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

“THESE TWO BOYS BECAME LIGHT AS SPARROWS…”

Raya Ilyinkovskaya FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. NOW A TEACHER OF LOGIC.

I’ll never forget the smell of the lindens in our hometown, Yelsk.

During the war everything that had been before the war seemed the most beautiful in the world. That’s how it stayed with me forever. To this day.

We were evacuated from Yelsk—mama, myself, and my younger brother. We stayed in the village of Gribanovka, near Voronezh, hoping to wait there for the war to end, but a few days after our arrival the Germans approached Voronezh. In our tracks.

We got on a freight car. They told us we’d be taken far to the east. Mama comforted us this way: “There’ll be a lot of fruit there.” We rode for a long time, because we spent a long time standing on side tracks. We didn’t know where or for how long we would stay, so we would run out at the stations at great risk in order to get some water. We had a little woodstove burning all the time, and we cooked a bucket of millet on it for everybody in the car. We ate this kasha all the while we rode.

The train stopped at the Kurgan-Tyube station. Near Andijan…I was struck by the unfamiliar nature and struck so strongly that for a time I even forgot about the war. Everything was blooming, ablaze, there was so much sun. I became cheerful again. All the former things came back to me.

We were brought to the Kyzyl Yul kolkhoz. So much time has passed, but I remember all the names. I’m even surprised that I haven’t forgotten them. I remember learning them at the time, repeating the unfamiliar words. We began to live in a school athletic hall, eight families together. Local people brought us some blankets and pillows. Uzbek blankets are made from multicolored pieces; the pillows are filled with cotton. I quickly learned to gather armfuls of dry cotton stems—we used them to heat the stove.

We didn’t understand at once that the war was here, too. They gave us a little flour, but it wasn’t enough, and it didn’t last long. We began to starve. The Uzbeks were also starving. Together with the Uzbek boys, we ran after the carts, and were happy if something fell off. The greatest joy for us was oil cake, oil cake from linseed, the one from the cottonseed was very hard, yellow, like from peas.

My brother Vadik was six years old. Mama and I left him at home alone and went to work in the kolkhoz. We hilled up rice, gathered cotton. My hands hurt from being unaccustomed, I couldn’t fall asleep at night. One evening mama and I came home, and Vadik came running to meet us with three sparrows hanging on a string from his shoulder, and a sling in his hand. He had already washed his “hunting” trophies in the river and waited for mama to start cooking a soup. He was so proud! Mama and I ate the soup and praised it, but the sparrows were so skinny there wasn’t a single gleam of fat in the pot. Only my brother’s happy eyes gleamed over it.

He made friends with an Uzbek boy who once came to us with his grandmother. She looked at the boys, wagged her head, and said something to mama. Mama didn’t understand, but then the foreman stopped by, who knew Russian. He translated for us: “She’s talking with her God, with Allah. And complaining to him that war is the business of men, of warriors. Why should children suffer? How did Allah allow that these two boys became light as the sparrows they shoot with a sling?” The grandmother poured a handful of dry golden apricots on the table—hard and sweet as sugar! They could be sucked, nibbled in small bites, and then the stone could be cracked and the crunchy kernel eaten.

Her grandson looked at these apricots, and his eyes were also hungry. They were burning! Mama became confused, but the grandmother patted her hand and hugged her grandson. “He always has a bowl of katek, because he lives at home with his grandmother,” the foreman translated. Katek is sour goat’s milk. All the while we were in evacuation, my brother and I thought it was the tastiest thing in the world.

The grandmother and the boy left, and the three of us went on sitting at the table. No one ventured to be the first to reach out and take a dry golden apricot…