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

“I WAS EMBARRASSED TO BE WEARING GIRLS’ SHOES…”

Marlen Robeichikov

ELEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW SECTION HEAD IN A TOWN COUNCIL.

I saw the war from a tree…

The grown-ups forbade us to do it, but we climbed the trees anyway and watched the dogfights from tall firs. We wept when our planes burned, but there was no fear, as if we were watching a movie. On the second or third day there was a general roll call, and the director announced that our Pioneer camp was being evacuated. We already knew that Minsk was being bombarded and burning, and that we wouldn’t be taken home, but somewhere farther away from the war.

I want to tell you how we prepared for the road…We were told to take suitcases and put in only the most necessary things: T-shirts, shirts, socks, handkerchiefs. We packed them, and each of us put his Pioneer neckerchief on top. In our childish imagination we pictured meeting the Germans, who would open our suitcases and there would be our Pioneer neckerchief. This would be our revenge for everything…

Our train was speedier than the war. It got ahead of it…When we stopped at stations, people there didn’t know about the war, hadn’t seen it. And we children told the adults about the war: how Minsk was burning, how our camp was bombed, how our planes burned. But the farther we moved away from home, the more we expected our parents to come and take us, and we didn’t suspect that many of us no longer had any parents. This thought couldn’t even occur to us. We talked about the war, but we were still children of peace.

From the train we were transferred to a steamboat, The Paris Commune, and taken down the Volga. By then we had been traveling for two weeks, and we had not undressed even once. On the steamboat I took off my sneakers for the first time. They allowed us to. I had rubber-soled lace-up sneakers. When I took them off, they really stank! I tried to wash them and then threw them out. I came to Khvalynsk barefoot.

So many of us had arrived that two Belorussian orphanages were created, one for schoolchildren, the other for preschoolers. How do I know about it? Because those who had to be separated from a brother or a sister cried very much, especially the younger ones, who were afraid to lose the older ones. When we were left without our parents in the Pioneer camp, it was interesting, like a game, but now we all became frightened. We had been raised at home, were used to having parents, parental care. My mother always woke me up in the morning and kissed me goodnight. Near us was an orphanage for “real” orphans. We were very different from them. They were used to living without parents, but we had to get used to it.

I remember the food in 1943: a spoonful of scalded milk and a piece of bread a day, boiled beets, in summer a soup made from watermelon rinds. We saw a film, March–April. There was a story in it about our scouts cooking kasha from birch bark. Our girls also learned to cook birch-bark soup.

In the fall we stocked up on firewood ourselves. Each one had a norm—three cubic feet. The forest was in the hills. We had to fell the trees, trim them, then cut them into three-foot lengths and stack them up. The norm was supposed to be for an adult, but we also had girls working with us. We boys had a bigger share of the work. At home we never had to use a saw, because we were all city boys, but here we had to saw very thick logs. Split them.

We were hungry day and night, while working and while sleeping. We were always hungry, especially in winter. We used to run over from the orphanage to an army unit, and often were lucky to get a ladle of soup there. But there were many of us, they couldn’t feed us all. If you came first, you got something; if you were late, you got nothing. I had a friend, Mishka Cherkasov. We were sitting once and he said, “I’d go fifteen miles now if I knew I’d get a bowl of kasha.” It was minus twenty outside, but he got dressed and ran to the army unit. He asked the soldiers for something to eat. They said they had a little soup—go, boy, fetch your tin. He went out and saw children from the other orphanage coming, so if he ran to get a tin, there’d be nothing left.

He went back and said to the soldiers, “Pour it here!” And he took his hat off and held it out to them instead of a tin. He looked so resolute that the soldier just poured a whole ladle for him. With a heroic air, Misha went past the orphans who were left with nothing and came running back to his orphanage. His ears were frostbitten, but he brought us the soup, which was no longer soup, but a hatful of ice. We turned this ice out onto a plate, and while the girls rubbed Misha’s ears, we ate it as it was, without waiting for it to thaw. There was so much joy on his face over bringing it for everybody that he didn’t even start eating first!

The tastiest food for us was oil cake. We distinguished it by varieties according to taste, and one variety was called “halva.” We conducted “Operation Cake.” Several of us got onto a moving truck and threw down chunks of cake, and the others picked them up. We came back to the orphanage covered with bruises, but we had eaten. And of course there were the summer and autumn markets! That was a good time for us. We’d try a bit of everything: a piece of apple from one market woman, a piece of tomato from another. To steal something at a market wasn’t regarded as shameful, on the contrary—it was heroism! We didn’t care what we pilfered, so long as it was something to eat. What it was didn’t matter.

There was a boy studying in our class who was the son of the director of an oil factory. We were children, we sat in class and played “naval battle.” And he sat behind us eating bread with vegetable oil. The smell filled the whole classroom.

We exchanged whispers, shook our fists at him, meaning just wait till the class is over…

We look—our teacher isn’t there, she’s lying on the floor. She was hungry and also smelled this oil. And fainted. Our girls took her home; she lived with her mother. In the evening we decided that beginning that day each of us would set aside a small piece of bread to give to our teacher. She would never have taken it from us, so we secretly gave it to her mother and asked her not to tell it was from us.

We had our orchard and our kitchen garden. In the orchard we had apple trees, and in the kitchen garden—cabbages, carrots, beets. We guarded them, several of us taking turns on duty. In changing watch, we counted everything: each head of cabbage, each carrot. During the night I thought, “Ah, if only one more carrot would grow overnight! It wouldn’t be on the list and could be eaten.” If it had been put on the list, God forbid it should disappear. For shame!

We sat at the kitchen garden with food all around us, and held ourselves back. We were terribly hungry. Once I was on duty with an older boy. An idea came to his head.

“Look, there’s a cow grazing…”

“Well, what of it?”

“Fool! Don’t you know there’s a decree that if a private cow grazes on government land, it’s either taken away or the owner gets fined?”

“But it’s grazing in a meadow.”

“It’s not tied to it.”

And he explains his plan to me: we take the cow, bring it to our orchard, and tie it up there. Then we go looking for the owner. And so we did. We brought the cow to our orphanage orchard and tied it up. My partner ran to the village, found the woman who owned the cow: thus and so, your cow is in the government-owned orchard, and you know the decree…

I don’t think…Now I doubt that the woman believed us and was frightened. She actually felt sorry for us, seeing we were hungry. We made this arrangement: we look after her cow, and she gives us several potatoes for it.

One of our girls fell ill and needed a blood transfusion. There wasn’t a single child in the whole orphanage who could give blood. Do you understand?

Our dream? To get to the front. Several boys, the most reckless ones, got together and decided to escape. As luck would have it, an army choirmaster came to the orphanage, Captain Gordeev. He chose four musical boys, including me. That was how I wound up at the front.

The whole orphanage came to see us off. I had nothing to wear, and one girl gave me her sailor suit, and another had two pairs of shoes and gave one to me.

Thus equipped I went to the front. Most of all I was embarrassed to be wearing girls’ shoes…