I heard someone run down the corridor shouting “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her! How am I going to feed my children?”

  “Hide,” they said to me. “It must be you he’s after.”

  The door opened, I pressed myself to the machine, there was nowhere to hide. A big man ran in with something heavy in his hands.

  “Where is she?”

  They pointed at me: “There she is…”

  He even leaned against the wall.

  “Pah! There’s nobody to kill, my own are like that.” And he turned and walked away.

  I just collapsed by the machine and burst into tears…

  Mama worked at the technical control section of the same factory. The factory produced missiles for the “katiushas,” in two sizes—thirty-five and seventeen pounds. The body of the missile was checked for its solidity under pressure. The missile was lifted, fixed to a socket, and submitted to the necessary pounds of pressure. If it passed the test, the missile was removed and put in a box. If it didn’t, the thread was stripped, the missile took off with a whine and flew up to the ceiling, and then fell who knows where. There was this whining and the fear when the missiles flew off…Everybody hid under the machinery…

  Mama shuddered and shouted during the night. I’d put my arms around her, and she would quiet down.

  Nineteen forty-three was coming to an end…Our army was advancing. I realized that I had to study. I went to the director of the factory. He had a high desk in his office, and I couldn’t be seen from behind it. I began a prepared speech: “I want to quit my factory job. I have to study.”

  The director became angry: “We don’t allow anyone to quit. It’s wartime.”

  “I make mistakes in orders, because I’m uneducated. I miscalculated a man’s salary recently.”

  “You’ll learn. I don’t have enough people.”

  “But after the war educated people will be needed, not ignoramuses.”

  “Ah, you pipsqueak.” The director got up from his desk. “So you know everything!”

  At school I went to the sixth grade. During the lessons of literature and history the teachers talked to us, and we sat and knitted socks, mittens, tobacco pouches for the army. We knitted and memorized poetry. Recited Pushkin in chorus.

  We were waiting for the war to end. It was such a cherished dream that mama and I were even afraid to talk about it. Mama was at work, and some commissioners passed through asking everybody, “What can you
give to the defense fund?” They asked me, too. What did we have? We had nothing except some government bonds that mama had saved. Everybody gave something, how could we not give?! I gave them all the bonds.

  I remember that when mama came home from work, she didn’t scold me, she just said, “That was all we had, besides your dolls.”

  I parted with my dolls, too…Mama lost our monthly bread coupons, and we were literally perishing. And the saving idea came into my head of trying to trade my two dolls—the big one and the little one—for something. We went to the market with them. An old Uzbeck came up to us: “How much?” We said we had to survive for a month, because we had no coupons. The old Uzbeck gave us a big sack of rice. And we didn’t starve to death. Mama swore, “I’ll buy you two beautiful dolls as soon as we get back home.”

  When we got back to Rostov, she couldn’t buy me any dolls, we were needy again. She bought them for me the day I graduated from the institute. Two dolls—a big one and a little one…

  * In the Caucasus, an aul is a fortified village, usually built against a cliffside or a steep slope.

  “IN THE LAST MOMENTS THEY SHOUTED THEIR NAMES…”

  Artur Kuzeev

  TEN YEARS OLD. NOW A HOTEL ADMINISTRATOR.

  Someone was ringing the bell. Pulling and pulling…

  Our church had long been closed, I don’t even remember when it was closed. It had always been a kolkhoz warehouse. Grain was kept in it. Hearing the long-dead bell, the village was dumbstruck: “Calamity!” Mama…everybody rushed outside…

  That was how the war began…

  I close my eyes…I see…

  Three Red Army soldiers are being led down the road, their arms tied behind them with barbed wire. They are in their underwear. Two are young, one an older man. They walk with their heads down.

  They are shot near the school. On the road.

  In the last moments they began to shout their names loudly in hopes that someone would hear and remember them. Inform their relatives.

  I watched through a hole in the fence…I remember…

  One was Vanechka Ballai, the other Roman Nikonov. And the one who was older shouted, “Long live Comrade Stalin!”

  And right after that trucks began to move down that road. Heavy German trucks. And they lay there…Trucks with soldiers and ammunition rode over them. Followed by motorcycles. The Germans rode and rode. By day and by night. For many days.

  And I kept repeating…I’d wake up at night and repeat: Vanechka Ballai, Roman Nikonov…The third man’s name I didn’t know…

  “ALL FOUR OF US PULLED THAT SLEDGE…”

  Zina Prikhodko

  FOUR YEARS OLD. NOW A WORKER.

  The bombing…The earth trembles, our house trembles…

  Our house was small, with a garden. We hid in the house, closed the blinds. The four of us sit there: my two sisters, our mama, and me. Mama says that she closed the blinds and now it’s not scary. And we agree that it’s not scary, yet we’re afraid. But we don’t want to upset mama.

  …We walked behind the cart, then someone sat us little ones on the bundles. For some reason it seemed to me that if I fell asleep I’d be killed, so I did all I could not to close my eyes, yet they closed on their own. Then my older sister and I decided that we’d take turns: first I’d close my eyes and sleep, then she, and the other one would watch that we weren’t killed. But we both fell asleep and woke up from mama’s cry: “Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid!” There was shooting ahead. People shouted…Mama pushed our heads down. But we wanted to look…

  The shooting ended. We drove farther on. I saw that people were lying in a ditch beside the road, and I asked mama, “What are those people doing?”

  “They’re sleeping,” mama replied.

  “Why are they sleeping in a ditch?”

  “Because it’s war.”

  “Does that mean we’ll sleep in a ditch, too? I don’t want to sleep in a ditch.” I began to fuss.

  I stopped fussing when I saw that mama had tears in her eyes.

  Where we were walking, where we were riding, of course I didn’t know. I didn’t understand. I remember only the word Azarichi and the wire, which mama didn’t let us get close to. After the war I learned that we wound up in the Azarichi concentration camp. I even went there afterward, to that place. But what could you see there now? Grass, earth…All the usual things. If there’s anything left, it’s only in our memory…

  When I talk about it, I bite my hands till they bleed, so as not to cry…

  They bring mama from somewhere and lay her on the ground. We crawl up to her—I remember that we crawled, we didn’t walk. We cry, “Mama! Mama!” I beg, “Mama, don’t sleep!” And we’re all bloody, because mama is all bloody. I think we didn’t understand that it was blood and what blood was, but we did realize that it was something terrible.

  Trucks came every day, people got into them and went away. We begged, “Mama, dear, let’s go on a truck. Maybe it goes toward where grandma lives?” Why did we remember grandma? Because mama always said that our grandma lived nearby and didn’t know where we were. She thought we were in Gomel. Mama didn’t want to go on those trucks, she pulled us off each time. And we cried, insisted. One morning she agreed…Winter came, we were freezing…

  I bite my hands so as not to cry. I can’t hold back the tears…

  We rode for a long time and someone told mama, or else she figured it out herself, that we were being taken to be shot. When the truck stopped, we were all told to get off. There was a farmstead there, and mama asked a convoy soldier, “Can we drink some water? My children are asking to drink.” He allowed us to go into the cottage. We went in, and the woman gave us a big mug of water. Mama drank with small sips, slowly, and I thought, “I want so much to eat, why does mama want to drink?”

  Mama drank up one mug, asked for another. The woman drew some water, gave it to her, and said that many people are taken to the forest every day and no one comes back.

  “Do you have a back door that we could leave by?” mama asked.

  The woman pointed—there it is. One door led to the street, the other to the yard. We ran out of the cottage and crawled. I think we didn’t walk but crawled to our grandmother’s house. How we crawled and for how long I don’t remember.

  Grandma put us on the stove, and mama on the bed. In the morning mama began to die. We sat there frightened and couldn’t understand: how can mama die and leave us when papa isn’t there? I remember mama calling us over, smiling.

  “Children, don’t ever quarrel.”

  Why would we quarrel? About what? We had no toys. A big stone was our doll. We had no candy. There was no mama to complain to.

  In the morning grandma wrapped mama in a big white sheet and put her on a sledge. All four of us pulled that sledge…

  Forgive me…I can’t…I’m crying…

  “THESE TWO BOYS BECAME LIGHT AS SPARROWS…”

  Raya Ilyinkovskaya

  FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER OF LOGIC.

  I’ll never forget the smell of the lindens in our hometown, Yelsk.

  During the war everything that had been before the war seemed the most beautiful in the world. That’s how it stayed with me forever. To this day.

  We were evacuated from Yelsk—mama, myself, and my younger brother. We stayed in the village of Gribanovka, near Voronezh, hoping to wait there for the war to end, but a few days after our arrival the Germans approached Voronezh. In our tracks.

  We got on a freight car. They told us we’d be taken far to the east. Mama comforted us this way: “There’ll be a lot of fruit there.” We rode for a long time, because we spent a long time standing on side tracks. We didn’t know where or for how long we would stay, so we would run out at the stations at great risk in order to get some water. We had a litt
le woodstove burning all the time, and we cooked a bucket of millet on it for everybody in the car. We ate this kasha all the while we rode.

  The train stopped at the Kurgan-Tyube station. Near Andijan…I was struck by the unfamiliar nature and struck so strongly that for a time I even forgot about the war. Everything was blooming, ablaze, there was so much sun. I became cheerful again. All the former things came back to me.

  We were brought to the Kyzyl Yul kolkhoz. So much time has passed, but I remember all the names. I’m even surprised that I haven’t forgotten them. I remember learning them at the time, repeating the unfamiliar words. We began to live in a school athletic hall, eight families together. Local people brought us some blankets and pillows. Uzbek blankets are made from multicolored pieces; the pillows are filled with cotton. I quickly learned to gather armfuls of dry cotton stems—we used them to heat the stove.

  We didn’t understand at once that the war was here, too. They gave us a little flour, but it wasn’t enough, and it didn’t last long. We began to starve. The Uzbeks were also starving. Together with the Uzbek boys, we ran after the carts, and were happy if something fell off. The greatest joy for us was oil cake, oil cake from linseed, the one from the cottonseed was very hard, yellow, like from peas.

  My brother Vadik was six years old. Mama and I left him at home alone and went to work in the kolkhoz. We hilled up rice, gathered cotton. My hands hurt from being unaccustomed, I couldn’t fall asleep at night. One evening mama and I came home, and Vadik came running to meet us with three sparrows hanging on a string from his shoulder, and a sling in his hand. He had already washed his “hunting” trophies in the river and waited for mama to start cooking a soup. He was so proud! Mama and I ate the soup and praised it, but the sparrows were so skinny there wasn’t a single gleam of fat in the pot. Only my brother’s happy eyes gleamed over it.