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

“NO ONE TO PLAY OUTSIDE WITH…”

Valya Nikitenko FOUR YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.

Everything gets stamped in a child’s memory like in a photo album. As separate snapshots…

Mama begs, “Run, let’s run! Stomp, stomp!” Her hands are full. I fuss: “My little legs hurt.”

My three-year-old brother pushes me: “Let’s lun” (he can’t pronounce r), “the Gelmans will catch us!” We “lun” together in silence.

I hide my head and my doll from the bombs. My doll already has no arms or legs. I weep and ask mama to bandage her…

Someone brought mama a leaflet. I already know what that is. It’s a big letter from Moscow, a nice letter. Mama talks with grandma, and I understand that our uncle is with the partisans. Among our neighbors there was a family of polizei. You know how children are: they go out and each one boasts of his papa. Their boy says, “My papa has a submachine gun…”

I, too, want to boast: “And we got a leaflet from our uncle…”

The polizei’s mother heard it and came to mama to warn her: it would be death to our family if her son heard my words or one of the children told him.

Mama called me in from outside and begged: “Darling daughter, you won’t talk about it anymore?”

“I will, too!”

“You shouldn’t talk about it.”

“So he can, and I can’t?”

Then she pulled a switch from the broom, but she was sorry to whip me. She stood me in the corner.

“If you talk about it, your mama will be killed.”

“Uncle will come from the forest in a plane and save you.”

I fell asleep there in the corner…

Our house is burning. Someone carries me out of it, sleepy. My coat and shoes get burned up. I wear mama’s blazer; it reaches to the ground.

We live in a dugout. I climb out of the dugout and smell millet kasha with lard. To this day nothing seems tastier to me than millet kasha with lard. Somebody shouts, “Our troops have come!” In Aunt Vasilisa’s kitchen garden—that’s what mama calls her, but the children call her “Granny Vasya”—stands a soldiers’ field kitchen. They give us kasha in mess tins, I remember precisely that it was mess tins. How we ate it I don’t know, there were no spoons…

They held out a jug of milk to me, and I had already forgotten about milk during the war. They poured the milk into a cup, I dropped it and it broke. I cried. Everybody thought I was crying because of the broken cup, but I was crying because I spilled the milk. It was so tasty, and I was afraid they wouldn’t give me more.

After the war, sicknesses began. Everybody got sick, all the children. There was more sickness than during the war. Incomprehensible, isn’t it?

An epidemic of diphtheria…Children died. I escaped from a locked-up house to bury twin brothers who were our neighbors and my friends. I stood by their little coffins in mama’s blazer and barefoot. Mama pulled me away from there by my hand. She and grandma were afraid that I, too, was infected with diphtheria. No, it was just a cough.

There were no children left in the village at all. No one to play outside with…