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

“WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO BURY…BUT NOW WE SOMEHOW RECALLED IT…”

Mikhail Shinkarev THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. NOW A RAILROAD WORKER.

Our neighbors had a deaf daughter…

Everybody shouted “War! War!” but she would come running to my sister with her doll, sing little songs. Other children no longer even laughed. “Good for her,” I thought, “she hasn’t heard anything about the war.”

My friends and I wrapped our red badges and red neckerchiefs in oilcloth and buried them among the bushes near the river. In the sand. Some conspirators! We came to that place every day.

Everybody was afraid of the Germans, even the children and the dogs. Mama used to put eggs out on the bench near the house. Outside. So as not to have them come into the cottage and ask, “Jude?” My sister and I had curly black hair…

We were swimming in the river…And we saw something black rising from the bottom. Just at that moment! We thought it was a sunken log, but this something was being pushed by the current to the bank, and we made out arms, a head…We saw that it was a man. I think no one got scared. No one cried out. We remembered the adults saying that our machine-gun operator had been killed at that spot and fell into the water with his “coffee grinder.”

Just a few months of war…And we already didn’t have any fear at the sight of death. We pulled the man out of the water and buried him. Someone fetched a shovel, and we dug a hole. Put him in and covered him with soil. Stood around silently. One girl even made the sign of the cross. Her grandmother used to help in the church, and the girl knew some prayers.

We did everything by ourselves. Without adults. Before the war we didn’t even know how to bury. But now we somehow recalled it.

For two days we kept diving for the machine gun…