Jacob's Ladder

41 Letters from the Willow Chest

War

(1942–1943) SVERDLOVSK–MOSCOW GENRIKH TO MARUSYA Checked by the Military Censor

FEBRUARY 3, 1942

My dearest mother! I haven’t heard anything from you for a long time—why? If you only knew how necessary your letters are to me, you would write more often. There’s not a single person here I can share my thoughts and worries with, not a single person from whom I could expect to hear a kind word. And only now have I come to understand how much I need that. Mother, dear, best in the world, I curse the hour when I had to leave Moscow. I so want to be with you, and I could put up with the hardest circumstances if only we could endure them together. My comrades? They’re all good people, to a greater or lesser degree, but living together, seeing the same faces day in and day out, hearing the same things over and over … Well, you understand what I mean.

I’m not eating very well. This is what they feed us: I try to get up as late as I can. After that I eat three and a half ounces of bread and drink boiled water. At one in the afternoon, I go to the dining hall, where I have the midday meal and seven ounces of bread. At seven or eight in the evening, I get seven ounces of bread. Before, we used to get commercial bread, but now it has become hard to find, and you have to stand in line for it just to get eighteen ounces. But what is eighteen ounces for me? Still, I try to keep my spirits up. I received news from Tomsk. Students from my Institute who were evacuated to Tomsk are going to Moscow soon. How we envy them!

Mama, why don’t you tell me anything about yourself? This silence can be interpreted in various ways.

It’s better to write the truth than to keep silent. I understand very well that things are hard for you. If you wish, make inquiries at my Institute about the possibility of my return—but that’s a pipe dream that is not likely to come true. The most difficult thing about my situation is prospects for the future. I’m awaiting a job assignment, which will happen when I graduate from the Institute (mid-July). Either I’ll remain in Sverdlovsk and undertake something important, or I’ll have to go out to the boondocks (Lysva, Chusovaya, Beloretsk). Moreover, there’s no guarantee of being able to work there long. And dreaming about Moscow …

If possible, send me my skating boots, canvas shoes, underwear, and my old suit coat, plus a few shirts. And write me letters, and more often, please, my dear mother! I go to the post office nearly every day and try to find a trace of you—but you’re not there. The post office is rather far away, and it closes early. I don’t always make it in time.

It’s better to write directly to my address than to the post office:

Genrikh Ossetsky

Student Dormitory 1, room 417

Sverdlovsk, 9 Vtuzgorodok, Ural Industrial Institute

I send you many, many kisses!

Genrikh

P.S. Did you find Jack Rubin? Checked by the Military Censor

FEBRUARY 8, 1942

Dear Mother,

I have been thinking over what I have lived through during the past week. I feel that during those days I experienced a sharp turnaround. The first three days of February were very difficult, and my mood was dark. The change in diet was just an impetus. I thought about many things during this time, and suddenly there was a breakthrough. It became clear that I had lived my life without achieving anything. Recently, I turned in a design project for machine tooling, and got the highest mark for it; but this didn’t make me happy. I felt indifferent to it. I am now carrying out a special commission for which I’ll be paid and which will count as a design project for the cutting-instrument course. Now the chance to earn a bit of extra money has turned up, but I can’t take advantage of it, because I am under constant pressure with the various design projects I have to submit. There are a lot of them!

My dear mother! It hurts me so much that you don’t tell me anything about yourself, but toss off these postcards that reveal nothing. You don’t answer any of my questions, and it ends up being not a correspondence but an exchange of greetings—nothing more. In all this time, I have received only one letter, dated January 2! I can imagine how tired you are when you come home after work and collapse on the divan. You haven’t told me how you like your new job. Have you really become a person who just punches in and out at work? I can’t imagine it!

I’ve become used to my new diet here.

Now that my health has recovered a bit, I can inform you: I had Pityriasis rosea, a very uncomfortable rashlike condition. Now I’m completely cured.

In the Ural Worker newspaper, there are often essays by Lyudm. Alex. They are completely without redeeming qualities. And you magnanimously opined that she still had time to learn. It’s too late for her to learn.

That is not at all what I wanted to write you, though. I’m unable to determine my own state of affairs. Perhaps with time everything will become clear. I’m feeling easier in my soul these days, but my situation is uncertain as I have begun to be aware of my own feelings, I have begun to find myself. I don’t know whether you will understand me. My dear mother, I have one dream for which I am willing to sacrifice everything—that is being together with you. Often, when I’m doing something, or making some decision, I ask myself, “What would Mama say?” Although I’ll soon be twenty-six, I sometimes feel like a little son, even helpless, and it’s very pleasant.

Sending you many, many kisses, your Genrikh. Excuse the jumble of thoughts in this letter; but what else could I do? That’s what I’m like now. Checked by the Military Censor

FEBRUARY 10, 1942

My dear Mother!

Hooray! Today I received your registered letter from February 1 and was very, very glad. It’s the second letter (registered) that I’ve received from you. Soon it will be four months since I left Moscow, but it seems like yesterday. Time flies, and it’s impossible to make up for every hour lost. That’s something I realized only recently. I’m working here at full tilt, and work is one of my few sources of comfort.

Your letter disturbed me. I can so clearly imagine your life, and I wanted so much to be there with you, to lighten your burden at least a little bit. I can see that it is not easy and that it is grounded in your clearly defined character and your enthusiasm. Mama, I want to be there with you! It’s so wonderful how you describe going to the theater and remember things that happened ten, twenty, thirty years ago. But for me, memories hold no interest whatsoever. Everything is in the future. I want to achieve something big and useful, and, to be honest, something that will bring fame and respect, and all that sort of thing. For the country, and for you. It won’t be easy, with my family legacy, but I’ll make it, you’ll see!

Write me and tell me whether you received my birthday telegram on January 23, and the money transfer of a hundred rubles that I sent you on the 20th. Right now I’m snowed under with work from my classes, and I haven’t managed to earn any more money—and, added to that, I have many expenses (paying for the studies, war tax, and repairing my felt winter boots). But I have provided for myself in advance for the next one and a half months. I will help you if I can. My dream is to be able to help you regularly. In a month, I’ll graduate from the theoretical courses of the Institute. Then only the applied part of the course and my thesis will remain to be completed. I’m almost an engineer.

I recently saw Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man at the Red Army Theater. I went there because of the buffet (here they call even the local opera and ballet theater “The Theater of Opera and Buffet”). My hunting expedition was successful. I bought eighteen sandwiches and five buns (the first time since leaving Moscow that I’ve had white bread). I wasn’t accepted into the Military Academy program, for reasons that had nothing to do with me. But I still stand a chance, since there will be a new round of admissions in May. I’m afraid that the academy is not for me. All my life, aviation, the dream of my childhood and youth, has eluded me. The admissions committee didn’t accept Kolya F., either. They refused Egor Gavrilin, and he had to get into the academy, since his studies at the Institute are in an abysmal state. He took only two exams, and he hasn’t even begun his project. The fellow got lazy. But they agreed at least to consider him in the next round of admissions.

It is now one in the morning. I just returned from the post office. All the other fellows have gone to bed, and they certainly foul up the air while they’re sleeping—that’s a result of the diet. I changed my schedule a bit. Now I study until three or four in the morning, get up at eleven or twelve, and eat my midday meal immediately. In that way, I allay my hunger and save time simultaneously. Mother, tell me more about what your day is like. What’s it like at home in the apartment: Is it cold? Is there gas for cooking?

Where is A. Kostromin? What do you hear from Uncle Mikhail? Does he write at all? Whom do you meet with, who are your friends? Write me about what my beloved Moscow looks like. And tell me how things stand with your food supply—I’m very worried about it.

The stipend will be disbursed pending the results of sixteen exams. I passed six of them already, and got four A’s and two B’s. I still need to get good marks on at least three more. It will be hard. I don’t attend lectures, but work only with my books. With few exceptions, the lecturers aren’t well qualified. I’m putting all my efforts into passing the exams early. Write me if you’ve heard any news about Osip Shapir and Sergey Prasolov. Sasha Volkov and Boris Kokin were killed near Leningrad. I was very upset by the news. And one of our students, Zhenya Pochando, received the decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union. Good for him! I bitterly regret that I’m not at the front.

Mother, write me more often. I desperately need your letters.

Send my greetings and a big kiss to Uncle Mikhail and the family. Thank you for the envelopes, by the way.

If you have the chance, send me socks, a darning needle and thread, some underwear, my skating boots and canvas shoes, a few shirts, a suitcase if at all possible, because I have nothing but a gunnysack. And please send me a suit as well. But the most important things are a slide rule, a pencil box, and pencils (drafting pencils—they’re in the desk drawer).

I send you many kisses (8,888 of them), Genrikh

P.S. I didn’t want to write you about it, but I can’t help myself. At the end of December, just by chance, I met my former classmate Amalia Kotenko in town. Do you remember her? You must—she got married to our classmate Tisha Golovanov as soon as she finished the tenth grade. You certainly remember him. He came to our house in the seventh grade and we played chess. He died in the first month of the war. I feel terribly sorry for her. We’ve started to meet each other occasionally. She was such a bright, happy girl, and now her light seems to have gone out. Cursed war. I’m trying to cheer her up a bit; she is “thawing” out bit by bit. SVERDLOVSK–MOSCOW EGOR GAVRILIN TO MARUSYA

FEBRUARY 15, 1942

Hello, Mrs. Ossetsky!

Genrikh let me read your last letter, and it touched me so deeply I wanted to write you a few warm and friendly lines, not by way of comfort—you are not one of those people who need that—and there’s probably nothing to comfort you for, but simply out of an excess of feeling, as they say. When I read your casual remarks about Moscow, about daily life there, about the working conditions of ordinary people, I get a sense of the reality of war and the front line. Here you don’t feel it at all. People know about it, and talk about it, but nothing more. At first, this seemed strange to me, but, gradually, even we who smelled the gunpowder, on earth and in the sky, out of the corner of our noses, so to speak, got used to it; so it’s not surprising that the people in Sverdlovsk have that reaction.

For this reason, it’s not surprising that the news of missing relatives or abandoned apartments, and many other things that are so natural for us in Moscow, and inevitable in wartime (especially this war), inspire indignation here. And you are absolutely right when you say that we live in a kind of paradise here—only we don’t appreciate it, and, I’m certain, if you were in our place you wouldn’t appreciate it, either. And that’s why you, more than anyone else, can understand why Genrikh is so eager to get to Moscow. We are sitting on pins and needles here, and we are very nervous, and we can’t feel at home. That very Sverdlovskian complacency irritates us, as does the fact that, on the very day when Lozovaya was recaptured by our troops, some students—yes, students!—got into a fight in the buffet over a salami sandwich. What does the man in the street here think about on such a day? How to snatch another person’s portion, whoever he might be. But the people who have experienced the war firsthand (and there are many such people here), refugees from Ukraine, Belorussia, Leningrad, Moscow, and the western regions, turn on the morning news as soon as they get up, and after that stand over the Soviet map arguing for the next few hours.

You describe a passage from Peer Gynt—the death of Åse. You are right, Mrs. Ossetsky, that it is perhaps the most powerful part of Ibsen’s play, and Grieg’s music.

Much has been said about a mother’s love, about its power and endurance, by all the great masters of the word—Romain Rolland, Gorky, Chekhov, Maupassant, Nekrasov, Heine, and many others. But this short scene of a mother’s quiet death in the arms of her estranged son, who has come to shut her eyes and to comfort her in her hour of death, surpasses almost everything in its laconicism, its emotional restraint, its power.

Truly, when the war ends, our Soviet Union will become stronger and more cohesive, all the wounds will heal, everything that has been destroyed will be reborn, life will gush forth like a spring, women and girls will find themselves new husbands and lovers—but who will heal the wounds of thousands of mothers? Who will answer for their suffering and irreparable grief? Yes, who besides the mothers themselves can understand their suffering? For it’s impossible to tell it. You are right a hundred times over. Every letter I get from my mother, in which she tries not to show her terrible anguish because she doesn’t want me to worry, enters the tiniest particles of my life and awakens such a storm of indignation and sorrow that I can’t tell where the indignation ends and the sorrow begins. But, reading your letter, I am convinced that all mothers feel the same, or at least very similar, anguish about their sons. The only thing that remains is to hope that all the sons feel the same love and gratitude toward their mothers that Genrikh and I feel.

But I am an optimist, Mrs. Ossetsky, and I know that you are, too, more so than many, and for that reason we will hope that very soon we will all be together in Moscow, and we will raise a toast in honor of the victorious finish of the war and all the good that lies ahead.

I send you my warmest, warmest greetings,

Egor Gavrilin GENRIKH TO MARUSYA Postcard

FEBRUARY 15, 1942

Mama! Sasha Figner has not heard anything from his parents in more than one and a half months. He asks you to call phone number D2-24-47, or inquire at his parents’ address: 6 Novinsky Boulevard, apartment 13, to find out whether everything is all right.

Some marriages are made in heaven, but the war made Amalia and Genrikh’s. They were never friends during high school. Genrikh looked at Amalia from afar, but she was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of friends, both boys and girls, and at the time when Genrikh left school, Tisha Golovanov, who was in love with her, was always by her side. Amalia and Tisha married right after they finished tenth grade and graduated, and the whole class celebrated the first wedding among their classmates. Genrikh didn’t attend the wedding—by that time he was already living the life of an adult, working and studying, and he rarely saw his former classmates.

He and Amalia didn’t meet again until December 1941, in Sverdlovsk, at the bazaar. Both of them had been evacuated—Genrikh with students of the Institute from which he was supposed to graduate that year, and Amalia from the design bureau where she worked. They both worked for Uralmash, which at that time was launching self-propelled guns. Genrikh worked in the project design department, and Amalia in Design Bureau 9, on the other side of town.

They delighted in each other’s company—as fellow Muscovites, neighbors, former classmates, with a great many common memories and common friends. During the first months of the war, four boys from their class perished. The first “killed in battle” notice was about Amalia’s husband, Tisha Golovanov, at the end of July 1941. Amalia took her bereavement very hard. The last stage of their relationship had been difficult: Tisha had begun to drink heavily, Amalia was ashamed about his drunkenness, they quarreled for an entire year, and Amalia’s mother, Zinaida, having suffered enough from the drunken behavior of men, lit a match to the fire so Amalia would kick Tisha out. He went to live with his mother; but now, after his death, Amalia couldn’t forgive herself for the falling out. Why couldn’t she simply have put up with it? It was especially painful to her that she and her husband hadn’t even managed to say goodbye, she had never written to him, and she hadn’t received a single letter from him. Amalia, as his wife, was given the news first, and had to go inform Tisha’s mother, who wailed and keened and then chased Amalia out of the house.

Amalia suffered not only the loss of her husband, but the loss of herself. She was used to living in peace with herself. The world smiled at her, and she liked herself well enough—what she didn’t like, she just didn’t look at. Instinctively, she preferred to avoid complications, not to multiply them. After Tisha’s death, she couldn’t return to her old habits of mind and her peaceable accommodation with the world. She was haunted by a feeling of guilt toward him, and tormented by what she thought was her own sinfulness, overcome by despair and loneliness, without a shadow of hope. Her own life seemed doomed and worthless to her.

She was happy to be evacuated—Moscow had become unbearable—but Sverdlovsk turned out to be worse.

Work was hard. It began at eight in the morning, and ended at various times, but never before eight in the evening. She left work every day with a swollen face and blue-tinged fingers, shivering with cold. In the room where the drafting boards were set up, where she worked, the temperature never rose above fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

The food supply in the city was meager. Food rations had not yet been introduced, and people lined up at the stores from early morning to buy a portion. A single person with a job had no time to stand in line. If it hadn’t been for the cafeteria at her workplace, she would have starved. On the last weekend before the New Year’s celebration, Amalia made her way to the market to buy some food—potatoes and rutabagas. Right in the middle of the vegetable stands, Genrikh appeared. She didn’t recognize him at first. Genrikh recognized her right away, by her blue eyes and her white fur hat—which she had worn since high school—with two earflaps and a pompom on the top.

They grabbed each other’s hands and embraced warmly. Genrikh picked up her bag and carried it for her—two kilograms of potatoes and a kilogram of rutabagas. Amalia also wanted to buy milk, but she didn’t have enough money; it had already become very expensive. Genrikh had a bottle of vodka to barter. They exchanged it for two loaves of bread. He gave one of them to Amalia. People were already hungry, but that was only the beginning of the deprivations they would experience in the coming year.

They celebrated the New Year in Genrikh’s dormitory, with his fellow students. Amalia was acknowledged to be the prettiest girl there. The contestants were few: Dilyara, a typist from the dean’s office, sweet, with slightly bulging eyes caused by Graves’ disease; and Sonya, the librarian, with an elongated nose, narrow face, and slightly protruding ears. From that evening on, Amalia became Genrikh’s girlfriend.

Genrikh met Amalia after work to accompany her to her dormitory, and then returned to his own, an hour’s walk through the dark, deserted city.

They got married in the spring of 1942. Now they lived not in dormitories but in a room in the family barracks. It was partitioned by a curtain; the second half of the room was occupied by a couple that had also been evacuated—engineers from Minsk, reticent and unfriendly. It was easier, and warmer for the two of them, to live together in the luxury of half a room. Still, they were hungry.

At the same time, Marusya was rushing around Moscow, which was becoming empty of residents, trying to find a decent job. She had been dogged by disappointment for a long time now: after the high hopes and expectations of her youth, the star that had lured her had begun to set. She had not become an actress, or a pedagogue; and she had not been able to break into journalism, either. The apex of her career was an occasional publication in the newspaper The Factory Whistle. It was comforting to know that wonderful writers appeared in the publication—Ilf and Petrov, Yuri Olesha, Paustovsky … and Marusya. There was also Pioneers’ Pravda, where Marusya managed to publish her articles devoted to children’s arts, gesturing subtly toward the Froebel principles of pedagogy. Her favorite journal, Soviet Toys and Games, to which she had been recommended by Nadezhda Krupskaya herself, had already closed down before the war. How interesting it had been to work there! They created new Soviet games and toys with new ideological content … But it was in the past, it was all in the past.

Marusya did not give up, however. She wrote, and ran around from one editorial office to another, offering them her work, and suddenly her efforts were met with unexpected success. A chance meeting, an offer that it would have been impossible even to contemplate—she was invited to work at the Moscow Theater of Drama as assistant to the artistic director in the Literary Section, and, if the occasion arose, to work with the actors. The other theaters had all been evacuated, but this one, organized by a director named Gorchakov, had elected to stay in Moscow in 1941.

Oh, joy! Marusya again breathed in the air of the theater and the dust of the footlights. They staged a play the public needed—Russian People, by Konstantin Simonov. It didn’t matter that the play was somewhat clumsy, and that daily life was hard, and shortages unavoidable. Marusya had the luxury of creative work, which was dearer to her than that most essential thing, bread. She flew through the darkened streets of Moscow, reborn, and dead tired. She wrote Genrikh occasional cheery letters and worked unflaggingly for the welfare of the country.

Amalia and Genrikh worked quietly behind their curtain, and their silent lovemaking brought forth fruit. What had not happened in five years of married life with Tisha came about now: Amalia was pregnant. She didn’t realize it for the first few months. Her period stopped, but during that hungry year, many young women stopped menstruating. Nature resisted conception. Amalia attributed her symptoms to exhaustion and malnourishment. She visited the doctor for the first time during the sixth month of her pregnancy, when the baby had begun to kick, announcing its existence. Her belly had begun to round out a little, some yellow spots had appeared on her face, and her lips were swollen. But she didn’t need to adjust a single button on her clothing—she herself lost weight, and all her nourishment went to the child. Her gait changed; she rocked as she walked, leaning back a bit like a duck, in her fear of falling.

The summer was unusually cold and rainy that year. It passed by almost unnoticed, and an early winter set in. The biggest trial was not the constant hunger, but the outhouse, which one had to visit every day, whether one wanted to or not. A long trench was dug, with rough boards resting on top like the walls of a temporary shed. Inside, by the wall, was a kind of battered platform covered with frozen urine and steadily increasing piles of excrement. Every trip to the outhouse was like a double balancing act. The natural boundaries of shame collapsed. Gripping her husband’s arms, in the darkness cut by the light of Genrikh’s flashlight, Amalia planted herself above a terrifying hole. Tears flowed down her face as blood squeezed out of the hemorrhoidal knots in her rectum. Genrikh could hardly keep from crying himself, seeing his wife’s suffering. With passion that surpassed that of the three Prozorov sisters by many degrees, the couple echoed Chekhov’s words: “To Moscow! To Moscow!” Because of the war, this was virtually impossible.

At the beginning of 1943, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, well known to Genrikh from his visit to his father, was closed down. Uralmash increased its production of tanks at an expedited pace. Genrikh worked on a design project that facilitated one of the most labor-intensive processes in high-precision metalworking. After finishing his work ahead of schedule, he received a prize. On the basis of this achievement, he asked the chief of his department, Abuzarov, to write him a letter of reference for an appointment with the director of the plant, Muzrukov. The director’s secretary, Dina, toward whom he was kindly disposed, was Abuzarov’s sister … Abuzarov laughed and refused, saying that it was impossible to make an appointment with the Lord God Himself. There had never been a case when the director agreed to receive a paltry engineer. Genrikh refused to back down, however.

“But why is it so urgent for you to see the big boss?” Abuzarov said. “You received a prize; what more do you want? They still won’t give you a room to live in.”

“Ask Dina. As a personal favor. I have to send my wife to Moscow,” Genrikh told him. “She’s been driven to exhaustion, and she’s going to give birth soon.”

Abuzarov scratched his scaly cheek with his scaly hand. “I’ll ask Dina, but it isn’t likely to work. If it does, you owe me one.”

“Three, if you want!” Genrikh said.

The meeting did take place, and the results were very positive. The director assumed that the greenhorn would request a separate room in a dormitory—but the housing issue was very tense. The scrawny-necked youth, who didn’t look a day over eighteen, asked for a permit for his pregnant wife to return to Moscow. This took Muzrukov by surprise—he’s not asking for housing?—and he called Design Bureau 9, where Amalia worked. Though they were even more surprised to receive a call from the big boss, they agreed to let Amalia leave for Moscow under the circumstances.

During the entire conversation, Genrikh stood at attention before the director’s desk, astonished at the ease with which decisions were made about issues that were insoluble for ordinary people.

The entrance permit into Moscow was wangled in a particular way, by a complex procedure. Muzrukov called the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee, Andrianov, and the issue was resolved definitively—a permit to go to Moscow to reside was ordered and duly received.

Three bottles of vodka, purchased on the black market at half the sum Genrikh earned from his prize, were given to Abuzarov. Abuzarov was happy. His father was trying to finish rebuilding a cowshed that had fallen into disrepair. Building materials were hard to come by, and vodka had been used as a currency of exchange for any goods since time immemorial.

The second half of the prize money was sent to Marusya. At first, Amalia was offended that Genrikh had sent the rest of it to his mother, but then she reconsidered and realized that he had not yet quite grown used to being a husband.

In the beginning of 1943, during a raging blizzard, Genrikh took his wife, who was heavily pregnant, to the station. He had to search and search to find the train, which was standing half a mile from the platform, and he propelled Amalia in that direction. He managed to stuff her suitcase into the car of the train, but the bag with scanty provisions for the trip stayed behind. The train started moving away. Thus, Amalia traveled for nearly four days and nights almost without eating. She was ill with flu, racked by pain, and bleeding. Her mother met her at the station with their lame neighbor, Pustygin, whom Zinaida had asked to carry the suitcase.

It was cold and dark at the station in Moscow. A blizzard was raging there, too, but not of such prodigious proportions as the one that had seen Amalia off in the Urals.

A few days later, Marusya, Amalia’s mother-in-law, visited. The first visit was very cordial. Her mother-in-law talked about Genrikh; she was cheerful and witty. Amalia recalled their classmates, whom Marusya remembered, too; she even mentioned Tisha. They counted the dead. They grieved, and they found reasons to be glad as well.

“It would be good if the baby were a girl,” Marusya said before she left.

“Everyone says that it will be a girl. Mama says that girls suck away the mother’s good looks, and I’ve become so unattractive since I got pregnant.”

“It will pass, it will pass,” Marusya said magnanimously.

In the beginning of March, in the Grauerman Maternity Hospital, where she herself had been born, Amalia brought into the world a four-pound-four-ounce girl. They called her Nora, on Marusya’s insistence. Amalia would have preferred “Lenochka,” but it was not Nora’s fate to be a Lenochka. The doctor delivered the baby and tied up the hemorrhoids that had plagued Amalia the entire second half of her pregnancy. They never troubled her again.

At the end of 1944, Genrikh returned to Moscow. The war had turned into victory—Stalin’s Ten Blows ushered the Red Army into Europe. Victory was already hanging in the air, but the “killed in battle” notices kept coming.

Of all the boys in their class, only two remained alive after the war: Genrikh himself, and Jack Rubin. Jack came home with no legs. From the class of ’41, there were also only two who survived. One of them was Daniel Mitlyansky, who subsequently became a sculptor. In front of their school, a statue commemorating these boys still stands, a statue made by Daniel at the beginning of the 1970s. But that time was still a long way off.