Last Witnesses : An Oral History of the Children of World War II

“AT THAT LIMIT…THAT BRINK…”

Valya Brinskaya TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.

Dolls…The most beautiful…They always remind me of the war…

As long as papa was alive, as long as mama was alive, we didn’t speak of the war. Now that they’re gone, I often think of how nice it is to have old people at home. While they’re alive, we are still children. Even after the war we were still children…

Our papa was a soldier. We lived near Bielostok. For us, the war started from the first hour, the first minutes. In my sleep I heard some sort of rumbling, like thunderclaps, but of an unusual, uninterrupted sort. I woke up and ran to the window—above the barracks in the village of Grayevo, where my sister and I went to school, the sky was burning.

“Papa, is that a thunderstorm?”

“Stay away from the window,” papa replied. “It’s war.”

Mama prepared his campaign trunk. My father was often called in when the alarm was raised. Nothing seemed unusual…I wanted to sleep…I fell back in my bed, because I didn’t understand anything. My sister and I went to bed late—we had gone to the movies. Before the war, “going to the movies” was quite different than now. Films were brought only before holidays, and there weren’t many: We Are from Kronstadt, Chapaev, If There Is War Tomorrow, Jolly Fellows. The screening was set up in the Red Army mess hall. We children didn’t miss a single show and knew all the films by heart. We even gave the cue to the artists on the screen or skipped ahead and interrupted them. There was no electricity in the village, nor in the army unit; we “rolled” the film with a portable motor. The motor crackled—we dropped everything and ran to take seats in front of the screen, and even brought along our own stools.

Watching movies was lengthy: the first part ends, everybody waits patiently while the projectionist winds the next reel. It’s all right if the film is new, but if it’s old, it keeps breaking. We wait while they glue it back and the glue dries. Or, even worse, the film would catch fire. When the motor stalled, it was a totally lost cause. Often we didn’t have time to watch a movie to the end. The order would be given: “First company—prepare for action! Second company—fall in!”

And if the alarm was raised, the projectionist ran off. When the breaks between the parts were too long, the spectators lost their patience, agitation set in, whistling, shouts…My sister would climb on a table and announce, “The concert begins.” She herself liked terribly to declaim, as we used to say. She didn’t always know the words perfectly, but she climbed on the table fearlessly.

She had been like that ever since kindergarten, when we lived in the military garrison near Gomel. After the poems, my sister and I would sing. For an encore we would sing “Our Armor Is Strong and Our Tanks Are Swift.” The windows shook in the mess hall when the soldiers picked up the refrain:

With fiery thunder, steel armor gleaming,

The tanks will furiously enter the fray…

And so, on June 21, 1941…the night before the war…for maybe the tenth time, we watched the movie If There Is War Tomorrow. After the movie, we didn’t disperse for a long time, father barely managed to herd us home: “So you’ll sleep tonight? Tomorrow is a day off…”

I woke up finally when there was an explosion nearby and the windows in the kitchen shattered. Mama was wrapping my half-awake little brother Tolik in a blanket. My sister was already dressed. Papa wasn’t home.

“Hurry, girls,” mama urged us. “There’s been a provocation at the border.”

We ran to the forest. Mama was out of breath. She was carrying my little brother, and she kept repeating, “Don’t fall behind, girls…Duck down, girls…” For some reason I remember how the sun hit me straight in the eyes. It was very bright. Birds were singing. And there was that piercing roar of airplanes…

I trembled, but then I felt ashamed that I was trembling. I had always wanted to be like the brave heroes from the book Timur and His Gang, by Arkady Gaidar,^* and here I was trembling. I took my little brother in my arms and started rocking him and even singing “And the young girl…” There was this love song in the movie The Goalkeeper. Mama often sang it, and it perfectly suited my mood and condition in that moment. I was…in love! I don’t know what science says, what the books about adolescent psychology say, but I was constantly in love. There was a time when I loved several boys at once. But at that moment, I liked only one—Vitya, from the Grayevo garrison. He was in the sixth grade. The sixth graders were in the same classroom with the fifth. Fifth graders in the first row of desks, sixth graders in the second. I can’t imagine how the teachers managed to conduct classes. I didn’t care about studying. How was it I didn’t break my neck staring at Vitya!

I liked everything about him: that he was short—we were well matched; that he had blue, blue eyes, like my papa’s; and that he was well-read—not like Alka Poddubnyak, who gave painful “flicks” and who liked me. Vitya especially liked Jules Verne! So did I. The Red Army library had his complete works, and I read them all…

I don’t remember how long we stayed in the forest…We stopped hearing explosions. Silence fell. The women sighed with relief: “Our boys fought them off.” But then…in the midst of that silence…suddenly we heard the roar of flying airplanes…We ran out to the road. The planes were flying toward the border: “Hur-ray!” But there was something “not ours” about those planes: the wings were not ours, and the sound wasn’t ours. They were German bombers, they flew wing to wing, slowly and heavily. It seemed like they left no empty space in the sky. We started counting, but lost track. Later, in the wartime news reports, I saw those planes, but my impression wasn’t the same. The filming was done at airplane level. But when you look at them from below, through the thick of the trees, and what’s more, with the eyes of an adolescent—it’s a scary sight. Afterward I often dreamed about those planes. But the dream went further—the whole of that iron sky slowly fell down on me and crushed me, crushed me, crushed me. I would wake up in a cold sweat, shaking all over. Horrible!

Somebody said that the bridge had been bombed. We got frightened: what about papa? Papa wouldn’t be able to swim across, he couldn’t swim.

I can’t say exactly now…But I remember that papa came running to us: “You’ll be evacuated by truck.” He gave mama the thick photograph album and a warm, quilted blanket: “Muffle up the children, or they’ll catch cold.” That was all we took with us. In such a hurry. No documents, no passports, not a kopeck of money. We also had a pot of meatballs my mother had prepared for the weekend, and my brother’s little shoes. And my sister—a miracle!—grabbed at the last moment a package, which contained mama’s crepe de chine dress and her shoes. Somehow. By chance. Maybe she and papa wanted to visit some friends for the weekend? Nobody could remember anymore. Peaceful life instantly disappeared, fell into the background.

That’s how we evacuated…

We quickly reached the station, but sat there for a long time. Everything trembled and rattled. The lights went out. We lit a fire with paper, newspapers. Somebody found a lantern. Its light cast huge shadows of people sitting—on the walls, on the ceiling. They stood still, then moved. And then my imagination ran away with me: Germans in a fortress, our soldiers taken prisoner. I decided to try and see if I could endure torture or not. I put my fingers between two boxes and crushed them. I howled in pain. Mama got frightened. “What’s the matter, dear?”

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to endure the torture during the interrogation.”

“What do you mean, little fool, what interrogation? Our soldiers won’t let the Germans through.”

She caressed my head and kissed me.

The train rode under bombs all the time. Whenever they began bombing, mama lay on top of us: “If they kill us, we’ll die together. Or else just me…” The first dead person I saw was a little boy. He was lying there looking up, and I tried to waken him. To waken him…I couldn’t understand that he wasn’t alive. I had a piece of sugar, I offered him that piece of sugar, hoping he would get up. But he didn’t…

They were bombing, and my sister whispered to me, “When they stop bombing, I’ll obey mama, I’ll always obey mama.” And indeed, after the war, Toma was very obedient. Mama remembered that before the war, she used to call her a scamp. And our little Tolik…Before the war he could already walk well and talk well. And now he stopped talking, he clutched his head all the time.

I saw my sister’s hair turn white. She had very long black hair, and it turned white. In one night…

The train started. Where is Tamara? She’s not in the car. We look. Tamara is running behind the car with a bouquet of cornflowers. There was a big field, the wheat was taller than us, and there were cornflowers. Her face…To this day her face is before my eyes. Her black eyes wide open, she runs, silent. She doesn’t even shout “mama.” She runs, silent.

Mama went mad…She rushed to jump out of the moving train…I was holding Tolik, and we both shouted. Then a soldier appeared…He pushed mama away from the door, jumped out, caught hold of Tomka, and threw her into the car with all his might. In the morning, we saw she was white. For several days we didn’t tell her, we hid our mirror, but then she accidentally looked into someone else’s and burst into tears: “Mama, am I already a grandmother?”

Mama comforted her. “We’ll cut your hair, and it will grow back dark.”

After this incident mama said, “That’s it. Don’t leave the car. If they kill us, they kill us. If we stay alive, then it’s our destiny!”

When they shouted “Airplanes! Everybody off the train!” she stuffed us under the mattresses, and to those who tried to get her off the train, she said, “The children ran, but I can’t go.”

I have to say that mama often used that mysterious word destiny. I kept asking her, “What is destiny? Is it God?”

“No, not God. I don’t believe in God. Destiny is the line of life,” mama answered. “I have always believed in your destiny, children.”

The bombings frightened me…Terribly. Later on, in Siberia, I hated myself for my cowardice. By chance, out of the corner of my eye, I read mama’s letter…She was writing to papa. We, too, wrote our first letters ever, and I decided to take a peek at what mama was writing. And mama was precisely writing that Tamara is quiet during the bombings, and Valya cries and is frightened. That was too much for me. When papa came to us in the spring of 1944, I couldn’t raise my eyes to him—I was ashamed. Terrible! But I’ll tell about the reunion with papa later. It’s a long way till then…

I remember a night air raid…Usually there were no raids at night, and the train drove fast. But now there was a raid. A heavy one…Bullets drummed on the roof of the car. Roaring planes. Glowing streaks from flying bullets…From bombshells…Next to me, a woman was killed. I understood only later that she was dead…But she didn’t fall. There was nowhere to fall, because the car was packed with people. The woman stood among us gasping, her blood flooding my face, warm, viscous. My shirt and pants were already wet with blood. When mama cried, touching me with her hand: “Valya, have they killed you?” I couldn’t answer.

That was a turning point for me. I know that after that…Yes…After that I stopped trembling. I didn’t care anymore…No fear, no pain, no sorrow. Some kind of stupor, indifference.

I remember that we didn’t reach the Urals right away. For some time we stayed in the village of Balanda, in the Saratov region. We were brought there in the evening, and we fell asleep. In the morning, at six o’clock, a herdsman cracked his whip, and all the women jumped up, grabbed their children, and ran outside screaming “Air raid!” They screamed until the kolkhoz chairman came and said that it was a herdsman driving cows. Then they came to their senses…

When the grain elevator hummed, our Tolik got scared and trembled. He didn’t let anyone go away from him for a second. Only when he fell asleep could we go outside without him. Mama went with us to the military commissariat to find out about father and ask for help. The commissar said, “Show me the documents stating that your husband is a commander in the Red Army.”

We didn’t have any documents, we only had a photograph of papa, in which he was wearing his uniform. He took it suspiciously.

“Maybe this isn’t your husband. How can you prove it?”

Tolik saw that he was holding the photo and not giving it back. “Give papa back…”

The commissar laughed. “Well, that’s a ‘document’ I can’t help believing.”

My sister went around “piebald,” so mama cut her hair. We checked every morning whether the new hair would be black or white. Our little brother reassured her, “Don’t cwy, Toma…Don’t cwy…” The hair that grew back was white. The boys teased her. Teased her unmercifully. She never took her kerchief off, even in class.

We came back from school. Tolik wasn’t at home.

We ran to mama’s work: “Where’s Tolik?”

“Tolik is in the hospital.”

My sister and I are carrying a blue wreath down the street…Of snowdrops…And our brother’s sailor suit. Mama is with us. She said that Tolik had died. Mama stopped outside the mortuary and couldn’t go in. Couldn’t bring herself to. I went in and recognized little Tolik at once—he lay there naked. I didn’t shed a single tear, I turned to wood.

Papa’s letter caught up with us in Siberia. Mama cried all night, unable to write to papa that their son was dead. In the morning the three of us took a telegram to the post office: “Girls alive. Toma gray-haired.” And papa figured out that Tolik was no more. I had a friend whose father had been killed, and I always wrote at the end of my letters to papa, because she asked me to: “Greetings to you, papa, from me and from my friend Lera.” Everybody wanted to have a papa.

Soon we received a letter from papa. He wrote that he had spent a long time in the rear on a special assignment and had fallen ill. They told him in the hospital that he could be cured only by being with his family: once he saw his dear ones, he’d feel better.

We waited several weeks for papa. Mama got her cherished crepe de chine dress and her shoes from the suitcase. We had made a decision not to sell that dress or the pair of shoes, no matter how hard the times would be. It was out of superstition. We were afraid that if we sold them, papa wouldn’t come back.

I heard papa’s voice outside the window and couldn’t believe that it was my papa. We were so used to waiting for him that I couldn’t believe I could see him. For us papa was someone you had to wait for and only wait for. That day classes were interrupted—the whole school gathered around our house. They waited for papa to come out. He was the first papa to come back from the war. My sister and I were unable to study for another two days, everybody kept coming to us, asking questions, writing notes: “What is your papa like?” And our papa was special: Anton Petrovich Brinsky, Hero of the Soviet Union…

Like our Tolik before, papa didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t be. It made him feel bad. He always dragged me with him. Once I heard…He told someone about some partisans coming to a village and seeing a lot of freshly dug earth. They stopped and stood on it…A boy came running across the field shouting that his whole village had been shot and buried there. All the people.

Papa turned and saw that I had fainted. Never again did he tell about the war in front of us…

We talked little about the war. Papa and mama were sure that there would never again be such a terrible war. They believed it for a long time. The only thing the war left in my sister and me was that we kept buying dolls. I don’t know why. Probably because we hadn’t had enough childhood. Not enough childhood joy. I was already studying at the university, but my sister knew that the best present for me was a doll. My sister gave birth to a daughter. I went to visit.

“What present can I bring you?”

“A doll…”

“I’m asking what to give you, not your girl.”

“And my answer is—give me a doll.”

Our children were growing up, and we kept giving them dolls. We gave dolls to all our acquaintances.

Our marvelous mama was the first to go; then papa followed her. We sensed, we felt at once that we were the last ones. At that limit…that brink…We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak…

Our words will be the last…

1978–2004

* Arkady Gaidar (1904–1941) was a Soviet writer. The short novel Timur and His Gang (1940), his most famous work, was based partly on the life of his own son, Timur Gaidar (1926–1999), who served in the navy, became a rear admiral, and was also a writer and journalist.