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

“WHY DID THEY SHOOT HER IN THE FACE? MY MAMA WAS SO BEAUTIFUL…”

Volodia Korshuk SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A PROFESSOR, A DOCTOR IN HISTORY.

We lived in Brest. Right on the border…

In the evening all three of us were at the movies: mama, papa, and I. It rarely happened that we went anywhere together, because my father was always busy. He was the director of the regional department of education, and was always on business trips.

The last evening without war…The last night…

When mama roused me in the morning, everything around rumbled, banged, boomed. It was very early. I remember that outside the windows it was still dark. My parents bustled about, packing suitcases; for some reason they couldn’t find anything.

We had our own house, a big garden. My father went somewhere. Mama and I looked out the window: there were some military people in the garden speaking broken Russian and dressed in our uniforms. Mama said they were saboteurs. I couldn’t quite figure out how it was possible that in our garden, where a samovar was still standing on a little table from the evening before, there were suddenly saboteurs! And where were our frontier guards?

We left the city on foot. Before my eyes a stone house ahead of us fell to pieces and a telephone flew out of a window. In the middle of the street stood a bed; on it lay a dead little girl under a blanket. As if the bed had been taken out and put there: everything was intact, only the blanket was slightly singed. Just outside the city were rye fields. Planes fired at us with machine guns, and everybody moved, not along the road, but over those fields.

We entered the forest, and it became less frightening. From the forest I saw big trucks. It was the Germans coming, and they were laughing loudly. I heard unfamiliar speech. There was a lot of r-r-r in it…

My parents kept asking each other: where are our soldiers? our army? I pictured to myself that at any moment Budenny would come galloping on his warhorse, and the Germans would flee in terror. There was nothing to equal our cavalry—so my father had convinced me recently.

We walked for a long time. At night we stopped at farms. They fed us, kept us warm. Many of them knew my father, and my father knew many of them. We stopped at one farm, I still remember the name of the teacher who lived there—Pauk [“Spider”]. They had two houses—a new and an old one side by side. They offered to let us stay; they would give us one of the houses. But my father declined. The owner drove us to the high road. Mama tried to give him money, but he shook his head and said that he could not take money for friendship at a difficult moment. I remembered that.

So we reached the town of Uzda, my father’s native area. We lived at my grandfather’s in the village of Mrochki.

I saw partisans in our house for the first time that winter, and ever since, my picture of them has been of people in white camouflage smocks. Soon my father left with them for the forest, and mama and I stayed with my grandfather.

Mama was sewing something…No…She was sitting at the big table and doing embroidery on a tambour, and I was sitting on the stove. The Germans came into the cottage with the village headman, and the headman pointed at mama: “Here she is.” They told mama to get ready. Then I became very frightened. Mama was taken outside, she called me to say goodbye, but I huddled under a bench and they couldn’t pull me out from there.

They took mama and two other women whose husbands were with the partisans, and drove somewhere. No one knew where. In which direction. The next day they were found not far outside the village. They lay in the snow…It had snowed all night…What I remember, from when my mama was brought home, was that for some reason they had shot her in the face. She had several black bullet holes in her cheek. I kept asking my grandfather, “Why did they shoot her in the face? My mama was so beautiful…” Mama was buried…My grandfather, my grandmother, and I followed the coffin. People were afraid. They came to take leave of her during the night…All night our door stayed open, but during the day we were by ourselves. I couldn’t understand why they had killed my mama, if she hadn’t done anything bad. She was sitting and embroidering…

One night my father came and said he was taking me with him. I was happy. At first my partisan life was not much different from my life with grandfather. Father would go on a mission and leave me with someone in a village. I remember a woman I was staying with had her dead husband brought to her on a sledge. She beat her head against the table on which the coffin stood and repeated the one word, fiends.

Father was absent for a very long time. I waited for him and thought, “I have no mama, grandpa and grandma are somewhere far away, what will I, a little boy, do, if they bring me my dead father on a sledge?” It seemed like an eternity before my father returned. While I was waiting, I promised myself to address him only formally from then on. I wanted to emphasize how I loved him, how I missed him, and that he was my only one. At first my father probably didn’t notice how I addressed him, but then he asked, “Why do you address me formally?” I confessed to him what I had promised myself and why. But he explained to me, “You, too, are my only one, so we should address each other informally. We’re the closest to each other in the world.” I also asked him that we never part from each other. “You’re already an adult, you’re a man,” my father persuaded me.

I remember my father’s gentleness. We were under fire…We lay on the cold April ground, there was no grass yet…Father found a deep depression and told me, “You lie underneath and I’ll lie on top. If they kill me, you’ll stay alive.” Everybody in the unit pitied me. I remember an older partisan came up, took my hat off, and caressed my head for a long time, saying to my father that he had a boy like that running around somewhere. And when we walked through a swamp, up to our waists in water, father tried to carry me on his back, but quickly became tired. Then the partisans started taking turns carrying me. I’ll never forget that. I won’t forget how they found a little sorrel and gave it all to me. And went to sleep hungry.

…In the orphanage of Gomel, where I was transported by plane with several other partisan children as soon as the town was liberated, someone handed me money sent by my father, a big red paper note. I went with the boys to the market and spent all the money on candy. It was a lot of candy, enough for everybody. The teacher asked, “What did you do with the money your father sent you?” I confessed that I bought candy. “That’s all?” she asked, surprised.

Minsk was liberated…A man came and said he would take me to my father. It was hard to get on the train. The man got in and people handed me to him through the window.

I met with my father and asked him again that he and I should never part, because it is bad to be alone. I remember he met me not alone, but with a new mama. She pressed my head to herself, and I missed my mother’s caress so much and so enjoyed her touch that I fell asleep in the car at once. On her shoulder.

I was ten when I went to first grade. I was big, and I knew how to read, and after six months they transferred me to second grade. I knew how to read, but not how to write. I was called to the blackboard and had to write a word with the letter Ю in it. I stood there terrified, thinking that I didn’t know how to write the letter Ю. But I knew how to shoot. I was a good shot.

One day I didn’t find my father’s pistol in the closet. I turned everything in it upside down—the pistol wasn’t there.

“How come? What are you going to do now?” I asked my father when he came home from work.

“I’ll teach children,” he said.

I was puzzled…I thought the only work was war…