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

“THROUGH A BUTTONHOLE…”

Inna Levkevich TEN YEARS OLD. NOW A CONSTRUCTION ENGINEER.

In the first days…From early morning…

Bombs were exploding over us…On the ground lay telephone poles and wires. Frightened people ran out of their houses. They ran out to the street, constantly warning each other, “Watch out—there’s a wire! Watch out—there’s a wire!” so that no one would get snared and fall. As if that was the most terrible thing.

In the morning of June 26 mama still handed out the salaries, because she worked as an accountant at a factory, but by evening we were already refugees. As we were leaving Minsk, we saw our school burn. Flames raged in every window. So bright…So…so intense, right up to the sky…We wept that our school was burning. There were four of us, three went on foot, and the fourth “rode” in mama’s arms. Mama was nervous, because she took the key, but forgot to lock the apartment. She tried to stop the cars, cried and begged, “Take our children, and we’ll go and defend the city.” She refused to believe that the Germans were already in the city. That the city had surrendered.

Everything that was happening before our eyes and with us was frightening and incomprehensible. Especially death…Pots and pans lay about around the killed people. Everything was burning…It seemed as if we were running over burning coals…I always made friends with boys, and was myself a tomboy. I was interested to see how the bombs came flying, how they whined, how they fell. When mama shouted, “Lie down on the ground!” I peeked through a buttonhole…What was there in the sky? And how were people running…Something was hanging from a tree…When I realized that this something was a man, I was stunned. I closed my eyes…

My sister Irma was seven; she carried a Primus stove and mama’s shoes. She was terribly afraid to lose those shoes. They were new, of a pale-rose color, with a faceted heel. Mama had taken them by chance, or maybe because they were her most beautiful thing.

With the key, and with the shoes, we soon returned to the city, where everything had burned down. Soon we began to starve. We gathered goosefoot and ate it. Ate some sort of dry flowers! Winter was coming. Fearing the partisans, the Germans burned a big kolkhoz^*1 orchard outside the city, and everybody went there to cut some wood from the stumps, to have at least a little. To heat the stove at home. We made liver out of yeast: we fried yeast in a pan and it acquired the taste of liver. Mama gave me money to buy bread at the market. An old woman there was selling kid goats, and I imagined that I’d save the whole family by buying a kid. The kid would grow up—and we’d have a lot of milk. So I bought the kid, paying all the money mama had given me. I don’t remember mama scolding me, but I do remember us sitting hungry for several days: we had no money. We cooked some sort of mixture to feed the kid, and I took him with me to bed, to keep him warm, but he was cold anyway. Soon he died. This was a tragedy. We wept very much, didn’t want mama to take him away. I wept the most, considering myself guilty. Mama took him away by night, and told us that the mice ate the kid.

Yet under the occupation we celebrated all the May and October holidays.^*2 Our holidays! Ours! We always sang songs, our family all liked to sing. We could eat potatoes in skins, maybe one piece of sugar for us all; still on that day we tried to prepare something a bit better than usual, even if the next day we’d go hungry—we still celebrated all the holidays. In a whisper, we sang mama’s favorite song: “The morning paints in tender hues / The ancient Kremlin walls…” That was a must.

A neighbor baked some little pies to sell and offered them to us: “Take them wholesale, and go and sell them piecemeal. You’re young, light-footed.” I decided to do it, because I knew how hard it was for mama alone to feed us. The neighbor brought the pies, my sister Irma and I sat and looked at them.

“Irma, don’t you think that this pie is bigger than that one?” I said.

“Seems so…”

You can’t imagine how I wanted to try a little piece.

“Let’s cut a tiny bit, and then go selling.”

We sat like that for two hours till there was nothing to take to the market. Then the neighbor started making candy, the kind they stopped selling in the stores for some reason. She gave some to us to go and sell. Again Irma and I sat over them.

“One is big, bigger than the others. Let’s lick it a little bit, Irma.”

“Let’s…”

We had one coat for the three of us, one pair of felt boots. We often stayed home. We told fairy tales to each other…read some books…But that wasn’t interesting. The interesting thing was to dream how the war would end and we’d live after that. Eating only pies and candy.

When the war was over, mama put on a little crepe de chine blouse. I don’t remember how it was she still had it. We had exchanged all nice things for food. This blouse had black cuffs, and mama unstitched them so that there was nothing dark, only light.

We went to school at once and from the first days began to learn songs for a parade.

*1 Kolkhoz was a Soviet acronym for “collective farm.”

*2 May 1 is International Workers’ Day, also known as Labor Day or May Day, adopted at the Second Socialist International in 1889, in part to commemorate the Haymarket massacre in Chicago on May 4, 1886. The October holiday commemorated the start of the Bolshevik Revolution on October 25, 1917 (November 7 by the Gregorian calendar).