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

“AUNTIE, TAKE ME ON YOUR KNEES…”

Marina Karyanova FOUR YEARS OLD. NOW WORKS IN CINEMA.

I don’t like to remember…I don’t. In a word—I don’t like it…

If everybody was asked, “What is childhood?” they would each say something of their own. For me childhood is mama and papa and candies. All my childhood I wanted mama and papa and candies. During the war I not only didn’t taste any candies—I didn’t even see any. I ate my first candy a few years after the war…About three years after…I was already a big girl. Ten years old.

I could never understand how anybody could not want chocolate candy. How? It’s impossible.

I never found my mama and papa. I don’t even know my real last name. They picked me up in Moscow at the Severny train station.

“What’s your name?” they asked me in the orphanage.

“Marinochka.”

“And your last name?”

“I don’t remember my last name…”

They wrote down Marina Severnaya.

I wanted to eat all the time. But still more I wanted someone to hug me, to caress me. There was little tenderness then, there was war all around, everybody was in grief. I go down the street…Ahead of me a woman walks with her children. She’d take one in her arms, carry him, put him down, take another. They sat on a bench, and she took the youngest on her knees. I kept standing there. Kept looking. I went up to her: “Auntie, take me on your knees.” She was surprised.

I asked her again, “Auntie, please…”