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

“AND I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A SCARF ON…”

Nadia Gorbacheva SEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW WORKS IN TELEVISION.

I’m interested in the inexplicable in the war…I still think a lot about it…

I don’t remember how my father left for the front…

We weren’t told. They wanted to spare us. In the morning he took me and my sister to kindergarten. Everything was the same as ever. In the evening we asked, of course, why father wasn’t there, but mama reassured us: “He’ll come back soon. In a few days.”

I remember the road…Trucks drove, in them cows mooed, pigs oinked, in one truck a boy held a cactus in his hands and was tossed from one side of the truck to the other…My sister and I found it funny the way he ran back and forth…We were children…We saw the fields, we saw the butterflies. We liked the ride. Mama protected us, we sat under mama’s “wings.” Somewhere deep in our minds was the awareness of a calamity, but mama was with us and everything would be good in the place we were going to. She shielded us from the bombs, from the frightened adult conversations, from everything bad. If we could have read mama’s face, we would have read everything on it. But I don’t remember it, I remember a big dragonfly that landed on my sister’s shoulder, and I shouted, “A plane!” and all the adults for some reason jumped off the wagon and threw their heads back.

We arrived at our grandfather’s in the village of Gorodets, in the Sennensky region. He had a big family, and we lived in the summer kitchen. People started calling us “summer folk,” and it stayed with us till the end of the war. I don’t remember us playing; at least in the first year of the war we didn’t play any summer games. Our little brother was growing up. We had him on our hands, because mama dug, planted, sewed. She would leave us by ourselves, and we had to wash the spoons and the dishes, the floors, to stoke the stove, to gather brushwood for the next day, to bring water: we carried half a bucket because we couldn’t carry a full one. In the evening mama assigned us our responsibilities: you for the kitchen, you for your brother. And we each answered for our duties.

We were hungry, yet we acquired a cat and then a dog. They were members of the family; we shared everything with them. Sometimes there wasn’t enough for the cat and the dog, so each of us tried to secretly stash away a little piece for them. And when the cat was killed by shrapnel, it was such a loss that it seemed impossible to survive. We wept for two days. We carried her in tears to be buried. Set up a cross, planted flowers, watered them.

Even now, when I remember all the tears we shed, I can’t bring myself to have a cat. When my daughter was little, she asked us to buy a dog, but I couldn’t.

Then something happened to us. We stopped being afraid of death.

Big German trucks drove in. We were all summoned from the cottages. They lined us up and counted: “Ein, zwei, drei…” Mama was the ninth, and the tenth person was shot. Our neighbor…Mama was holding our brother in her arms, and she dropped him.

I remember smells…Now, when I see movies about the fascists, I sense the soldiers’ smell. Leather, good broadcloth, sweat…

That day my sister was responsible for our brother, and I weeded the kitchen garden. When I bent down among the potatoes, I couldn’t be seen. You know how it is in childhood—everything seems big and tall. When I noticed the plane, it was already circling over me. I saw the pilot quite distinctly. His young face. A brief submachine gun volley—bang-bang! The plane circles for a second round…He wasn’t seeking to kill me, he was having fun. I already understood it then, with my child’s mind. And I didn’t even have a scarf on to cover my head…

So, what is it? How to explain it? I wonder: is that pilot still alive? And what does he remember?

The moment when it was decided whether you die from a bullet or from fear would pass, and an in-between time would come: one disaster would blow over, and the next wasn’t known yet. Then we laughed a lot. We began to tease one another, to joke: who hid where, how we ran, how the bullet flew by and missed. I remember that well. Even we children would gather and poke fun at one another: who was scared, who wasn’t. We laughed and cried at the same time.

I remember the war in order to figure it out…Otherwise why do it?

We had two chickens. When we said, “Quiet—Germans!” they were quiet. They sat very quietly with us under the bed and wouldn’t cluck even once. However many trained chickens I saw later in the circus, I wasn’t surprised. On top of that, ours diligently laid eggs in a box under the bed—two eggs a day. We felt so rich!

Still we did set up some sort of a Christmas tree. It was mama, of course, who remembered that we were children. We cut bright pictures out of books, made paper balls—one side white, the other black, made garlands out of old threads. On that day we especially smiled to each other, and instead of presents (we didn’t have any), we left little notes under the tree.

In my notes I wrote to mama: “Mama dear, I love you very much. Very, very much!” We gave each other presents of words.

Years have passed…I’ve read so many books. But I don’t know much more about the war than when I was a child.