Last Witnesses Read online

  *2 The Whites were Russian forces loyal to the emperor during the revolution. Vasily Chapaev (1887–1919) was a distinguished Red Army commander during the Russian Civil War.

  “I REALIZED—THIS WAS MY FATHER…MY KNEES TREMBLED…”

  Lenya Khosenevich

  FIVE YEARS OLD. NOW A DESIGNER.

  What has stayed in my memory is color…

  I was five years old, but I remember very well…My grandfather’s house—yellow, wooden, some beams on the grass behind the paling. The white sand we played in—as if it was laundered. White as could be. I also remember mama taking me and my little sister to be photographed somewhere in town, and Ellochka crying and me comforting her. The photograph has survived; it’s our only prewar photograph…For some reason I remember it being green.

  Then all the memories are in dark colors…If these first ones are in light tones—the green grass, like a light watercolor, and the white sand, and the yellow paling…then later everything is in dark colors. I’m carried somewhere, choking from the smoke, our things are in the street, bundles, for some reason one chair…People are crying. And mama and I go down the street for a long time. I hold on to her skirt. To everybody mama meets, she repeats the same phrase: “Our house has burned down.”

  We spend the night in some entryway. I’m cold. I warm my hands in the pocket of mama’s jacket. I feel something cold in it. It’s the key to our house.

  Suddenly mama’s not there. Mama disappears, grandma and grandpa remain. I now have a friend two years older—Zhenia Savochkin. He’s seven, I’m five. I’m taught to read with a book of fairy tales by the Grimm brothers. Grandma teaches by her own method, and I can even get a rude flick on the brow from her: “Eh, you!” Zhenia also teaches me. He reads a book and shows me the letters. But most of all I like to listen to the fairy tales, especially when grandma reads. Her voice resembles mama’s. One evening a beautiful woman comes and brings something very tasty. From what she says I understand that mama is alive, and, like papa, is fighting. I’m happy and I shout: “Mama will come back soon!” I want to run outside and share the news with my friend. I get it with a belt from grandma. My grandfather defends me. When they went to bed, I collected all the belts in the house and threw them behind the wardrobe.

  I’m hungry all the time. Zhenia and I go to pick rye, which grows right behind the houses. We rub the ears and chew the grains. The field now belongs to the Germans…and so do the ears of rye…We see a car, we run away. An officer in a green uniform with gleaming epaulettes pulls me literally from our gate. He beats me either with a swagger stick or with a belt. I’m petrified with fear and don’t feel any pain. Suddenly I see grandma: “Dear sir, give me back my grandson. In God’s name, I beg you!” Grandma kneels before the officer. The officer leaves, I lie on the sand. Grandma carries me into the house. I can barely move my lips. After that I’m sick for a long time.

  I also remember carts going down the street, many carts. Grandpa and grandma open the gates. Refugees come to live with us. After a while they get sick with typhus. They’re taken to a hospital, as it’s explained to me. After some time grandpa gets sick. I sleep with him. Grandma grows thin and barely moves about the room. In the afternoon I go out to play with the boys. I come back in the evening and don’t find either grandpa or grandma at home. The neighbors tell me they have also been taken to the hospital. It frightens me, being alone. I already guess that nobody comes back from the hospital where the refugees—and now my grandparents—have been taken. It’s frightening to live alone in the house. At night the house is big and unfamiliar. Even in the daytime it’s frightening. Grandpa’s brother takes me to live with him. I have a new grandpa.

  Minsk is being bombed, we hide in a cellar. When I come out from it, the sun dazzles my eyes, and I go deaf from the roar of the motors. Tanks are moving down the street. I hide behind a post. Suddenly I see a red star on the turret. Ours! I run to our house at once: if our tanks have come, mama has also come! I approach the house—some women with rifles are standing by the porch, they pick me up and begin to ask questions. One of them looks somewhat familiar. She reminds me of somebody. She comes closer to me and embraces me. The other women begin to cry. I shout “Mama!” Then I just collapse…

  Soon mama brought my little sister from the orphanage, but she refused to recognize me—she forgot me completely during the war. But I was so glad to have a little sister again.

  I came home from school and found my father, who had returned from the war, asleep on the sofa. He was asleep, and I took the papers out of his map case and read them. And I realized—this was my father. I sat and looked at him until he woke up.

  My knees trembled all the time…

  “CLOSE YOUR EYES, SONNY…DON’T LOOK…”

  Volodia Parabkovich

  TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A PENSIONER.

  I grew up without mama…

  I’ve never remembered myself as a child…My mama died when I was seven. I lived with my aunt. I was a cowherd, I stocked firewood, drove horses to the night pastures. There was enough to do in the kitchen garden. Then in winter we went sliding on wooden sleds and skating on homemade skates, also wooden, edged with metal and tied to our bast shoes with strings, and also went skiing on skis made of planks and discarded coopers’ rivets. I made it all myself.

  To this day I remember the first ankle boots my father bought me. And how upset I was when I scratched them with a twig in the forest. I was so sorry that I thought: it would be better if I cut my foot—it would heal. I wore those boots leaving Orsha with my father when the fascist airplanes bombed the city.

  Outside the city they shot at us point-blank. People fell to the ground…In the sand, in the grass…“Close your eyes, sonny…Don’t look,” my father begged. I was afraid both to look up—the sky was black with planes—or at the ground—the dead lay everywhere. A plane passed close to us…Father also fell and didn’t get up. I sat over him: “Papa, open your eyes…Papa, open your eyes…” Some people shouted, “Germans!” and pulled me after them. And I couldn’t grasp that my father would never get up again and that I had to leave him like that in the dust on the road. There was no blood on him anywhere, he simply lay silently. People pulled me away by force, but for many days I walked and kept looking back, waiting for father to catch up with me. I woke up during the night, awakened by his voice…I couldn’t believe I had no father anymore. So I was left alone, in my one woolen suit.

  After wandering for a long time…I rode a train, went on foot…I was taken to an orphanage in the town of Melekess in the Kuibyshev region. I tried to escape to the front several times, but each time it failed. They caught me and brought me back. But, as they say, no luck can be good luck. While cutting firewood in the forest, I lost control of the ax, it bounced back and hit me on a finger of my right hand. The teacher bandaged me with her kerchief and sent me to the town clinic.

  On our way to the orphanage, along with Sasha Liapin, who had been sent to accompany me, I noticed a man in a sailor’s cap with ribbons, who was hanging an announcement on the board next to the town Komsomol Committee. We came closer and saw that it was the rules of application to the navy’s cadet school on the Solovetsky Islands.* This school was open only to volunteers. Priority of acceptance was given to the children of sailors and the wards of orphanages. I can hear that sailor’s voice as if it was happening today: “So you want to become sailors?”

  “We’re from an orphanage,” we said.

  “Then go in to the Komsomol Committee and write an application letter.”

  I can’t describe to you our rapture at that moment. It was the direct way to the front. By then I didn’t believe I’d be able to avenge my father! That I’d have time to get to the war.

  We went in to the town Komsomol Committee and wrote applications. A few days later we were already standing before a medical commission. One of its members looke
d me over: “He’s very small and skinny.”

  Another, in an officer’s uniform, sighed. “Never mind, he’ll grow up.”

  They changed our clothes, having some trouble finding the right sizes. When I saw myself in the mirror in a sailor’s uniform, in a sailor’s cap, I was happy. A day later we were already sailing on a boat to the Solovetsky Islands.

  Everything was new. Unusual. It’s late at night…We stand on deck…The sailors urge us to go to bed.

  “Go to the crew’s quarters, boys. It’s warm there.”

  Early in the morning we saw the monastery shining in the sun and the golden hues of the forest. These were the Solovetsky Islands, where the first school of naval cadets in the country was about to open. But before beginning to study, we had to build the school—more precisely, the dugouts. The ground of Solovki is nothing but stone. We didn’t have enough saws, axes, shovels. We learned to do everything by hand: dig hard soil, cut centennial trees, root up stumps, do carpentry. After work we went to rest in cold tents, with beds lined with fir branches, with mattresses and pillows stuffed with grass. We covered ourselves with overcoats. We did our own laundry, the water was mixed with ice…We wept—our hands hurt so.

  In 1942…We took a military oath. We were issued sailors’ caps with the inscription “Naval Cadet School,” but, to our great regret, not with shoulder-length ribbons, but with a little bow on the right side. They gave us rifles. In the beginning of 1943…I was assigned to serve on the guards destroyer Intelligent. Everything was new to me: the crests of the waves the ship’s bow cut through, the “phosphorus” stripe left by the propellers…It was breathtaking…

  “Are you scared, sonny?” the commander asked.

  “No,” I said, not thinking for a second. “It’s beautiful!”

  “It would be beautiful, if it weren’t for the war,” the commander said and looked away for some reason.

  I was fourteen years old…

  * The Solovetsky Islands (also known collectively as Solovki), in the White Sea, were the location of a fortified monastery founded in 1436, then of a notorious Soviet hard-labor camp from 1926 to 1939. A naval academy was set up there just prior to the start of WWII.

  “MY LITTLE BROTHER CRIES, BECAUSE HE WASN’T THERE WHEN PAPA WAS THERE…”

  Larissa Lisovskaya

  SIX YEARS OLD. NOW A LIBRARIAN.

  I remember my papa…And my little brother…

  Papa was with the partisans. The fascists captured him and shot him. Some women told mama where they had been executed—papa and several other people. She ran to where they lay…All her life she remembered that it was cold, the puddles were glazed with ice. They lay in their stocking feet…

  Mama was pregnant. She was expecting our little brother.

  We had to hide. The families of the partisans were arrested. They seized them with the children. Took them away in canvas-covered trucks…

  We stayed for a long time in our neighbors’ cellar. Spring was already beginning…We lay on potatoes, and the potatoes sprouted…You fall asleep and during the night a sprout pops up and tickles you near the nose. Like a little bug. I had bugs living in my pockets. In my socks. I wasn’t afraid of them—either by day or by night.

  We got out of the cellar and mama gave birth to our little brother. He grew, began to speak, and we used to remember papa:

  “Papa was tall…”

  “Strong…How he used to toss me in his arms!”

  That was me and my sister talking, and our little brother would ask, “And where was I?”

  “You weren’t there yet…”

  He begins to cry, because he wasn’t there when papa was there…

  “THAT GIRL WAS THE FIRST TO COME…”

  Nina Yaroshevich

  NINE YEARS OLD. NOW TEACHER OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION.

  There was a big event in our home…

  In the evening a suitor came to propose to my eldest sister. There was a discussion well into the night about when the wedding would take place, where the couple would register their marriage, how many guests to invite. And early in the morning my father was summoned to the recruiting office. The noise spread over the village—war! Mama was at a loss—what were we to do? I thought of just one thing: living through that day. No one had explained to me yet that war was not for a day or two, but maybe for a very long time.

  Now it’s summer, a hot day. I’d like to go to the river, but mama prepares us for the road. We also had a brother who was just discharged from the hospital; he had had an operation on his foot, and he came home on crutches. But mama said, “We all must go.” Where? Nobody knew anything. We walked some three miles. My brother hobbled and cried. How could we go with him? We turned back. At home our father was waiting for us. The men who went to the recruiting office in the morning all came back; the Germans had already taken our regional center. The town of Slutsk.

  The first shells came flying. I stood and watched them before they hit the ground. Someone taught us that you should open your mouth so as not to be deafened. So we opened our mouths, stopped our ears, and could still hear them coming. Whining. It’s so frightening that the skin on your face and your whole body gets taut. There was a bucket hanging in our yard. When everything became quiet, we took it down: we counted fifty-eight holes. The bucket was white, they thought someone was standing there in a white kerchief, and they shot at it…Just for fun…

  The first Germans rode into the village in big trucks adorned with birch branches. The way we did when there was a wedding. We used to break a lot of birch branches…We watched them through the wattle fences. We didn’t have fences then, but wattle fences. Made of vines. We tried to get a look at them…They seemed like ordinary people…I wanted to see what kind of heads they had. For some reason I had this idea that they had inhuman heads…Rumors were already going around that they killed people. Burned them. But they rode about laughing. Pleased, suntanned.

  In the morning they did exercises in the schoolyard. Doused themselves with cold water. Rolled up their sleeves, got on their motorcycles—and off they went.

  A few days later they dug a big pit outside the village next to the milk factory. Every day at around five or six in the morning shots were heard from there. Whenever they started shooting, even the cocks stopped crowing and hid themselves. One evening my father and I were riding in the cart, and he stopped the horse not far from that pit. “I’ll go and have a look,” he said. His cousin had been shot there. He went, and I followed him.

  Suddenly father turned and stood so as to hide the pit from me: “Go back. You mustn’t go farther.” I only saw, when we crossed the brook, that the water in it was red…And crows flew up. There were so many of them that I screamed…Father couldn’t eat anything for several days after that. He would see a crow and run back to the cottage shaking all over…Like in a fever…

  In the park in Slutsk two partisan families were hanged. It was freezing cold, and the hanged people were so frozen that, when the wind swung them, they tinkled. Tinkled like frozen trees in the forest…That tinkling…

  When we were liberated, father went to the front. He went with the army. He was already gone when my mother made me the first dress I had during the war. Mama made it out of foot-cloths. They were white, and she dyed them with ink. There wasn’t enough ink for one of the sleeves. But I wanted to show the dress to my friends. So I stood sideways in the gate, to show the good sleeve and hide the bad one. I thought I looked so dressed up, so beautiful!

  At school there was a girl, Anya, who sat in front of me. Her father and mother had been killed, and she lived with her grandmother. They were refugees from near Smolensk. The school bought her a coat, felt boots, and a pair of shiny galoshes. The teacher brought them and put them on her desk. We all sat silently, because no one had such boots or such a coat. We envied her. One of the bo
ys nudged Anya and said, “Some people are lucky!” She fell on the desk and cried. She sobbed through four lessons.

  My father returned from the front, everybody came to look at him. And also at us, because our papa came back to us.

  That girl was the first to come…

  “I’M YOUR MAMA…”

  Tamara Parkhimovich

  SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A SECRETARY-TYPIST.

  All through the war I thought about my mama. I lost my mama in the first days…

  We were sleeping, and our Pioneer camp was bombed. We ran out of the tents, ran around crying: “Mama! Mama!” The teacher shook me by the shoulders to calm me down, and I shouted, “Mama! Where’s my mama?” Finally she pressed me to her: “I’m your mama.”

  I had a skirt, a white blouse, and a red kerchief hanging on my bedstead. I put them on, and we went on foot to Minsk. On the way many children were met by their parents, but my mama wasn’t there. Suddenly they said, “The Germans are in the city…” We all turned back. Somebody said he had seen my mother—dead.

  Here there’s a gap in my memory…

  How we reached Penza I don’t remember, how they brought me to the orphanage I don’t remember. Blank pages in my memory…All I remember is that there were many of us, and we slept two to a bed. If one cried, the other also began to cry: “Mama! Where’s my mama?” I was little, one nanny wanted to adopt me. But I kept thinking about mama…

  I was coming from the dining room, the children all cried, “Your mama is here!” It rang in my ears: “Your ma-a-a-ama…Your ma-a-a-ama…” I had dreams about mama every night. My real mama. And suddenly she came in reality, but I thought it was a dream. I see—mama! And I don’t believe it. They spent several days persuading me, but I was afraid to get close to mama. What if it’s a dream? A dream! Mama cried, and I shouted, “Don’t come near me! My mama was killed!” I was afraid…I was afraid to believe my happiness…