“I RAN AWAY TO THE FRONT FOLLOWING MY SISTER, FIRST SERGEANT VERA REDKINA…”
Nikolai Redkin ELEVEN YEARS OLD. NOW A MECHANIC.
The house became quiet…Our family grew smaller.
My older brothers were called up to the army at once. My sister Vera kept going to the recruiting office and in March 1942 also left for the front. Only my younger sister and I stayed at home.
In the evacuation we were taken by our relations in the Orel region. I worked in the kolkhoz. There weren’t any men left; all the men’s tasks lay on the shoulders of those like me. Adolescents. We replaced the men—boys from nine to fourteen. I went to plow for the first time. The women stood next to their horses and urged them on. I stood there waiting for someone to come and teach me, and they went down one furrow and turned to the second one. I was alone. All right, so I drove by myself, off the furrow or along it. In the morning I was in the field, and at night tending the horses with the boys in the pasture. One day like that, two…On the third day I plowed and plowed and collapsed.
In 1944 my sister Vera came to us for one day on her way from the hospital after being wounded. In the morning she was taken to the train station in a wagon, and I ran after her on foot. At the station a soldier refused to let me on the train: “Who are you with, boy?”
I wasn’t at a loss: “I’m with First Sergeant Vera Redkina.”
That’s how I made it to the war…