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

“A HANDFUL OF SALT…ALL THAT WAS LEFT OF OUR HOUSE…”

Misha Maiorov FIVE YEARS OLD. NOW A DOCTOR OF AGRONOMY.

During the war I liked dreams. I liked dreams about peaceful life, about how we lived before the war…

First dream…

Grandma has finished her household chores…I’ve been waiting for this moment. Now she moves the table to the window, spreads the fabric on it, puts cotton wool on top of it, covers it with another piece of fabric, and begins to quilt a blanket. I, too, have a job: on one side of the blanket grandma hammers in little nails, to each one of them ties a piece of string, rubs it with chalk, and I hold it tight on the other side. “Tighter, Mishenka,” grandma asks. I pull more tightly, grandma lets go—snap!—and there’s a chalk line on the red or blue satin. The lines crisscross forming rhombs, the black thread stitches will go along them. The next operation: grandma lays out paper patterns (they’re called stencils now) and a design appears on the quilted blanket. It’s very beautiful and interesting. My grandma is an expert at stitching shirts; she’s especially good at the collars. Her Singer sewing machine goes on working even when I’m already asleep. And grandpa is asleep, too.

Second dream…

Grandpa is making shoes. Here, too, I have something to do. I whittle wooden pegs. Now all soles are held by metal pins, but they rust, and the sole quickly falls off. Maybe at the time they already used metal pins, but I remember the wooden ones. A smooth, knotless log of old birch should be sawed into rounds, which are left to dry under an old rag. Then they are split into pieces about an inch thick and four inches long, and they, too, are left to dry. Eighth-inch-thick splints can easily be cut off these pieces. A shoemaker’s knife is sharp, it’s easy to cut edges off this splint on two sides: you prop it against the worktable—zhik-zhik—and the splint becomes sharp, and then you just split it into nail-shaped pins. With a shoemaker’s awl, grandpa makes a hole in the boot sole, puts the peg in, taps it with a shoemaker’s hammer—and the pin is in the sole. The pegs were inserted in double rows, which is not only pretty, but also very strong: the dry pins will swell from moisture and hold the sole in place still more fast, and it won’t fall off until it’s worn out.

Grandpa also puts soles on felt boots, or rather a second sole, they serve longer then and you can wear them without galoshes. Or else he doubles the back of the heel with leather, so that the felt shoe doesn’t wear out inside the galosh. My task is to twist a linen thread, tar it, wax it, and thread it through a needle. But a shoemaker’s needle is very valuable, and therefore grandpa very often uses bristles, the most ordinary bristles from a wild boar’s scruff, or maybe a domestic boar, only the bristles are softer. Grandpa has a whole bunch of these bristles. They can be used to sew on a sole or a small patch in an awkward place: bristles are flexible and will get in anywhere.

Third dream…

Older children organized a theater in the neighbors’ big barn. The show is about border patrol and spies. A ticket costs ten kopecks. I don’t have it, they don’t let me in, I begin to howl: I, too, want “to see the war.” I peek into the barn on the sly—the “border patrol” wore real army shirts. The show was terrific…

Then my dreams broke off…

Soon I saw soldiers’ army shirts in our home…Grandma gave meals to the tired and dust-covered soldiers, and they kept saying, “The Germans are barging ahead.” I started badgering grandma: “What are the Germans like?”

We load bundles onto a cart, I’m seated on them. We go somewhere. Then we come back…There are Germans in our house! They’re like our soldiers, only in a different uniform and merry. Mama, grandma, and I now live behind the stove, and grandpa—in the barn. Grandma doesn’t quilt blankets anymore, grandpa doesn’t make shoes. Once I pushed aside the curtain: a German with earphones was sitting in the corner by the window, turning the handle of the radio set. There was music, then distinct Russian speech…The other German was spreading butter on bread at the moment. He saw me and waved the knife right in front of my nose. I hid behind the curtain and didn’t come out from behind the stove anymore.

A man in a charred shirt is being led down the street past our house, barefoot, his hands bound with wire. The man is all black…Later I saw him hanged next to the village council building. They said he was one of our pilots. At night I dreamed about him. In my dream he was hanging in our yard…

I remember everything in black: black tanks, black motorcycles, German soldiers in black uniforms. I’m not sure that it was really only black, but that’s how I remember it. A black-and-white film…

…I’m wrapped in something and we hide in the swamp. All day and all night. The night is cold. Strange birds cry in frightening voices. It seems that the moon shines very, very bright. Scary! What if the German shepherds see or hear us? Occasionally their hoarse barking reaches us. In the morning we go home! I want to go home! Everybody wants to go home, to the warmth! But there is no more home, only a heap of smoking embers. A smoldering place…Like after a big bonfire…We find in the ashes a lump of salt that always lay on our hearth. We carefully collected the salt, and also the clay mixed with the salt, and poured it into a jar. That was all that was left of our house…

Grandma was silent all the while, but at night she began to lament, “Ah, my cottage! Ah, my cottage! I was a young girl in i-i-i-it…Here the matchmakers ca-a-a-ame…Here the children were bo-o-o-orn.” She went around our black yard like a ghost.

In the morning I opened my eyes. We slept on the ground, in our kitchen garden.