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

“THEY HAD ALREADY BOUGHT ME A PRIMER…”

Lilia Melnikova SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER.

I was supposed to start first grade…

They had already bought me a primer and a school bag. I was the oldest. My sister Raya was five years old, and our Tomochka—three. We lived in Rossony, our father worked as the director of a tree farm, but a year before the war he died. We lived with mama.

The day the war reached us, all three of us were in the kindergarten, the littlest one too. And so all the children were picked up, but we were left, nobody came for us. We were frightened. Mama was the last to come running. She worked at the tree farm, they had to burn or bury some papers. And that had detained her.

Mama said that we would be evacuated, that they had given us a cart. We had to take the most necessary things. I remember there was a big wicker hamper in the corridor. We put this hamper on the cart. My little sister took her doll. Mama wanted to leave the doll…It was a big doll…My sister cried, “I won’t leave her!” We rode out of Rossony, and our cart tipped over, the hamper opened, and shoes poured out of it. It turned out that we had taken nothing with us: no food, no changes of clothes. Mama had lost her head and confused the hampers. She had taken the one in which she kept shoes to be repaired.

Before we had time to pick up these shoes, the planes came flying and began to bomb us, to strafe us with machine guns. Our doll was all bullet-riddled, but my sister was perfectly unharmed, without a scratch. She wept: “I still won’t leave her.”

We went back and began to live under the Germans. Mama would go to sell our father’s clothes. I remember the first time when she traded his two-piece suit for some peas. We ate pea soup for a month. We finished the soup. We had a big old quilted blanket. Mama cut it up to make warm boots, and if anyone wanted them, they paid her as they could. Sometimes we ate mash, sometimes we had one egg for all of us…But often we had nothing. Mama just hugged us and caressed us…

Mama didn’t tell us that she was helping the partisans, but I figured it out. She often went off somewhere and didn’t say where. Whenever she went to trade something, we knew about it, but then she would just go off—and that was that. I was proud of mama and said to my sisters, “Soon our troops will come. Uncle Vanya (papa’s brother) will come.” He fought with the partisans.

That day mama poured milk into a bottle, kissed us, and left, and locked the door with a key. The three of us got under the table covered with a big tablecloth, where it was warm, and played “Mothers-and-Daughters.” Suddenly we heard the rattle of motorcycles, then a terrible knocking on the door and a man’s voice calling my mother’s name distortedly. Incorrectly. I had a bad feeling. There was a ladder standing outside our window on the side of the kitchen garden. We climbed down it on the sly. Quickly. I grabbed one sister’s hand, put the other one on my shoulders—we call that “eeny-meeny”—and walked outside.

There were many people gathered there. And children. Those who came to get mama didn’t know us and didn’t find us. They broke down the door…I saw mama appear on the road, so small, so thin. The Germans saw her, ran up the hill, seized her, twisted her arms, and began to beat her. We ran and shouted, all three of us, shouted with all our might: “Mama! Mama!” They shoved her into the motorcycle sidecar, she just called out to a neighbor: “Fenia, dear, look after my children.” The neighbors led us away from the road, but they were afraid to take us: what if the Germans came to get us? So we went to cry in a ditch. We couldn’t go home, we’d already heard that in another village the parents were taken away and the children were burned, locked up in the house and burned. We were afraid to go to our own house…This lasted probably for three days. We sat in the chicken coop, then we’d go to the kitchen garden. We wanted to eat, but we didn’t touch anything in the kitchen garden, because mama scolded us for pulling out carrots before they were grown and picking off the peas. We didn’t take anything, and we said to each other that mama would be upset that without her we destroyed everything in the kitchen garden. Of course that’s what she would think. She wouldn’t know that we hadn’t touched anything. That we were obedient. The adults sent us with their children—some boiled a turnip, some a potato, some a beet…

Then Aunt Arina took us in. She had one boy left, she had lost the other two when she went away with the refugees. We kept remembering mama, and Aunt Arina took us to the prison commandant to ask for a meeting. The commandant said that we couldn’t talk to mama, that he would only allow us to pass by her window.

We went past the window and I saw mama…We were led very quickly, and I was the only one who saw mama, my sisters didn’t have time. Mama’s face was red, I realized she had been badly beaten. She also saw us and only cried out, “Children! My girls!” And she didn’t look out the window anymore. Afterward we were told that she had seen us and fainted…

Several days later we learned that mama had been shot. My sister Raya and I understood that our mama was no more, but the youngest, Tomochka, kept saying that once mama came back she would tell her how we mistreated her and didn’t carry her in our arms. When we were given food, I gave her the best pieces. I remembered mama doing that…

After mama was shot…The next day a car drove up to our house…They began to take our things…The neighbors called out to us, “Go, ask for your felt boots, your warm coats! It will be winter soon, and you only have summer clothes.” The three of us stood there, little Tomochka sat on my shoulders, and I said, “Mister, give her her felt boots.” The policeman was just then carrying them in his hands. Before I finished, he kicked me with his foot, and my sister fell off…And she hit her head against the stone. In the morning we saw a big abscess there, and it began to grow. Aunt Arina had a thick kerchief, she wrapped it around her head, but the abscess still showed. At night I would put my arms around her head, and her head was very, very big. I was afraid she would die.

The partisans learned about it all and took us to stay with them. They comforted us the best they could, and loved us very much. We even forgot for a while that we had no papa and mama. Someone had a torn shirt; they twisted the sleeve, drew eyes, a nose—and made a doll for us. They taught us to read, they even made up verses about me not liking to wash with cold water. What facilities were there in the forest? In winter we washed with snow…

Lilia sits in the tub,

And Lilia frets,

“Help me, help me,

The water is so wet.”

When it became dangerous, they took us back to Aunt Arina. The commander—and the unit commander was the legendary Pyotr Mironovich Masherov—asked, “What do you need? Is there anything you want?” And we needed many things, first of all some shirts. They made dresses for us from the same fabric army shirts were made of. Green dresses with patch pockets. They made felt boots for the three of us, winter coats, and knitted us mittens. I remember that they brought us to Aunt Arina on a cart and gave us sacks of flour and grain. Even pieces of leather, so that she could make shoes for us.

When there was a search at Aunt Arina’s, she passed us off as her children. They kept asking why we were blond and her son was dark-haired. They knew something…They put us in a truck with Aunt Arina and her boy, and brought us to the Igritsky concentration camp. It was winter, everybody slept on the floor, on boards, with some straw. We lay like this: me, then little Toma, next to her Raya, then Aunt Arina and her son. I wound up at the edge. The people next to me changed often. I would touch a cold hand at night and know that the man was dead. In the morning I would look—he’s as if alive, only cold. Once I was frightened…I saw that rats had eaten the lips and cheeks of a dead man. The rats were fat and insolent. I was afraid of them most of all…While we were with the partisans, the abscess on my little sister’s head went away, but in the concentration camp it appeared again. Aunt Arina used to hide this abscess all the time, because she knew that if they saw the girl was sick, they would shoot her. She wrapped my sister’s head with a thick kerchief. At night I heard her pray: “Lord, you took their mother, preserve the children.” I also prayed…I asked, “At least let little Tomochka survive, she’s so young, she shouldn’t die.”

We were taken somewhere from the concentration camp…We rode in cattle cars. On the floor were dried cow flops. I remember that we only reached Latvia, and there local people took us. Tomochka was the first to be taken. Aunt Arina carried her in her arms, handed her to an old Latvian man, and knelt before him: “Only save her. Save her.” He said, “If I reach my home with her, she’ll live. I have a mile and a half to walk. Across the river, then through the cemetery…” We all wound up with different people. Aunt Arina was also taken from us…

We heard…They told us—Victory. I went to the people who had taken my sister Raya: “We have no mama…Let’s go and take our Toma. And we must find Aunt Arina.”

We discussed it and went to look for Aunt Arina. That we found her was a miracle. We found her because she was a very good seamstress. We stopped at some house to have a drink of water. They asked us where we were going. We replied that we were looking for Aunt Arina. The hostess’s daughter said at once, “Let’s go, I’ll show you where she lives.” Aunt Arina just gasped when she saw us. We were skinny as sticks. It was the end of June, the most difficult time: the old harvest was eaten, and the new one wasn’t ripe yet. We ate the still green ears: we’d rub a bit in our hands and swallow it, even without chewing, we were so hungry.

Not far from our parts was the town of Kraslava. Aunt Arina said we had to go there and get to the orphanage. She was already very sick, and she asked that we be taken there. We were brought there early in the morning, the gates were still closed, they deposited us by the window of the orphanage and left. The sun rose in the morning…Children ran out of the house, all wearing red shoes, trunks without tops, towels in their hands. They ran to the river, laughing. And we watched…We didn’t believe that there could be a life like that. The children noticed us—we were sitting there raggedy, dirty—and shouted, “New ones have come!” They called the teachers. No one asked us for any papers. They brought some bread and cans of food right away. We didn’t eat, we were afraid that this happiness would suddenly end. This impossible happiness…They reassured us: “Sit here for now, girls, we’ll go to heat the bath house. We’ll wash you and show you where you’ll live.”

In the evening the director came, saw us, and said that they were overcrowded and that we had to be taken to the Minsk children’s center and from there sent to some orphanage. When we heard that again we had to go somewhere, we began to cry and begged them to let us stay. The director said, “Don’t cry, children. I can’t bear the sight of your tears.” She called somewhere, and we were allowed to stay in that orphanage. It was a beautiful, wonderful orphanage; the teachers there were such as probably don’t exist now. With such hearts! How could they have kept such hearts after the war?

They loved us very much. Taught us how to behave with each other. There was this incident. They told us that if you treat someone to candies, don’t take them out of the bag, but offer the whole bag. And the person it’s offered to should take one candy, not the whole bag. One boy was absent when we had this conversation. The sister of one girl came and brought a box of candies. The girl offered the box to that boy, and he took the whole box from her. We laughed. He was embarrassed and asked, “What should I have done?” They told him that he was supposed to take one candy. Then he realized: “I see now—we should always share. Otherwise it’s good for me, but bad for everybody else.” Yes, we were taught to act so that it’s good for everybody, not for some one person. It was easy to teach us, because we had been through a lot.

The older girls made book bags for everybody, they even made them out of old skirts. On holidays the director of the orphanage always rolled out raw dough into a pancake huge as a sheet. Each of us cut off a piece and made a dumpling of whatever shape we wanted: small, big, round, triangular…

When there were many of us together, we rarely remembered our papas and mamas. But when we were sick in a special ward, and lay there with nothing to do, they were all we talked about, and about how we wound up in the orphanage. One boy told me that all his family were burned up while he was riding a horse to the neighboring village. He said he was very sorry for his mama, very sorry for his papa, but most of all he was sorry for little Nadenka. Little Nadenka lay in white swaddling clothes, and they burned her. Or else, when we gathered in a small circle in the clearing, we told each other about home. About how we had lived before the war.

A little girl was brought to the orphanage. They asked her, “What’s your last name?”

“Marya Ivanovna.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Marya Ivanovna.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Marya Ivanovna.”

Her only response was “Marya Ivanovna.” Our teacher was Marya Ivanovna, and this girl was Marya Ivanovna.

For the New Year she recited a poem by Marshak: “I had a pretty little chicken.”^* And the children nicknamed her “Chicken.” Children are children, we were all tired of calling her Marya Ivanovna. Then one of our boys went to see his friend at a vocational school that had taken us under its patronage, and they argued about something, and he called the other boy “Chicken.” The boy was hurt. “Why did you call me ‘Chicken’? Do I look like a chicken?” And our boy said that there was a girl in our orphanage who resembled him very much. She had the same nose, the same eyes, and we called her “Chicken,” and he told him why.

It turned out that the girl was that boy’s sister. When they met, they remembered that they had ridden in a cart…Their grandmother had heated something for them in a can, and then she had been killed during a bombing…And an old neighbor, the grandmother’s friend, called to her when she was already dead: “Marya Ivanovna, get up, you have two grandchildren…How could you die, Marya Ivanovna? Why did you die, Marya Ivanovna?” It turned out that the girl remembered it all, but she wasn’t sure that she did and that it had all happened to her. She only had two words in her ears: Marya Ivanovna.

We were all very glad that she had found her brother, because we all had somebody, and she didn’t have anybody. I, for instance, had two sisters, someone else had a brother, or cousins. Those who didn’t have anybody would decide: you be my brother, or you be my sister. And then they would protect and take care of each other. In our orphanage there were eleven Tamaras…Their last names were: Tamara Unknown, Tamara Strange, Tamara Nameless, Tamara Big, and Tamara Small…

What else do I remember? I remember that they scolded us very little in this orphanage, no, they didn’t scold us at all. We used to go sleigh riding in winter with children who had families, and I saw mothers scold and even spank their children, if they put felt boots on their bare feet. When we did that nobody scolded us. I deliberately put my boots on that way so as to be scolded. I wanted so much to be scolded.

I was a good student, and they told me I should help a boy with his math. A village boy. We went to school together—the orphanage children and local village children. I had to go to his family. To his house. I was frightened. I thought, “What kind of things do they have there, how do they stand in the house, how should I behave myself?” Home was something inaccessible to us, the most desirable.

I knocked on the door and my heart skipped a beat…

* Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) was a poet, writer, and translator most famous for his books for children. However, the poem “Chicken” was in fact written by his friend and fellow children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky (1882–1969).