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

“THE WIDE WORLD IS WONDROUS…”

Ludmila Nikanorova TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.

I wish I could remember…Did we talk about war before the war?

Songs played on the radio: “If There Is War Tomorrow” and “Our Armor Is Strong and Our Tanks Are Swift.” Children could sleep peacefully…

Our family lived in Voronezh. The city of my childhood…In the schools, many teachers were part of the old intelligentsia. A high level of musical culture. The children’s choir of our school, where I sang, was very popular in the city. I believe everyone loved the theater.

Our house was inhabited by military families. A four-story house with rooms along the corridors; in summer, a sweet-scented acacia bloomed in the yard. We played a lot in the little park in front of the house. There were hiding places there. I was very lucky with my parents. My father was a career soldier. All through my childhood, I had seen military uniforms. My mother had a gentle character, golden hands. I was their only daughter. As expected in such cases, I was persistent, capricious, and shy at the same time. I took lessons of music and ballet dancing at the House of the Red Army. On Sundays—the only day when he wasn’t busy—papa loved walking around the city with us. My mother and I had to walk to his left, as my father kept greeting oncoming officers and raising his right hand to his visor.

He also loved to read poetry with me, especially Pushkin:

Study, my son: for learning shortens

The lessons of our swift-passing life.^*1

That June day…In my pretty dress I was going with a friend to the garden of the House of the Red Army to see a play that was supposed to start at noon. We saw everybody listening to a loudspeaker fastened to a pole. Bewildered faces.

“You hear—it’s war!” my friend said.

I rushed home. Flung the door open. The apartment was quiet, mama wasn’t there, my father was shaving with concentration in front of the mirror, one cheek covered with lather.

“Papa, it’s war!”

Papa turned to me and went on shaving. I saw an unfamiliar expression in his eyes. I remember that the speaker on the wall was switched off. That’s all he could do to postpone for us the moment of the terrible news.

Life changed instantly…I don’t remember my father being at home at all during those days. Everyday life became different. We held general meetings of the tenants: how to extinguish a fire if the house started burning, how to cover the windows for the night—the city had to be without lights. Provisions disappeared from the counters, ration cards appeared.

And then came that last evening. It wasn’t at all like those I see now in the movies: tears, embraces, jumping onto moving trains. We didn’t have that. Everything was as if my father was leaving on maneuvers. My mother folded his belongings, his collar, his tabs were already sewn on, she checked his buttons, socks, handkerchiefs. My father rolled up his greatcoat—I think I was holding it.

The three of us went out to the corridor. It was late. At that hour all the doors were locked except the front one—to go out to the courtyard, we had to go up from the first floor to the second, pass through a long corridor and go back down. It was dark outside, and our always thoughtful father said,“There’s no need to accompany me any farther.”

He embraced us. “Everything will be fine. Don’t worry, girls.”

And he left.

He sent us several letters from the front: “We’ll soon be victorious, then we’ll live differently. How is our Ludmilochka behaving?” I can’t remember what I did till the first of September. Of course, I upset my mother by staying at my girlfriends’ for a long time without permission. Air-raid warnings became, one might say, a usual thing. Everyone quickly got used to them: we didn’t go down into the shelter, but stayed at home. Many times I was caught under bombings in the streets downtown. I would just run into a store or into an entryway.

There were many rumors, but they didn’t stay in my memory. In my child’s mind…

My mother was on duty at the hospital. Every day trains arrived with wounded soldiers.

Surprisingly, goods appeared again on the counters, and people bought them. For several days, my mother and I wondered: shouldn’t we buy a new piano? We decided not to for the time being, but to wait for my father. It’s a major purchase, after all.

Incredible as it seems, we went back to school, as usual, on the first of September. Not a word from my father all through August. We had faith, and waited, though we already knew such words as encirclement and partisans. At the end of the month, they announced: Be prepared for evacuation at any moment. We were informed of the exact day, I think, the day before. The mothers had a hard time. Anyway, we were convinced that we would leave for a couple of months, sit it out somewhere in Saratov, and come back. One bundle for the bed things, one bundle for the dishes, and a suitcase with our clothes. We were ready.

I remember this picture on the way: our train leaves without a signal, people grab their pans, there’s no time to put out the cook fires. We get on the train and go, and there is a chain of fires along the embankment. The train arrived in Alma-Ata, then went back to Chimkent. And so several times—there and back. Finally, with sluggish oxen harnessed to carts, we rode into the aul. I saw a kibitka for the first time…^*2 Like in an eastern fairy tale…Everything was so colorful, unusual. I found it interesting.

But when I noticed my mother’s first gray hair, I was dumbstruck. I began to grow up very quickly. Mama’s hands! I don’t know what they couldn’t do. How did mama have the presence of mind at the last moment to grab the sewing machine (without the case, putting it with the pillows) and toss it into the car going to the train? That sewing machine was our breadwinner. Mama managed to sew at night. Did she ever sleep?

On the horizon were the snowy spurs of the Tien Shan mountains. In spring the steppe is red with tulips, and in the fall there are grape clusters, melons. But how could we buy them? And the war! We were looking for our dear papa! Over three years, we wrote three dozen requests: to army headquarters, field post office 116, to the defense commissariat, to the Head Office of Red Army Personnel in Buguruslan…They all sent the same answer: “Not listed among the wounded or the dead.” Since he wasn’t listed, we waited and waited, still hoping.

Good news began to come over the radio. Our troops were liberating one city after another. Now Orsha was liberated. That’s my mother’s birthplace. My grandmother was there, and my mother’s sisters. Voronezh was liberated, too…But Voronezh without papa was foreign to us. We wrote to my grandmother and went to her place. We traveled all the way on the rear platform, it was impossible to get inside. Five days on the platform…

My favorite place in my grandmother’s house was by the warm Russian stove. At school we sat with our coats on. Many girls had coats sewn out of army greatcoats, and the boys simply wore the greatcoats. Early in the morning, I heard from the loudspeaker: victory! I was fifteen years old…I put on my father’s present from before the war—a worsted cardigan—and my brand-new high-heeled shoes, and went to school. We kept these things, we had bought them in bigger sizes, so there was room to grow, and now I had grown.

In the evening we sat at the table, and on the table was a photo of my papa and a battered volume of Pushkin…It was his wedding gift to my mother. I remember how papa and I read poetry together, and when there was something he especially liked, he said, “The wide world is wondrous…” He always repeated those words in good moments.

I can’t imagine such a beloved papa not alive…

*1 The lines are from the tenth scene of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (1825), spoken by Boris Godunov to his son Feodor.

*2 In the Russian far east, a kibitka is a round tent of lattice work covered with felt, sometimes mounted on wheels. In European Russia, a kibitka is a large covered wagon.