Wrong Country: War by the Eyes of a Child

The Great Patriotic War was the name of WWII in our country, the former USSR. If you are young and innocent, I decipher this now—out—of—use—an acronym for the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics. It began in 1917 and finished in 1991.

In the summer of 1941, when the infamous Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin lost his head. He believed nobody but Hitler, and they signed a Pact of non-aggression in 1940. When a German-Russian spy, Sorge, working for Stalin, called him from Tokyo about a concrete day of the war-- June 21, 1941, Stalin sent him in obscene language to his mother, not trusting him or anybody else of his spies, who notified him about the day of the war. Besides, Stalin, in a state of madness, folly, or fear, destroyed all military staff with Marshal Tukhachevsky as a head of it. At the end of November 1938, the Red Army had been cleansed of more than 40,000 officers and was not ready for war.

My first remembrance of myself happened during the period of war, somewhere in 1943. Now, I see myself as a little girl in flashbacks:

It is a harshly cold winter morning. A small girl, three years old, in a heavy winter coat, wrapped up in shawls, her feet in huge valenki (felt boots), is slowly walking to the truck, loaded with some belongings. Behind her, an old woman follows with the bundles in her hands. Around them, everything is in the deep white snow; the whiteness of the snow seems boundless. Only a narrow, trampled path leads to the truck. Snow squeaks under the feet.

My babushka (grandmother) and I are moving somewhere. I hold a doll in my hands. Suddenly, an older girl appears from nowhere and snatches a doll from me. I am standing with only one doll's arm in my hand. I never owned any real dolls after that one perished, only those made from old rugs by my babushka. God bless her memory. May I say that, not believing in God?

Village after village, my babushka and I are among the endless crowds of other women with children and elderly escaping from the German Army. Sometimes, we stay safe for a while in one of those villages after the German Army flees from the Red Army’s pursuit.

I am in a huge wooden bed, playing with children. I feel the tender, soft touch of an eiderdown. Some German of high rank, skedaddling from the Russians, left everything behind, even this strange royal bed with the soft feather bedcover. That unknown down blanket was my first introduction to luxury.

We don't have enough potatoes, so babushka dries the peelings and later fries them in soy oil. (Somewhat, there is a lot of soy oil, but no other food. From that time, I wouldn't say I love soy.) We don't have any bread at all. Instead, we eat zhmykh-pressed sunflower shells. My grandma prepares soup from the nettle. In spring, we eat the sweet tops of the young branches of the fir and pine trees. In summer, we are luckier: plenty of mushrooms and berries around. And we can wash ourselves in the river or lake! In winter, lice eat us constantly in our hair, linen, and elastic pants. We are itching ourselves to the blood.

Again and again, we go somewhere, slowly and tiredly; sometimes, somebody gives us a place on the cart with other people, and there are no tracks anymore. And I do not understand what is happening, why we are constantly moving, and where our home is.

For all that, one day, my babushka smiles and tells me that we are going to my mama to the big city by train. Now, I am about five years old and understand that all the poor, ruined villages and the crowds of old people and children along the dirty roads mean -- war. Strange, I do not remember any bombings or killings, only tired wandering, hunger, and lice.

I know almost nothing about my mother. What is still alive in my memory is a train slowly approaching the platform. My grandma and I are looking through the open car window, and she says: Look, look, Lorochka, there is your mama! She points to a young woman, fancily dressed, it seems to me, in a bright light summer dress, a coquettish hat with a wide brim, frilly white socks, and heeled sandals.

No, it’s some auntie, not my mama, I cry. I cannot accept this young, unfamiliar woman as my mama. At first, I call her Aunt Sonia, later Mama Sonia, and one day, finally, I called her Mama. But even when I agree that she is my mother, somewhere in the innermost part of my soul, she remains a stranger to me. Unconsciously, not knowing why, I reject this young woman as my mother.

It is the summer of 1945. The Great Patriotic War is over. We live in the totally ruined city of Voronezh. The German and Hungarian armies destroyed 95 percent of the town on their way to Stalingrad. Our apartment is on the second floor of the spare part of the building. There is electric power but no plumbing or running water. So, every evening, we tote buckets of water up from the down-the-street water pump and carry a slop pail downstairs every morning.

We live together: my mother, whom I call Aunt Sonia, little Boris, introduced to me as my three-year-old -brother, and myself. Babushka had left after four days.

Camp of the Prisoners of War

When the Soviet troops took over Voronezh, they placed Hungarians and Germans in the POW camp on the city's outskirts. The walls encircled the camp. Inside took the rooted two-story dormitories, a bathhouse, a kitchen, a mess room, and a greenhouse. My mother worked in the Camp Documentation Department outside the camp.

I do not know how long my mother worked there before I came on the scene. As she explained to me later, she could choose a POW camp between Moscow and Voronezh but did not wish to run accidentally into my father on Moscow Streets, where he lived.

The families of the staff were allowed to use the Camp’s shower rooms on certain days and at specific times. I liked visiting the enemies' Camp because compared to the destroyed and impoverished city, the layout looked lovely: the freshly painted buildings, the flowers between them, the clean asphalt pathways. The prisoners were working on rebuilding Voronezh. At the time, we thought the defeated enemies inside the zone were much better off than we, the victors. In their greenhouse, they had fresh vegetables. They made fresh bread, but we always went hungry.

Now, when I write this story, I am curious: who was eating the produce of their greenhouse? Most probably, the echelon of Voronezh communists enjoyed the crop prisoners grew.

The military staff building was situated outside the zone but very close to it. From the Camp to the staff building, prisoners walked free; relations between both sides were rather friendly. My little brother occasionally visited the greenhouse. The prisoners loved the kid: they missed their children so much. On the other hand, Boris seemed mentally underdeveloped; I suspected inmates were giving him some smoking herbs, which slowed his mental development. When we discussed my theory years later, he vehemently denied it, attributing it to my imagination. But somehow, the story stuck with me. Looking back, I remember the story of our school's German language teacher, a translator in the Camp. She fell in love with a German officer, and somehow it became known. So, people meeting the poor woman on the streets showered her with obscenities.

Because my grandma didn't stay in Voronezh, we were left alone. It was a time when the kids were running around without any supervision. So many men didn't return from war, and our

mothers were left high and dry, the only providers working very hard. We became street kids for a long time; playing among the ruins, we were the “offspring of the ruins,” in Peter Handke’s words.

Some Flashbacks of that Time:

Telega (Horse-driven cart).

Boris and I are running after the telega. The horse saunters lazily. I want to jump on the cart; we will have a perfect ride if the driver does not scream at us. So, I help my little brother climb up and then try to do the same. But my leg gets caught in the wheel, and I scream from the terrible pain.

Khleb da Kasha – Pischa Nasha (Bread and Kasha are our food).

Before going to work, our mother cooks a pot of millet kasha and leaves this food for the day. We roam the streets and then run to our apartment to eat the kasha. Close to the evening, we have almost finished the whole pot. Seeing how little kasha left for our mother, I became terrified. What would our mother eat when she comes home? Finally, at five years old and being creative, I found the solution: pour a lot of water into the pot. Do not recall my mother's reaction.

Behind the Building.

I am plucking the dandelions behind our building. There is no backyard, only a strip of weeds, then a road, and across that road is my future school, closed for summer. Three boys from our building are approaching me. I know these boys; they are two or three years older. They ask me something. I do not understand at first. Oh, they want to see me naked. I obey them. I take off my little summer dress. It is not enough for them; they ask me to take off my underwear. I do that, too. They look at my petite body and try to lick it. Then they leave. I am perplexed and begin to cry. My dandelions wither on the ground.

Invalids of War

We, the street children, know our streets by heart. On all corners, we see the armless, the legless, the double amputees, whatever is left of the bodies mutilated by the war, on the handmade wooden platforms with bearings instead of wheels. Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor cold, the invalids sit on the ground in any weather. Some of them have medals pinned to their jackets. Their army caps are on the ground in front of them. They beg for money. In the evenings, they are drunk, and they scream or fight. Occasionally, someone sings drunken songs. Being drunk for them is the only way not to feel their misery.

This fixed picture of the helpless, crippled, pitiable invalids of the Great Patriotic War had been seen throughout the whole Soviet Union. They saved their country, but the government ignored them.

Reading recently Gathering Evidence, a memoir of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, I have been struck by the similarity of the tragedy of the invalids from both sides, their- and -ours- cripples: We passed hundreds of severely wounded war victims, many of them totally crippled, unloaded at the railway station like tiresome, badly packaged goods.

As a five-year-old girl, I lived in the same conditions in Voronezh as he, a teenager in Salzburg (the town of Mozart!), in 1945. Some two or three years after the war, Stalin gave a directive to clean up the big cities of all “crippled, badly packaged goods.” They were packaged anew. The Leningrad government drove their invalids to the island of Valaam in the Northern Sea. Moscow loaded their crippled veterans on a ship, gave them enough vodkas, and drowned them in the river, as far away as possible from the capital. I have no idea where Voronezh sent its invalids, but the city became clean. It is hard to believe this story, but I read about it in some books and fear, it is true.

Russian history is shocking. The Russian tsars Ivan the Terrible -16th century, Peter the Great -18th century, and Stalin -20th century, are remembered for their cruelty. Stalin refused to

save his son Yakov when the Germans offered to exchange him, a prisoner of war, for Paulus, their Field Marshal General, whom the Soviets captured in Stalingrad. This fact became a legend; he refused to exchange a “German General for a simple soldier.” Yakov died in the German camp, but at least he was saved from the Soviet Gulag, where our Great Lieder incarcerated all Soviet prisoners returning from Germany, proclaiming them “traitors.”

The Voronezh camp was disbanded in three years, and the lucky prisoners returned to their native countries. My mother received a present from a Hungarian prisoner, who was an excellent copyist. He painted two copies in oil of the famous, though mediocre, 19th-century Russian painter Mikhail Shishkin’s "Three Bears on the Tree" and another – Rye Field." They still adorn our modest apartment, and my late brother's wife enjoys them.

The camp's walls disappeared, and the barracks became dormitories for workers of the new Tire Plant. Unfortunately, nobody took care of the landscaping, so the beautiful flowers died, the grass became trampled, and the whole area looked colorless and decayed before long.

Life has dragged by its daily routine and only the lack of male power reminded the past war.