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

“YOU SHOULD GO TO THE FRONT, BUT YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH MY MAMA…”

Yania Chernina TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER.

An ordinary day…That day began as usual…

But while I was riding on the tram, people were already saying, “How awful! How awful!” and I couldn’t understand what had happened. I came running home and saw my mama. She was kneading dough, and tears poured from her eyes. I asked, “What’s happened?” The first thing she said was, “War! Minsk has been bombed…” And we had just come back to Rostov from Minsk, after visiting my aunt.

On the first of September we still went to school, but on the tenth the school was closed. The evacuation of Rostov began. Mama said that we must prepare to leave, but I protested: “What evacuation can there be?” I went to the regional Komsomol Committee and asked to join ahead of time. They refused, because the age for joining Komsomol was fourteen and I was only twelve. I thought that if I became a Komsomol member, I would be able to take part in everything right away, would become an adult at once. Would be able to go to the front.

Mama and I got on the train. We had only one suitcase, and there were two dolls in it, a big one and a little one. I remember mama didn’t even resist when I put them in. I’ll tell later how these dolls saved us…

We reached the Kavkazskaya station. The train was destroyed by bombs. We climbed onto some open flatcar. Where we were going we had no idea. We knew one thing: we were going away from the front line. From the battles. It poured rain. Mama covered me with herself. At the Baladzhary station near Baku we got off wet and black from the engine smoke. And hungry. Before the war we had lived modestly, very modestly. We didn’t have nice things that we could take to the market to exchange or sell. Mama only had her passport with her. We sat at the train station and didn’t know what to decide. Where to go. A soldier walked by, not even a soldier—a very little soldier, dark, with a sack on his shoulders, and carrying a mess tin. You could see he had just been taken into the army and was going to the front. He stopped near us. I clung to mama. He asked, “Where are you going, woman?”

Mama said, “I don’t know. We’re being evacuated.”

He spoke Russian, but with a heavy accent.

“Don’t be afraid of us, go to our aul,^* to my mother. All our men have been taken into the army: my father, me, my two brothers. She’s all alone. Help her, and you’ll survive together. I’ll come back and marry your daughter.”

And he told us his address. We had nowhere to write it down, so we memorized it: Musa Musaev, village of Kum, Evlakh station, Kakh district. I’ve remembered the address all my life, though we didn’t go there. We were taken by a single woman who lived in a makeshift plywood hut, which had room only for a bed and a small bedside table. We slept on the floor sideways with our legs under the bed.

We were lucky to meet nice people…

I’ll never forget how an officer came up to mama. They talked, and he told her that his whole family had been killed in Krasnodar, and that he was going to the front. His comrades shouted, called him to the train, and he stood there and couldn’t leave us.

“I see that you’re in distress. Allow me to leave you my army certificate. I have no one else left,” he said suddenly.

Mama wept. But I understood it all in my own way. I started yelling at him.

“There’s war…Your whole family got killed. You should go to the front and take revenge on the fascists, but you fall in love with my mama. Shame on you!”

He and my mother stand there, and they both have tears in their eyes, and I can’t understand how my good mama can talk with such a bad man: he doesn’t want to go to the front; he talks about love, but there can be love only in peacetime. Why did I decide that he was talking about love? He only mentioned his army certificate…

I also want to tell about Tashkent…Tashkent was my war. We lived in the dormitory of the factory where mama worked. It was in the center of the city, in the former club. Family people lived in the vestibule and the auditorium, and the “bachelors” lived on the stage—they were called “bachelors,” but in fact they were workers whose families had been evacuated elsewhere. Mama and I were placed in a corner of the auditorium.

We were given coupons for thirty pounds of potatoes. Mama worked in the factory from morning till night, and I had to go and get these potatoes. I spent half a day waiting in a line, and then dragged the sack on the ground for four or five blocks, because I couldn’t lift it. Children weren’t allowed on public transportation, because there was flu going around and they had announced a quarantine. Just then…No matter how I begged, they wouldn’t allow me on a bus. When I only had to cross the street to get to our dormitory, I ran out of strength, fell on the sack, and burst into sobs. Some strangers helped me: they brought me and the potatoes to the dormitory. I can still feel that weight. Each of those blocks…I couldn’t abandon those potatoes, they were our salvation. I’d have died before abandoning them. Mama used to come back from work hungry, blue.

We were starving, and mama became as skinny as I was. The thought that I had to help somehow never left me. Once we had nothing to eat at all, and I decided to sell our only flannel blanket and buy some bread with the money. Children weren’t allowed to sell things, and I was taken to the children’s room at the police station. I sat there until they informed mama at the factory. When her shift was over, mama came to get me, but meanwhile I cried my eyes out from shame and from thinking that mama was hungry and there wasn’t a crust of bread at home. Mama had bronchial asthma; during the night she coughed terribly and couldn’t breathe. She had to swallow at least a little something to feel better. I always hid a bit of bread for her under the pillow. I would already be asleep, but even so I would remember that I had bread under the pillow, and I wanted terribly to eat it.

In secret from mama I went to get a job at the factory. I was such a little thing, a real starveling, and they didn’t want to take me. I stood there and cried. Somebody took pity on me. They sent me to the accounting office to fill out work assignments and calculate salaries. I worked on a special machine, which was a prototype of the present-day calculator. Now it works noiselessly, but then it was like a tractor, and it worked with a lamp on. For twelve hours a day my head was like in the hot sun, and toward the end of the day I was deaf from the noise.

Something terrible happened to me: instead of 280 rubles salary, I calculated 80 for a worker who had six children. Nobody noticed my mistake till payday. I heard someone run down the corridor shouting “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her! How am I going to feed my children?”

“Hide,” they said to me. “It must be you he’s after.”

The door opened, I pressed myself to the machine, there was nowhere to hide. A big man ran in with something heavy in his hands.

“Where is she?”

They pointed at me: “There she is…”

He even leaned against the wall.

“Pah! There’s nobody to kill, my own are like that.” And he turned and walked away.

I just collapsed by the machine and burst into tears…

Mama worked at the technical control section of the same factory. The factory produced missiles for the “katiushas,” in two sizes—thirty-five and seventeen pounds. The body of the missile was checked for its solidity under pressure. The missile was lifted, fixed to a socket, and submitted to the necessary pounds of pressure. If it passed the test, the missile was removed and put in a box. If it didn’t, the thread was stripped, the missile took off with a whine and flew up to the ceiling, and then fell who knows where. There was this whining and the fear when the missiles flew off…Everybody hid under the machinery…

Mama shuddered and shouted during the night. I’d put my arms around her, and she would quiet down.

Nineteen forty-three was coming to an end…Our army was advancing. I realized that I had to study. I went to the director of the factory. He had a high desk in his office, and I couldn’t be seen from behind it. I began a prepared speech: “I want to quit my factory job. I have to study.”

The director became angry: “We don’t allow anyone to quit. It’s wartime.”

“I make mistakes in orders, because I’m uneducated. I miscalculated a man’s salary recently.”

“You’ll learn. I don’t have enough people.”

“But after the war educated people will be needed, not ignoramuses.”

“Ah, you pipsqueak.” The director got up from his desk. “So you know everything!”

At school I went to the sixth grade. During the lessons of literature and history the teachers talked to us, and we sat and knitted socks, mittens, tobacco pouches for the army. We knitted and memorized poetry. Recited Pushkin in chorus.

We were waiting for the war to end. It was such a cherished dream that mama and I were even afraid to talk about it. Mama was at work, and some commissioners passed through asking everybody, “What can you give to the defense fund?” They asked me, too. What did we have? We had nothing except some government bonds that mama had saved. Everybody gave something, how could we not give?! I gave them all the bonds.

I remember that when mama came home from work, she didn’t scold me, she just said, “That was all we had, besides your dolls.”

I parted with my dolls, too…Mama lost our monthly bread coupons, and we were literally perishing. And the saving idea came into my head of trying to trade my two dolls—the big one and the little one—for something. We went to the market with them. An old Uzbeck came up to us: “How much?” We said we had to survive for a month, because we had no coupons. The old Uzbeck gave us a big sack of rice. And we didn’t starve to death. Mama swore, “I’ll buy you two beautiful dolls as soon as we get back home.”

When we got back to Rostov, she couldn’t buy me any dolls, we were needy again. She bought them for me the day I graduated from the institute. Two dolls—a big one and a little one…

* In the Caucasus, an aul is a fortified village, usually built against a cliffside or a steep slope.