The Unwomanly Face of War Read online

  I suddenly saw that the sky was blue…

  —

  —What do I remember…What’s imprinted in my memory? The silence, the extraordinary silence in the wards of the badly wounded…The worst…They didn’t talk among themselves. Didn’t call anyone. Many were unconscious. Most often they just lay there silently. Thinking. Looking off somewhere to the side and thinking. You call out to him and he doesn’t hear.

  What were they thinking about?

  * * *

  OF HORSES AND BIRDS

  * * *

  —We rode and rode…

  There were two trains standing next to each other at the station…One with the wounded, and the other with horses. And then a bombardment began. The trains caught fire…We started to open the doors, to save the wounded, so that they could get away, but they all rushed to save the burning horses. When wounded people scream, it’s terrible, but there’s nothing more terrible than the neighing of wounded horses. They’re not guilty of anything, they don’t answer for human deeds. And nobody ran to the forest, everybody rushed to save the horses. All those who could. All of them!

  I want to say…I want to say that the fascist planes flew just over the ground. Low, very low. Later I thought: the German pilots saw it all, can it be that they weren’t ashamed? What were they thinking?

  —

  —I remember one time…We came to a village, and there were some dead partisans lying near a forest. What they had done to them I can’t tell you, my heart won’t bear it. They had been cut up into pieces…They were trussed like pigs. They lay there…and horses were grazing not far away. They must have been the partisans’ horses; they even had saddles. Either they had escaped from the Germans and then came back, or the Germans hadn’t managed to take them away—I don’t know. They didn’t go far. There was a lot of grass. I thought: how could those people do such things in front of horses? In front of animals? The horses had watched them…

  —

  —The field and forest were burning…The meadow was smoky. I saw burned cows and dogs…An unusual smell. Unfamiliar. I saw…Burned barrels of tomatoes, of cabbage. Birds were burned. Horses…Many…Many completely charred ones lay on the road. We also had to get used to that smell…

  I realized then that anything can burn…Even blood burns…

  —

  —During a bombardment, a goat latched on to us. She lay down with us. Simply lay down nearby and screamed. When the bombing ceased, she went with us and kept clinging to people—well, she’s alive, she’s also afraid. We came to a village and said to some woman, “Take her out of pity.” We wanted to save her…

  —

  —Two wounded men lay in my ward…A German and our badly burned tank driver. I come to look at them: “How do you feel?”

  “I’m all right,” our tank driver replies, “but he’s in a bad way.”

  “This fascist…”

  “No, I don’t know, but he’s in a bad way.”

  They were no longer enemies, but people, simply two wounded men lying next to each other. Something human arose between them. I observed more than once how quickly it happened…

  —

  —How is it…How…Remember…Birds are flying in late fall…Long, long flocks. Our artillery and the Germans’ are firing, and they’re flying. How to call out to them? How to warn them: “Not here! There’s shooting here!” How?! The birds are falling, falling to the ground…

  —

  —They brought us some SS officers to be bandaged. A nurse comes to me: “How are we to bandage them?”

  “Normally. They’re wounded…”

  And we bandaged them normally. Two of them later escaped. They were caught, and to keep them from escaping again, I cut the buttons off their long drawers…

  —

  —When they told me…These were the words: “The war is over!” I just sat on the sterilized table. The doctor and I had agreed that when they said “The war is over!” we’d sit on the sterilized table. Do something unbelievable like that. I never let anyone come near that table, not even within gunshot of it. I had gloves, I wore a mask, I had a sterilized smock on, and I handed over all necessary things: swabs, instruments…And now I just sat on that table…

  What did we dream of? First, of course, of being victorious; second, of staying alive. One said, “Once the war is over, I’ll give birth to a whole slew of children.” Another: “I’ll enroll in the university.” Yet another: “I’ll spend all my time at the hairdresser’s. I’ll dress up in pretty clothes and pamper myself.” Or: “I’ll buy nice perfume. Buy a scarf and a brooch.”

  And now that time had come. Everybody suddenly grew quiet…

  —

  —We took back a village…We looked for where to draw some water. We entered a courtyard where we noticed a well sweep. A carved wooden well…A shot man was lying in the yard…Next to him sat his dog. He saw us and began to whimper. It took us a while to realize he was calling us. He led us to the cottage…We followed him. On the threshold lay the man’s wife and three children…

  The dog sat next to them and wept. Really wept. Like a human being…

  —

  —We entered our villages…There were only stoves standing—that was all. Nothing but stoves! In Ukraine we came to villages where there was nothing, just watermelons growing. People ate nothing but these watermelons; it was all they had. They came to meet us and brought watermelons…Instead of flowers…

  I returned home. In a dugout—my mother, three children, and a little dog, all eating boiled goosefoot. They boiled the goosefoot, ate it themselves, and gave it to the dog. And the dog ate it…Before the war we had so many nightingales, but for two years after the war nobody heard them. The earth was all overturned, the so-called ancestors’ dung had been dug under. Plowed in. The nightingales appeared only in the third year. Where had they been? Nobody knows. They came back after three years.

  People put up houses, then the nightingales came back…

  —

  —Whenever I see wild flowers, I remember the war. We didn’t pick flowers then. And if we made bouquets, it was only when we buried someone…When we bid farewell…

  —

  —Ehh, girls, how vile it was…This war…Let’s drink to the memory of our friends…

  * * *

  * General Pavel Ivanovich Batov (1897–1985), a much-decorated general of the Red Army, commanded the 65th Army from 1942 to the end of the war, on the Don front, at Kursk, and later in Belorussia.

  What do you remember most?

  You remember most the quiet, often perplexed human voice. The woman feels astonished at herself, at what happened to her. The past disappeared, it blinded her with its scorching whirl and vanished, but the human being remained. Remained in the midst of ordinary life. Everything around is ordinary except her memory. And I also become a witness. A witness to what people remember and how they remember, to what they want to talk about and what they try to forget or remove to the furthest corner of memory. Curtain off. How they desperately seek for words, yet wish to reconstruct what is gone in the hope that from a distance they may be able to find its full meaning. To see and understand what they hadn’t seen and understood then. There. They study themselves, meet themselves anew. Most often it is already two persons—this one and that one, the young one and the old one. The one in the war and the one after the war. Long after the war. The feeling that I am hearing two voices at the same time never leaves me…

  At that time, in Moscow, on Victory Day, I met Olga Yakovlevna Omelchenko. All the women were wearing spring dresses, bright scarves, but she wore an army uniform and an army beret. Tall, strong. She did not talk and did not weep. She was silent all the time, but this was some sort of special silence, which implied more than could be said, more than words. It was as if she talked to herself all the time. She no longer needed anybody.

  We became acquainted, and afterward I came to see her in Polotsk.

  Before me yet another p
age of the war opened, before which any fantasy will fall silent…

  Olga Yakovlevna Omelchenko

  MEDICAL ASSISTANT IN AN INFANTRY COMPANY

  Mama’s talisman…Mama wanted me to be evacuated together with her. She knew that I was eager for the front, and she tied me to the cart on which our things were being transported. But I quietly untied myself and left with a piece of that rope still on my arm…

  Everybody was on the move…Fleeing. Where was I to go? How to reach the front? On the road I met a group of girls. One of them said to me, “My mother lives nearby, let’s go to my place.” We came at night, we knocked. Her mother opened the door, looked at us, and we were dirty, ragged. “Stay there in the doorway,” she ordered. We stood there. She brought enormous cauldrons, took all our clothes off. We washed our hair with ashes (there was no soap anymore), climbed on the stove,* and I fell fast asleep. In the morning this girl’s mother cooked cabbage soup, baked some bread from bran and potatoes. How tasty that bread seemed to us and how sweet the cabbage soup! And so we stayed four days, and she fed us up. She gave us a little at a time, otherwise she was afraid we’d eat too much and die. On the fifth day she said, “Go.” And before that a neighbor came. We were sitting on the stove. The mother put her finger to her lips, so that we’d be quiet. She hadn’t told her neighbors that her daughter had come back; she told everybody that her daughter was at the front. This was her only daughter, but she didn’t feel sorry for her. She couldn’t forgive the disgrace of her coming back. Of not fighting.

  During the night she woke us up, gave us small bundles of food, embraced each of us, and said, “Go…”

  She didn’t even try to keep her daughter home?

  No, she kissed her and said, “Your father’s fighting, you go and fight, too.”

  Back on the road this girl told me that she was a nurse, her unit had fallen into an encirclement…

  For a long time I wandered from place to place and finally wound up in the city of Tambov and found a job in a hospital. The hospital was good; after going hungry for a long time I ate well, I became plump. And then when I turned sixteen, they told me that, like all the nurses and doctors, I could give blood. I started giving blood every month. The hospital constantly needed hundreds of liters, there was never enough. I gave a pint of blood twice a month. I was given a donor’s ration: two pounds of sugar, two pounds of farina, two pounds of sausage, to restore my strength. I was friends with a floor attendant, Aunt Niura. She had seven children, and her husband had been killed at the start of the war. The oldest boy, who was eleven, went to the grocery store and lost their ration cards, so I gave them my donor’s ration. One day the doctor said to me, “Let’s attach your address, in case somebody suddenly turns up who has had a transfusion of your blood.” We wrote out my address and stuck the label to the vial.

  And a while later, two months, not more, I finished my shift and went to sleep. They came and roused me. “Get up! Get up, your brother has come.”

  “What brother? I don’t have a brother.”

  Our dormitory was on the top floor. I went down, looked: there stood a handsome young lieutenant. I asked, “Who wants to see Omelchenko?”

  He said, “I do.” And he showed me the label the doctor and I had written. “Here…I’m your blood brother.”

  He brought me two apples, a bag of candy—it was impossible then to buy candy anywhere. My God! How tasty those candies were! I went to the head of the hospital: “My brother has come…” They gave me a leave. He said, “Let’s go to the theater.” It was the first time in my life I went to the theater, and with a young fellow, at that. A handsome young fellow. An officer!

  He left several days later. He had orders to go to the Voronezh front. When he came to say goodbye, I opened the window and waved to him. I couldn’t get a leave: just then a lot of wounded arrived.

  I had never received letters from anybody; I had no idea what it was—to receive a letter. And suddenly they handed me a little triangle. I opened it, and there was written, “Your friend, commander of a machine-gun platoon…died a hero’s death…” It was my blood brother. He was from an orphanage, and probably mine was the only address he had. My address…When he was leaving he kept asking me to stay in this hospital, so that after the war he could easily find me. “It’s easy to lose each other during the war,” he said. And a month later I received this letter, that he had been killed…And I was so frightened. I was struck to the heart…I decided to do all I could to go to the front and avenge my blood; I knew that my blood had been spilled somewhere there…

  But it wasn’t so easy to go to the front. I applied three times to the head of the hospital, and the fourth time I came to him and said, “If you don’t let me go to the front, I’ll run away.”

  “Very well. I’ll give you an order, since you’re so stubborn.”

  The most terrible thing, of course, is the first battle. It’s because you don’t know anything yet…The sky throbs, the ground throbs, your heart seems about to burst, your skin feels ready to split. I never thought the ground could crackle. Everything crackled, everything rumbled. Heaved…The ground heaved…It was more than I could take…How was I to live through all that…I thought I couldn’t endure it. I was so terribly frightened, and then I decided: so as not to turn coward, I took my Komsomol card, dipped it in the blood of a wounded soldier, put it in my pocket over my heart, and buttoned it. And by doing that I made myself an oath that I had to endure, and above all not to turn coward, because if I did it in my first battle, I wouldn’t be able to take a step afterward. I’d be removed from the front line and sent to the medical battalion. And I only wanted to be at the front line; I wanted sometime to see at least one fascist face-to-face…Personally…And we advanced, we walked through the grass, and the grass was waist high. Nothing had been sown there for several years. It was very hard to walk. This was at the Kursk Bulge…

  After the battle the chief of staff summoned me. It was some sort of ruined hut, with nothing inside. There was one chair, and he was standing. He sat me in the chair.

  “I look at you and think: what made you come to this hellfire? You’ll be killed like a fly. It’s war! A meat grinder! Let me at least transfer you to a medical unit. It’s all very well if they kill you, but what if you’re left without eyes, without arms? Have you thought of that?”

  I reply, “I have, Comrade Colonel. And I ask you one thing: don’t transfer me from the company.”

  “All right, go!” he shouted at me. I even got scared. And he turned to the window.

  Heavy combat. Hand-to-hand…That is a horror…Not for a human being…They beat, they stab with a bayonet, they strangle each other. They break each other’s bones. There’s howling, shouting. Moaning. And that crunching…That crunching! Impossible to forget it…the crunching of bones…You hear a skull crack. Split open…Even for war it’s a nightmare; there’s nothing human in it. I won’t believe anyone who says that war isn’t terrifying. Now the Germans rise up and advance; they always march with their sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Another five or ten minutes and they attack. You begin to shake. To shiver. But that’s before the first shot…And then…Once you hear the command, you no longer remember anything; you rise up with everybody and run. And you no longer think about being afraid. But the next day you can’t sleep, you’re afraid. You remember everything, all the details, and it dawns on you that you could have been killed, and you’re insanely frightened. Right after an attack it’s better not to look at faces; they’re some sort of totally different faces, not like people usually have. They themselves cannot raise their eyes to each other. They don’t even look at the trees. You go up to someone and he says, “Go a-way! A-way…” I can’t express what it is. Everybody seems slightly abnormal, and there’s even a glimpse of something bestial. Better not to see it. To this day I can’t believe I stayed alive. Alive…Wounded and shell-shocked, but whole. I can’t believe it…

  I close my eyes and see it all again in front of
me…

  A shell hit the ammunition depot, and it caught fire. The soldier who was standing guard next to it got scorched. Turned into a black piece of meat…He kept jumping around…And everybody watched from the trench, and nobody budged, they were all at a loss. I grabbed a sheet, ran over, covered the soldier with it, and lay down on him. Pressed him to the ground. The cold ground…Like that…He thrashed about till his heart burst, then grew still…

  I was all covered with blood…One of the older soldiers came up and embraced me. I heard him say, “The war will end, and if she’s still alive, there’ll be nothing human left of her anyway, it’s all over.” Meaning that I was in the midst of such horror, and living through it, at such a young age. I was shaking as if in a fit; they took me under the arms to the dugout. My legs wouldn’t hold me up…I was shaking as if an electric current was running through me…I can’t describe how it felt…

  Then the battle began again…At the Sevsk the Germans attacked us seven or eight times a day. So that day I also carried the wounded with their weapons. When I crawled to the last one, his arm was completely smashed. Hanging by little pieces…by the sinews. He was all bloody…His arm had to be urgently amputated and bandaged, otherwise it was impossible to bandage him. But I had no knife or scissors. My kit was loose on my shoulder, and things had fallen out. What was I to do? I bit his flesh off with my teeth. I bit it off and bandaged him…I was bandaging, and the wounded man said, “Make it quick, nurse, I’ll go and fight some more…” In delirium…

  A few days later, when the tanks came against us, two men turned coward. They fled…The whole line wavered…Many of our comrades were killed. The wounded that I had dragged to a shell hole were taken prisoner. An ambulance was supposed to come for them…But when those two turned coward, panic set in. The wounded were abandoned. Later on we came to the place where they lay, some with their eyes put out, some with their guts ripped open…After I saw it my face turned black overnight. I was the one who had gathered them in one place…I…It frightened me so much…