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

“HIS ARMY SHIRT WAS WET…”

Valia Matiushkova FIVE YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.

You’ll be surprised! But I would like to recall something funny. Merry. I like to laugh, I don’t want to cry. O-o-oh…I’m already crying…

Papa is taking me to mama in the maternity hospital and says that we’ll soon buy ourselves a boy. I try to imagine what sort of little brother I’ll have. I ask papa, “What’s he like?” Papa says, “Small.”

Suddenly papa and I are somewhere high up, and there’s smoke coming through the window. Papa carries me in his arms, and I ask him to go back for my little purse. I fuss. Papa says nothing and firmly presses me to himself, so firmly that I have a hard time breathing. Soon there is no papa; I’m walking down the street with some woman. We walk along the barbed wire. There are prisoners of war behind it. It’s hot, they ask for a drink of water. All I have is two pieces of candy in my pocket. I throw them over the wire. Where did I get them, these candies? I no longer remember. Someone throws bread…Cucumbers…The guard shoots, we run away…

It’s astonishing, but I remember it all…In detail…

Then I remember myself in a children’s center, also surrounded by barbed wire. We were guarded by German soldiers and German shepherds. There were some children who couldn’t walk yet, they crawled. When they were hungry they licked the floor…Ate dirt…They died quickly. The food was bad. They gave us bread that made our tongues swell so much that we couldn’t even speak. All we thought about was food. You finish breakfast and think—what will there be for lunch? You finish lunch—what’s for supper? We crawled under the barbed wire and escaped to town. There was one goal—the garbage dumps. It was an inexpressible joy when you found a herring skin or potato peels. We ate them raw.

I remember being caught at the dump by some man. I was frightened. “I won’t do it anymore, mister.”

He asked, “Whose child are you?”

“Nobody’s. I’m from a children’s center.”

He took me to his place and gave me something to eat. They only had potatoes in his house. They boiled them, and I ate a whole pot of potatoes.

From the center they transferred us to an orphanage. The orphanage was across the street from a medical institute, which housed a German hospital. I remember low windows, heavy shutters, which were closed at night. They fed us well there, and my health improved. The cleaning woman there loved me very much. She pitied everybody, but especially me. When they came to take our blood, everybody hid: “The doctors are coming…”—and she put me in some corner. She kept saying that I resembled her daughter. Other children hid under the beds. They got pulled out. Lured by something. By a piece of bread, or else they’d show some toy. I remember a red ball…

The “doctors” would go away, and I’d go back to the room…I remember a little boy lying there, his arm hanging from the bed, bleeding. And other children crying…Every two or three weeks new children came. Some were taken somewhere, they were already pale and weak, and others were brought. Fattened up.

German doctors thought that the blood of children under five years old contributed to the speedy recovery of the wounded. That it had a rejuvenating effect. I found this out later…of course, later…

And then…I wanted to get a pretty toy. A red ball.

When the Germans began to flee from Minsk…to retreat…that woman who tried to save me led us outside the gate: “Those of you who have somebody, search for them. Those who don’t, go to any village, people there will save you.”

And I went. I lived with some grandmother…I don’t remember her name or the name of the village. I do remember that her daughter had been arrested, and we were left just the two of us—the old one and the little one. We had a piece of bread for a week.

I was the last to find out that our troops were in the village. I was sick. When I heard about it, I got up and ran to school. I saw a soldier and clung to him. I remember that his army shirt was wet.

He had been embraced, and kissed, and wept over so much.