Authors:
Svetlana Balseris
Diana Maurer
Anastasia Golubeva
Term 8 b, School N° 5
Touristic club of local lore “The Wanderer”
Scientific project leader: N.I. Maurer
Novoselovo, 2000
I. Introduction
II. Main part
1. Memoirs of children of war
2. Analysis and appraisal of the collected material
III. Conclusions
IV. Bibliography
The Great Patriotic War - the tragedy of the entire country, the entire people. There is probably no family in the country, which remained unaffected by the events of those years.
Our fathers and grandfathers had enough strength, moral and courage to defend the liberty and independence of our home country. But had they been able to defend the frontline, to bear up, if the rear had not been protected accordingly? In the towns and villages of the rear the entire population fit for work was drawn on to fulfill this task: old people, women, children. It is very important to visualize the human figures of those times, people who became the actors of history. This collective paper is dedicated to their children of war.
Its aim – the collection of memoirs of people of the elder generation, people who were aged between 6 and 15 during the war, the renewing of interesting facts, which befell in our region at that time.
The task of our paper is to give an objective image of the life of our fellow countrymen who were to experience the Great Patriotic War.
The main subject matter of our paper – the memoirs of children of war.
The 22 June 2001 was the 60th anniversary of the perfidious invasion of fascist German troops into our country. Children of war report on the events of those distant years.
Asa Vladimirovna Andreevna (maiden name Yakusheva), born 1931
My aunt was married to an Austrian. His name was Adolf Hohenschläger. In 1937 he received a couple of letters from his sister, who wanted him to come back to Austria, accusing him of having “heinously betrayed the communists”. Uncle Adolg replied: “ I have my family in Siberia, and Siberia is my home”. The NKVD organs learned about these letters. The uncle was arrested and declared an “enemy of the people”. He managed to ask an acquaintance to inform my father about his detention. This was enough. They sent for my dad to appear before the examining magistrate and accused him of having kept the existence of a related enemy of the people secret. Father was excluded from the party, removed from the office (he was a dstrict militia officer), and Mum, too, was dismissed from the civil registry office. The parents removed from the Dauric to the Novoselovo District.
The war broke out when I was ten years old. Many details have already faded away. We heard about the outbreak of the war from the radio. A meeting was held in Novoselovo.
One day in August my father – Vladimir Aleksandrovich Yakushev, Uncle Fedor Efimovich Samoilov and Cousin Ivan Vasilevich Kuvshinov went to the front. Uncle and cousin were killed. They were not included in the Books of Memory, and we cannot find their names on the memory plate in the Park of Victory, either. Presumably, the military commissariate did not keep their documents …
During the war I frequented the elementary school. I do recall that we collected clothes to pack parcels, which we then sent to the front. We put little notes inside on which we expressed our desire for the victory on our enemy.
In 1944 we received a letter from the hospital in Tashkent, from a soldier named Ivan Golovanov. He thanked Mum for the little warm coats: “If we had not received these coats, I had lost both legs. But one of my hands froze off, anyway. It had to be amputated”.
I still recall the day when they reported our victory. We did not receive a single letter from my Dad during the whole period of war. However, in May 1945 he wrote: “Lena, I am going to come home by the first special troop train. Wait for my arrival”.
But he did neither arrive by the first, no by the second train.
In August Mum got seriously ill. The doctor in Novoselovo intended to send her to Krasnoyarsk, but the captain of the steamship was afraid of taking her along. Hence, they tokk my mum back home. She lay there for 12 days and died on the thirteenth. There was nothing to make a coffin from, Finally, the husband of mum’s sister pulled down several thin planks from the roof.
In September 1945 father returned from war; after the victory they had been keeping him in an internment camp in Estonia for a couple of months.
Leo Friedrichovich Bengardt (Benhardt?), born 1935
We lived on the river Wolga. Before the war my father served in the Red Army as an officer. After Stalin’s ukase he found himself in the trud army. And then he disappeared, went missing. Until today we do not know what happened to him.
At the beginning of the war many German men addressed themselves to the military commissariate asking to send them to the front. They were not aware of the fact that Stalin “distrusted” them. Once, soldiers arrived in the village. All residents were driven on trucks an then taken to the banks of the Volga. As if all this has just happened a couple of minutes ago, I can see Mum, Dad , grandma and grandpa in front of my eyes. Our little dog tried to run after the truck as long as he could. He followed it all up the roas; finally, at the end of his tether, he whiningly sank to the floor.
We spent several weeks at the landing stage. Then they took us to the opposite side of the Volga on barges, where we had to board a train. They put us in freight cars. The train left for the east. The waggons were stuffed with people, it was hot and stuffy. Many old people died. They adults dragged us to the openings in the floor so that we could gasp at least some fresh air.
We reached Koma. Something engraved on my mind: we were standing at the riverside, there is a white church in front of us. Our family was placed with the peasant woman Akulina. Her husband and two sons were fighting at the front. As soon as she recived the notification about their death (all three of them were killed at the front), she went to get an axe to slash at us.
In January 1942 they came to mobilize my father into the trud army. Already in August we received the information that he “died from exhaustion”.
Mama is crying, we are all crying. Akulina was looking at us all the time. Finally, she approached mother, and then both embraced and began to cry their eyes out. It seemed as if grief and agony united them.
We were supervised by a commandant. We were not even allowed to leave for the neighbouring village without specific permission. We were permitted to use the Russian language only. Even at home we were afraid of talking in our mother tongue. It is hard to recall this, to remember our dreadful life of those days. We were not allowed to pick a single spike that had dropped to the ground. As soon as you tried to do that, the brigade leader would appear to drive you to the office by blows of a whip: “Cough up the spikes!” We were not allowed to secure ourselves a simple stake without written permission, we were not aeven allowed to buy anything. Once, I left to get a couple of stakes. I loaded the sledge and started back for home frozen to the marrow. On my way, I came across the district militia officer. I had to unload the sledge in front of his office. I do recall that I burst into tears, recall the unexpressably pain and humiliation I felt that very moment.
I met all kinds of people in my life. But I think the number of good people prevailed. In our district lived many Jews, Letts, Estonians, Poles …. at that time.
From my stepfather I learned a shoemaker’s trade. This knowledge helps me to master my life still today.
Maria Mikhailovna Pozdeeva (maiden name Zabzarina)
I remember how I got to work instead of enjoying myself on the dance floor. I had just arrived at the club. The music was not on yet, when a one-and-a-half ton truck. They convoked all young fellows and girls, asked thm to mount the truck and took them to a field. We had to work there for two day and were even forced to stay there overnight. There was no way out. When they said: “You have to”, then you had to follow their orders and instructions.
Yelena Nikolaevna Lenivtseva, born 1928
I finished the 6th term in 1943 and took employment with the post office. At 6 o’clock in the morning I hurried to work, for they would not accept you to arrive late, not even by one minute – this is what the martial law said.
They mobilized brother Sergei to the front when he was only 17 years old. On the 20 July 1944 he wrote: “Everything is fine with me. I was wounded, but recovered well. I was appointed sergeant. Tomorrow I am going to enter the fray…”. He was killed on July 21. His commander, captain of the guards Rudenko, later handed us over Sergei’s last letter and a family photo, which he had with him during the battle.
A little later, tracking pioneers informed us about the place where he had been buried – somewhere on Volhynian territory. They sent us a picture showing a mass grave. This letter, a reminiscence of my childhood, I have been keeping until today.
As we can derive from the above-mentioned memoirs, the population of our district found itself in a very difficult situation on the eve of the Great Patriotic War and during the entire war process. Many residents were affected by repressions, which avalanched through the whole country. But we have to expressly point out that these represions neither bestialized nor embittered our fellow countrymen.
During the war our district, as well as many others situated in the Krasnoarsk Territory, became a place were special resettlers were forced to take up residence; as we can see from the memoirs, this process took place under strinent, even cruel, conditions. Even much letter those special resettlers lived in conditions a good deal worse compared to those of the indigenous population of our district.
The choice of the subject “What children of war tell us” was not made incidentally. The war events left deep wounds in the souls and hearts of adults and, in particular, children. Our grandmothers and grandfathers still remember very freshly and vividly those hard, rough times, just a few generations grew up without knowing about the concrete meaning of war. We do not want history to make the same mistakes once again in the future, we do not need war. War means death. War means the suffering of the entire people. We tried our best to preserve utmost objectivity; we did not allow any obloquies nor denigration of historic facts, but we did not allow any puff pieces or palliation, either. We tried our best to just report about the bitter truth of the cheerless circumstances under which the people of Novoselovo lived during the Great Patriotic War.