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

“WERE WE REALLY CHILDREN? WE WERE MEN AND WOMEN…”

Victor Leshchinsky SIX YEARS OLD. NOW DIRECTOR OF AN ENERGY TECHNICAL SCHOOL.

I went to visit my aunt. She invited me for the summer…

We lived in Bykhovo, and my aunt in the village of Kommuna, near Bykhovo. In the center of the village there was a long house, for about twenty families—a communal house. That’s all I’ve managed to remember.

They said “War.” I had to go back to my parents. My aunt didn’t let me go.

“When the war ends, you can go.”

“And will it end soon?”

“Of course.”

After some time, my parents came on foot: “The Germans are in Bykhovo. People are fleeing to the villages.” We stayed at my aunt’s.

In the winter partisans came to the house…I asked for a rifle. They were my mother’s nephews, my cousins. They laughed and let me hold one. It was heavy.

The house always smelled of leather. And warm glue. My father made boots for the partisans. I asked him to make boots for me. He told me, “Wait, I have a lot of work.” And, I remember, I showed him that I needed small boots, I had a small foot. He promised…

The last memory I have of my father is of how they led him down the street to a big truck…And they hit him on the head with a stick…

…The war ended, we had no father, and no home. I was eleven, I was the oldest in the family. The other two, my brother and sister, were little. My mother took out a loan. We bought an old house. The roof was in such condition that, if it rained, there was nowhere to hide, it leaked everywhere. The water poured through. At the age of eleven, I repaired the windows myself, covered the roof with straw. I built a shed…

How?

The first log I rolled in and placed by myself; with the second one my mother helped. We weren’t strong enough to lift them any higher. Here’s what I did: I would trim the log on the ground, make a notch, and wait until the women set off for work in the fields. In the morning, they would all grab it together and lift it, I would fit it a bit and set it down in the notch. By evening, I would have trimmed another one. They came back from work in the evening, and lifted…And so the little wall grew…

There were seventy households in the village, but only two men came back from the front. One on crutches. “Baby! My dear baby!” my mother lamented over me. In the evening I fell asleep wherever I sat down.

Were we really children? By the age of ten or eleven, we were men and women…