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

“WE EVEN FORGOT THAT WORD…”

Anya Gurevich TWO YEARS OLD. NOW A RADIO ENGINEER.

Either I remember it, or mama told me later…

We walk down the street. It’s hard for us to walk: mama is sick, my sister and I are small—my sister is three years old, I’m two. How could we be saved?

Mama wrote a note: last name, first name, year of birth. She put the note in my pocket and said, “Go.” She showed me the house. There were children running around there…She wanted me to be evacuated with the orphanage; she was afraid we’d all be killed. She wanted to save at least one of us. I had to go alone: if mama were to take me there, they would send us both away. They took only children who had been left without parents, but I had mama. My whole fate lay in my going without looking back. Otherwise I would never have left mama, I would have thrown myself on her neck in tears, and no one would have forced me to stay in a strange house. My fate…

Mama said, “Go and open that door.” So I did. But this orphanage did not have time to evacuate…

I remember a big room…And my little bed by the wall. And many such little beds. We had to make them ourselves, very carefully. The pillow always had to be in the same place. If we did it differently, the house mistresses scolded us, especially when some men in black suits came. Policemen or Germans—I don’t know, I remember black suits. I don’t remember that we were beaten, but there was the fear that you could be beaten for something. I don’t remember our games…mischief…We were very active—tidied up, washed—but that was work. No childhood memories…laughter…fretting…

No one ever caressed us, but I didn’t weep about mama. No one around me had a mama. We didn’t even remember the word. We forgot it.

Here’s how they fed us: they gave us a bowl of mash and a piece of bread a day. I didn’t like mash and I gave my portion to a girl, and she gave me her piece of bread. We became friends because of it. Nobody paid any attention until one house mistress noticed our exchange. They put me on my knees in the corner. I spent a long time kneeling by myself. In a big empty room…To this day whenever I hear the word mash I immediately want to weep. When I grew up I couldn’t understand why this word provoked such revulsion in me. I forgot about the orphanage…

I was already sixteen, no, probably seventeen…I met my house mistress from the orphanage. There was a woman sitting on a bus…I looked at her and felt drawn to her as if by a magnet, drawn so much that I missed my stop. I didn’t know the woman, I didn’t remember her, but I was drawn to her. I finally couldn’t stand it, burst into tears, and got angry with myself: what’s the matter with me? I looked at her as at a painting I had seen once, but had forgotten, and wanted to look at again. And there was something dear, maybe like mama…closer than mama, but who she was I didn’t know. And this anger, these tears just gushed out of me! I turned away, went to the exit, stood there, and cried.

The woman saw it all, came up to me and said, “Don’t cry, Anechka.”

I cried still more from those words of hers. “But I don’t know you.”

“Look better!”

“I swear I don’t know you.” And I howled.

She led me off the bus.

“Look closely at me, you’ll remember everything. I’m Stepanida Ivanovna…”

I stood my ground.

“I don’t know you. I’ve never met you.”

“Do you remember the orphanage?”

“What orphanage? You must be taking me for someone else.”

“No, remember the orphanage…I was your house mistress.”

“My papa was killed, but I have mama. What orphanage?”

I had forgotten about the orphanage, because I was already living with mama. At home. This woman gently stroked my head, but all the same my tears poured down. Then she said, “Here’s my phone number…Call me if you want to learn about yourself. I remember you well. You were our littlest girl…”

She went away, and I couldn’t move from the spot. I should, of course, have run after her, asked all sorts of questions. I didn’t run and catch up with her.

Why didn’t I? I was a wild thing, simply a wild thing. For me people were something alien, dangerous, I didn’t know how to speak with anybody. I sat for hours talking to myself. Was afraid of everything.

Mama found me only in 1946…I was eight years old. She had been taken to Germany together with my sister, where they somehow survived. When they came back, mama searched in all the orphanages in Belarus. She lost all hope of finding me. Yet I was right there…in Minsk. But evidently the little note mama had given me got lost, and I was registered under another last name. Mama looked at all the girls called Anya in the Minsk orphanages. She decided that I was her daughter by my eyes, and because I was tall. For a week she kept coming and looking at me: was I her Anechka or not? My first name had stayed with me. When I saw mama, some incomprehensible feelings came over me, I began to cry for no reason. No, those were not memories of something familiar, it was something else…People around me said, “Mama. Your mama.” And some new world opened for me—mama! A mysterious door was thrown open…I knew nothing about people called “mama” and “papa.” I was frightened, while others rejoiced. Everybody smiled at me.

Mama invited our prewar neighbor to come with her: “Find my Anechka here.”

The neighbor immediately pointed at me.

“Here’s your Anka! Don’t hesitate, take her. Your eyes, your face…”

In the evening the house mistress came up to me: “Tomorrow you’ll be picked up, you’ll leave.”

I was terrified.

In the morning they washed me, dressed me, everybody was nice to me. Our gruff old nanny smiled at me. I realized that this was my last day with them, that they were taking leave of me. Suddenly I didn’t even feel like going anywhere. They changed me into everything mama brought—mama’s shoes, mama’s dress—and that way I was already separated from my orphanage friends…I stood among them like a stranger. And they gazed at me as if they were seeing me for the first time.

My greatest impression at home was the radio. There were no radio sets yet, but a black dish hung in the corner, and the sound came from there. I looked at it every moment. I ate and looked at it, went to bed and looked at it. How could people be there, how did they all get inside? Nobody could explain it to me, because I was unsociable. In the orphanage I had been friends with Tomochka. I liked her because she was cheerful, smiled often, and nobody liked me, because I never smiled. I began to smile when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. At school I used to hide my smile. I didn’t want people to see me smile, I was embarrassed. I didn’t know how to communicate, even with the girls: they would talk about all sorts of things during recess, and I couldn’t say anything. I sat and was silent.

Mama took me from the orphanage, and a couple of days later we went to a market together. There I saw a policeman and had hysterics. I shouted, “Mama, Germans!”—and started to run.

Mama rushed after me, people surrounded me, and I was shaking all over: “Germans!”

After that I refused to go out for two days. Mama tried to explain to me that it was a policeman, who protects us and keeps order in the street, but I refused to be persuaded. No way…The Germans who came to our orphanage wore black army coats…True, when they took blood from us, they led us to a separate room and wore white smocks, but I didn’t remember the white smocks. I remembered their black uniforms…

At home I couldn’t get used to my sister. She should have been someone close, but I was seeing her for the first time in my life, and for some reason she was my sister. Mama was at work all day long. We woke up in the morning and she was already gone. There were two pots of kasha in the oven, we had to serve ourselves. I waited for mama all day long—as something extraordinary, as some sort of happiness. But she came home late, when we were already asleep.

I found a doll somewhere, not really a doll, only a doll’s head. I loved it. It was my joy. I carried it around from morning till night. It was my only toy. I dreamed of having a ball. I would come out to the yard, all the children had balls, they carried them in special nets, that’s how they were sold. I would ask, and they would let me hold it for a while.

I bought myself a ball when I was eighteen and got my first salary at the clock factory. My dream came true: I brought the ball and hung it up in its net. I was ashamed to go outside with it, because I was grown up, so I sat at home and looked at it.

Many years later I decided to go to Stepanida Ivanovna. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, but my husband insisted: “Let’s go together. How is it you don’t want to find out anything about yourself?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. I’m afraid.”

I dialed her home number and heard the response: “Stepanida Ivanovna Dediulia has died…”

I can’t forgive myself…