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

“MY FIRST AND LAST CIGARETTE…”

Gena Yushkevich TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW A JOURNALIST.

The morning of the first day of the war…

Sun. And unusual quiet. Incomprehensible silence.

Our neighbor, an officer’s wife, came out to the yard all in tears. She whispered something to mama, but gestured that they had to be quiet. Everybody was afraid to say aloud what had happened, even when they already knew, since some had been informed. But they were afraid that they’d be called provocateurs. Panic-mongers. That was more frightening than the war. They were afraid…This is what I think now…And of course no one believed it. What?! Our army is at the border, our leaders are in the Kremlin! The country is securely protected, it’s invulnerable to the enemy! That was what I thought then…I was a young Pioneer.^*1

We listened to the radio. Waited for Stalin’s speech. We needed his voice. But Stalin was silent. Then Molotov^*2 gave a speech. Everybody listened. Molotov said, “It’s war.” Still no one believed it yet. Where is Stalin?

Planes flew over the city…Dozens of unfamiliar planes. With crosses. They covered the sky, covered the sun. Terrible! Bombs rained down…There were sounds of ceaseless explosions. Rattling. Everything was happening as in a dream. Not in reality. I was no longer little—I remember my feelings. My fear, which spread all over my body. All over my words. My thoughts. We ran out of the house, ran somewhere down the streets…It seemed as if the city was no longer there, only ruins. Smoke. Fire. Somebody said we must run to the cemetery, because they wouldn’t bomb a cemetery. Why bomb the dead? In our neighborhood there was a big Jewish cemetery with old trees. And everybody rushed there, thousands of people gathered there. They embraced the monuments, hid behind the tombstones.

Mama and I sat there till nightfall. Nobody around uttered the word war. I heard another word: provocation. Everybody repeated it. People said that our troops would start advancing any moment. On Stalin’s orders. People believed it.

But the sirens on the chimneys in the outskirts of Minsk wailed all night…

The first dead…

The first dead I saw was a horse…Then a dead woman…That surprised me. My idea was that only men were killed in war.

I woke up in the morning…I wanted to leap out of bed, then I remembered—it’s war, and I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to believe it.

There was no more shooting in the streets. Suddenly it was quiet. For several days it was quiet. And then all of a sudden there was movement…There goes, for instance, a white man, white all over, from his shoes to his hair. Covered with flour. He carries a white sack. Another is running…Tin cans fall out of his pockets, he has tin cans in his hands. Candy…Packs of tobacco…Someone carries a hat filled with sugar…A pot of sugar…Indescribable! One carries a roll of fabric, another goes all wrapped in blue calico. Red calico…It’s funny, but nobody laughs. Food warehouses had been bombed. A big store not far from our house…People rushed to take whatever was left there. At a sugar factory several men drowned in vats of sugar syrup. Terrible! The whole city cracked sunflower seeds. They found a stock of sunflower seeds somewhere. Before my eyes a woman came running to a store…She had nothing with her: no sack or net bag—so she took off her slip. Her leggings. She stuffed them with buckwheat. Carried it off. All that silently for some reason. Nobody talked.

When I called my mother, there was only mustard left, yellow jars of mustard. “Don’t take anything,” mama begged. Later she told me she was ashamed, because all her life she had taught me differently. Even when we were starving and remembering these days, we still didn’t regret anything. That’s how my mother was.

In town…German soldiers calmly strolled in our streets. They filmed everything. Laughed. Before the war we had a favorite game—we made drawings of Germans. We drew them with big teeth. Fangs. And now they’re walking around…Young, handsome…With handsome grenades tucked into the tops of their sturdy boots. Play harmonicas. Even joke with our pretty girls.

An elderly German was dragging a box. The box was heavy. He beckoned to me and gestured: help me. The box had two handles, we took it by these handles. When we had brought it where we were told to, the German patted me on the shoulder and took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Meaning here’s your pay.

I came home. I couldn’t wait, I sat in the kitchen and lit up a cigarette. I didn’t hear the door open and mama come in.

“Smoking, eh?”

“Mm-hmm…”

“What are these cigarettes?”

“German.”

“So you smoke, and you smoke the enemy’s cigarettes. That is treason against the Motherland.”

This was my first and last cigarette.

One evening mama sat down next to me.

“I find it unbearable that they’re here. Do you understand me?”

She wanted to fight. Since the first days. We decided to look for the underground fighters—we didn’t doubt that they existed. We didn’t doubt for a moment.

“I love you more than anybody in the world,” mama said. “But you understand me? Will you forgive me if anything happens to us?”

I fell in love with my mama, I now obeyed her unconditionally. And it remained so for my whole life.

*1 The All-Union Pioneer Organization, for Soviet children from ten to fifteen years old, was founded in 1922. It was similar to Scout organizations in the West.

*2 Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), an Old Bolshevik and close collaborator with Stalin, served in several high offices of the Soviet Union. From 1939 to 1949 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs. On August 23, 1939, he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of nonaggression between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which was broken by Germany in June 1941.