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

“WE ASK: CAN WE LICK IT?…”

Vera Tashkina TEN YEARS OLD. NOW AN UNSKILLED WORKER.

Before the war I cried a lot…

My father died. Mama was left with seven children on her hands. It was a poor life. Hard. But later, during the war, that peaceful life seemed happy.

Grown-ups wept, but we weren’t afraid. We often played “war,” and the word was very familiar to us. I wondered why mama wept all night. Went around with red eyes. Only later did I understand…

We ate…water…Dinnertime came, mama put on the table a pot of hot water. We poured it into bowls. It’s evening. Suppertime. A pot of hot water on the table. Colorless hot water, there was nothing to put in for color in winter. Not even grass.

My brother was so hungry he ate a corner of the stove. He gnawed away at it every day until we noticed there was a little dent in it. Then mama took our last things, went to the market, and exchanged them for potatoes or corn. She would cook some cornmeal, divide it among us, and we would look at the pot and ask, “Can we lick it?” We took turns licking it. And after us our cat also licked it, she was hungry, too. I don’t know whether there was anything left there for her. We didn’t leave even a drop. There wasn’t even any smell left. We licked up the smell.

We kept waiting for our troops…

When our planes started bombing, I didn’t run to hide, but dashed out to look at our bombs. I found a piece of shrapnel…

“Where on earth have you been?” Frightened mama met me at home. “What’re you hiding there?”

“I’m not hiding anything. I brought a piece of shrapnel.”

“You’ll be killed, that’ll teach you.”

“Why, mama? It’s shrapnel from one of our bombs. How could it kill me?”

I kept it for a long time…