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

“YOU’RE NO BROTHER OF MINE IF YOU PLAY WITH GERMAN BOYS…”

Vasya Sigalev-Kniazev SIX YEARS OLD. NOW AN ATHLETIC COACH.

It was early dawn…

Shooting began. Father leaped out of bed, ran to the door, opened it, and cried out. We thought he was frightened, but he fell, he had been hit by an exploding bullet.

Mama found some rags. She didn’t turn the light on, because there was still shooting. Father moaned, tossed from side to side. A faint light came through the window, fell on his face…

“Lie down on the floor,” mama said.

And suddenly she burst into sobs. We rushed to her with a cry. I slipped in my father’s blood and fell. I smelled blood and also some other heavy smell—father’s intestines had exploded…

I remember a big, long coffin, yet my father wasn’t tall. “Why does he need such a big coffin?” I wondered. Then I decided that father had been badly wounded, and it would be less painful for him this way. That’s how I explained it to the neighbors’ boy.

Sometime later, also in the morning, some Germans came and took mama and me. They put us on the square in front of the factory where my father had worked before the war (in the village of Smolovka, Vitebsk region). We stood there with two more partisan families. There were more children than adults. Everybody knew that mama had a big family, five brothers and five sisters, all of them with the partisans.

They started beating mama. The whole village watched her being beaten, and we did, too. Some woman kept bending my head down toward the ground. “Lower your eyes, lower your eyes.” I kept wiggling out of her hands. I watched…

Beyond the village was a woody hill. They left the children and led the adults there. I clung to mama, she kept pushing me away and cried out, “Farewell, children!” I remember her dress rising in the wind as she fell into the trench…

Our troops came, and I saw an officer with epaulettes. I liked it so much that I made epaulettes for myself out of birch bark and drew the insignia with coal. I fixed them on the peasant coat my aunt had made for me, and went as I was—in my best shoes—to report to Captain Ivankin (my aunt told me his name) that Vanya Sigalev wanted to fight the Germans together with him. First there was joking, laughing, then they asked my aunt about my parents. When they discovered that I was an orphan, the soldiers sewed little tarpaulin boots for me overnight, shortened an army coat, made a smaller hat, smaller epaulettes. Someone even fabricated an officer’s shoulder strap. Thus I became a son of the special demining unit No. 203. They enlisted me as a liaison. I tried to do my best, but I couldn’t read or write. When mama was still alive, my uncle had told me, “Go to the railway bridge and count how many Germans are there…” How could I count? He poured a handful of grain into my pocket, and I put the grains one by one from the right pocket to the left. And my uncle counted them afterward.

“War is war, but you’ve still got to learn to read and write,” said the party organizer Shaposhnikov.

The soldiers got hold of some paper, he made a notebook out of it, and wrote the alphabet and the multiplication table in it. I memorized it and recited it for him. He would bring an empty shell box, draw lines on it, and say, “Write.”

In Germany there were already three of us boys—Volodia Pochivadlov, Vitia Barinov, and me. Volodia was fourteen years old, Vitia seven, and by then I was nine. We were great friends, like brothers, because we had no one else.

But when I saw Vitia Barinov play “war” with German boys and give one of them his forage cap with a little star, I shouted that he was no longer a brother to me. He would never again be a brother to me! I grabbed my trophy pistol and ordered him to go to our unit’s bivouac. And there I put him under arrest in some closet. He was a private and I was a junior sergeant, so I conducted myself like a superior in rank.

Someone told Captain Ivankin about it. He summoned me. “Where is Private Vitia Barinov?”

“Private Barinov is in the guardhouse,” I reported.

The captain spent a long time explaining to me that all children are good, that they’re not to blame for anything, that Russian and German children will be friends once the war is over.

The war ended. I was awarded three medals: “For the Taking of Königsberg,” “For the Taking of Berlin,” and “For Victory over Germany.” Our unit returned to Zhitkovichi, and there we demined the fields. I learned by chance that my older brother was alive and living in Vileika.

With a recommendation for a Suvorov School, I escaped to Vileika. I found my brother there, and soon a sister came to join us. So we already had a family. We set up house in some attic. But it was hard with provisions until I put on my uniform, pinned my three medals to it, and went to the town council.

I came. Found a door with a sign plate: CHAIRMAN. Knocked. Went in and reported according to regulations: “Junior Sergeant Sigalev comes to petition for state provisions.”

The chairman smiled and rose to meet me.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“In an attic.” And I gave him the address.

In the evening they brought us a sack of cabbage, two days later a sack of potatoes.

Once the chairman met me in the street and gave me an address: “Come in the evening, someone will be expecting you.”

I was met by a woman. She was his wife. Her name was Nina Maximovna, his Alexei Mikhailovich. They gave me something to eat, I washed myself. My army things were now too small for me, so they gave me a couple of shirts.

I started coming to see them, first occasionally, then more often, then every day. A military patrol would meet me and ask, “Whose medals have you pinned on, lad? Where’s your father?”

“I have no father…”

I had to carry my papers with me.

When Alexei Mikhailovich asked me, “Would you like to be our son?” I answered, “I’d like it very much.”

They adopted me, gave me their last name—Kniazev.

For a long time I couldn’t call them “papa” and “mama.” Nina Maximovna loved me straight off, pitied me. If there was something sweet, it was always for me. She wanted to caress me. To be nice to me. But I didn’t like sweets, because I had never eaten them. Our life before the war was poor, and in the army I got used to everything soldiers get. And I wasn’t a gentle boy, because I had lived among men and hadn’t seen any special gentleness for a long time. I didn’t even know any gentle words.

Once I woke up during the night and heard Nina Maximovna weeping behind the partition. She had probably wept before, but she did it when I didn’t see or hear it. She wept and complained, “He’ll never be our own, he won’t be able to forget his parents…His blood…There’s so little of the child in him, and he isn’t gentle.” I went up to her quietly and put my arm around her neck: “Don’t cry, mama.” She stopped crying, and I saw her glistening eyes. It was the first time I had called her “mama.” After a while I called my father “papa.” Only one thing remained: I couldn’t stop addressing them rather formally.

They didn’t try to make me into a pampered boy, and I’m grateful to them for that. I had clear duties: to tidy up the house, to shake out the doormats, to bring firewood from the shed, to light the stove after school. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to get a higher education. They instilled it in me that one must study, and after the war one must study well. Only well.

While still in the army, when our unit was stationed in Zhitkovichi, the commander had ordered Volodia Pochivadlov, Vitia Barinov, and me to study. The three of us sat at the same desk in the second grade. We carried weapons, and we didn’t recognize any authority. We didn’t want to obey civilian teachers: how can they give us orders if they’re not in military uniform? The only authorities for us were commanders. A teacher walks in, the whole class rises, we go on sitting.

“Why are you sitting?”

“We’re not going to answer you. We only obey our commander.”

During the long break we lined up all the students by platoons and taught them to march and sing soldiers’ songs.

The director of the school came to the unit and told the political commissar about our behavior. We were put in the guardhouse and demoted. Vovka Pochivadlov, who had been a sergeant major, became a sergeant; I had been a sergeant and became a junior sergeant. Vitka Barinov had been junior sergeant and became corporal. The commander had a long talk with each of us, trying to bring home to us that As and Bs in arithmetic were more important for us then than any medals. Our combat mission was to study well. We wanted to shoot, but they told us we had to study.

Even so we wore our medals to school. I keep a photo of myself wearing medals, sitting at the desk drawing for our Pioneer newspaper.

Whenever I brought an A home from school, I shouted from the porch, “Mama, I got an A!”

And it was so easy for me to say “mama”…