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

“IN THE DIRECTION OF THE SUNRISE…”

Valya Kozhanovskaya TEN YEARS OLD. NOW A WORKER.

A child’s memory…Only fear or something good stays in a child’s memory…

Our house stood near an army hospital. The hospital was bombed, and I saw wounded men on crutches fall out of the windows. Our house caught fire…Mama ran into the flames: “I’ll get some clothes for the children.”

Our house burned…Our mama burned…We rushed after her, but people caught us and held us back: “You won’t save your mama, children.” We ran where everybody else did. There were dead people lying around…The wounded moaned, asked for help. How could we help them? I was eleven, my sister nine. We lost each other…

We met again in the orphanage of Ostroshitsk village, near Minsk. Before the war our father took us there to a Pioneer camp. A beautiful place. The Germans turned the Pioneer camp into an orphanage. Everything was both familiar and alien. For several days there was nothing but weeping, nothing but tears: we were left without parents, our house was burned down. The house mistresses were the same, but the rules were German. A year later…I think it was a year later…they began selecting children to be taken to Germany. They selected not by age but by size, and unfortunately I was tall, like our father, while my sister was short, like our mother. The trucks came. They were surrounded by Germans with submachine guns. I was driven onto a truck. My sister cried, they pushed her, fired under her feet to keep her from coming to me. So we were separated…

The train car. Jam-packed…A whole car full of children, none older than thirteen. Our first stop was Warsaw. No one gave us anything to eat or drink, only some little old man came with his pockets full of folded pieces of paper on which the prayer “Our Father” was written in Russian. He gave each of us one of these papers.

After Warsaw we rode for two more days. Were brought to what seemed to be a sanitation center. Were all stripped naked, boys and girls together. I wept from shame. The girls wanted to be on one side, the boys on the other, but we were all herded together and they aimed a hose at us…With cold water…With some strange smell I never met with afterward, and I don’t know what disinfectant was in it. They paid no attention whether it was eyes, or mouth, or ears—they performed their sanitary treatment. Then they handed us striped trousers and tops like pajamas, wooden sandals for our feet, and on our chests were pinned metal labels saying Ost (“East”).

They drove us outside and lined us up as for a roll call. I thought they would take us somewhere, to some camp, but someone whispered behind me, “We’re going to be sold.” An old German man came over, selected three girls and myself, paid the money and pointed to a wagon with some straw in it: “Get in!”

We were brought to some estate…There was a big, tall house with an old park around it. We were housed in a shed. Half of it was occupied by twelve dogs, the other half by us. At once there was work for us in the field—to gather stones, so that plows and seeders didn’t break. The stones had to be stacked neatly in one place. In our wooden sandals, our feet got all covered with blisters. We were fed with bad bread and skim milk.

One girl couldn’t bear it and died. They drove her body to the forest on a horse drawn cart and put her in the ground just like that. The wooden sandals and striped pajamas were brought back to the estate. I remember her name was Olya.

There was a very old German man there who fed the dogs. He spoke very poor Russian, but he tried to encourage us saying, “Kinder, Hitler kaput. Russky kom.” He would go to the chicken coop, steal some eggs in his hat, and hide them in his toolbox—he also did carpentry on the estate. He’d take an ax and pretend to go and do some work, but instead he’d put his toolbox next to us and look around, gesturing to us to make us eat quickly. We sucked the eggs and buried the shells.

Two Serbian boys who also worked on this estate talked to us. They were slaves like us. They told us their secret…They confessed that they had a plan. “We must escape, otherwise we’ll all die, like Olya. They’ll put us in the ground in the forest and bring back the wooden clogs and pajamas.” We were afraid, but they persuaded us. It was like this…Behind the estate was a swamp. We snuck off there in the morning unnoticed and then ran for it. We ran in the direction of the sunrise, to the east.

In the evening we all collapsed in the bushes and fell asleep. We were exhausted. In the morning we opened our eyes—it was quiet, only toads croaking. We got up, washed with dew, and started on our way. We walked a little and saw a high road ahead of us and on the other side a dense and beautiful forest. Our salvation. One boy crawled over, looked at the road, and called to us, “Let’s run!” We ran out onto the road, and a German truck with armed soldiers drove out of the forest to meet us. They surrounded us and started beating and trampling the boys.

They threw them dead into the truck, and put me and another girl next to them. They said that the boys were lucky, and you’ll be luckier still, Russian swine. They knew by the labels that we were from the east. We were so frightened that we didn’t even cry.

They brought us to a concentration camp. There we saw children sitting on straw with lice crawling on them. The straw was brought from the fields that began right behind the barbed wire with live electric current.

Every morning an iron bar clanged, in came a laughing officer and a beautiful woman, who said to us in Russian, “Whoever wants kasha quickly line up by twos. We’ll take you to eat…”

The children stumbled, shoved, everybody wanted kasha.

“We only need twenty-five,” the woman said as she counted. “Don’t quarrel, the rest of you can wait till tomorrow.”

At first I believed her, and ran and shoved along with the little children, but then I became afraid: “Why did those who were led away to eat kasha not come back?” I started sitting right by the steel door at the entrance, and even when there were only a few of us left, the woman still didn’t notice me. She always stood and counted with her back to me. I can’t tell how long it went on. I think…I lost memory then…

I never saw a single bird or even a beetle in the concentration camp. I dreamed of seeing at least a worm. But they didn’t live there…

One day we heard noise, shouts, shooting. The iron bar clanged—and our soldiers burst in shouting, “Dear children!” They took us on their shoulders, in their arms, several children at a time, because we weighed nothing by then. They kissed us, embraced us, and wept. They took us outside…

We saw the black chimney of the crematorium…

They fed us, treated us medically for several weeks. They asked me, “How old are you?”

I replied, “Thirteen…”

“And we thought, maybe eight.”

When we became stronger, they took us in the direction of the sunrise.

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