It’s July 1941 and I am 11 years old. My eyes are a well-focused camera that collects color as well as sound, storing scenes in a mind still hungry for new experiences.
The dark planes in the sky are not "ours". They sprinkle cucumbers from their long bellies. First, there is a shriek whistle and then the earth shakes in awe. The bombs seemed to burst in my ears. My face ducks in the grass as a hot wind passes overhead. When I look up, I do so with cheeks wet from tears and stinging from thistles. The pain makes me alert: it is not my ears that exploded but a loop of track several hundred meters away.
Silent grief from the radio
Just a few weeks earlier, the familiar voice of the radio announcer, followed by Stalin's, had told everyone of the war that was about to beset us. I remember how a hum of silence vibrated through the crowd of people gathered on the street to hear the news. They stood limp and motionless.
It was the women who first fathomed the tragedy to come.
I was born and raised in a small town near a large railway station in Donbass, called the junction, where four different lines intersected. It was here where I saw hundreds of confused boys and young men loaded into railcars. The women weren't allowed to approach the standing train.
Never before and never thereafter have I seen so many crying mouths, a wall of inaudible female grief. Some mothers just stood on the thresholds of the family house, whimpering into kerchiefs as their sons were led away. Others crowded shoulder to shaking shoulder before the cordon of NKVD troops. They huddled out in the open for days in the hope of catching a glimpse of their men and boys.
It was like a forbidden funeral.
It never occurred to me at the time that almost all those sturdy village lads were departing on a one-way trip.
Of books and bombs
But my little town apparently never entered into the plans of the great-power strategists. No battles were launched from there. The war years at the Junction were like a slow motion film with pauses for changes in the winning sides. The Soviets hauled away everything that they could carry, while German pilots bombed everything that they were able to hit.
There's a grain silo smoking in the distance. Its roof has been crushed by a bomb My mother wants me to go and fetch some grain. But be careful, she pleads. Here's a cart and a sack. The wheat of course will smell like cinders, but it will do for porridge. I can see her holding my little sister as I head off on my mission.
On the way, I come across a warehouse full of burning books that has also been hit from above. The poverty of my family at the time was absolute: we never had any books, except an old edition of Taras Shevchenko verse. Against my mother's admonitions and forewarnings of impending starvation, I fill the sack with literary giants: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Cervantes, Jack London, Jules Verne. As I ponder my find, for the first time in my life.
I feel rich. All the same, I move on toward the silo to collect as much grain as the remaining space on my cart will permit.
Lies from the local cinema
During one of those pauses in Ukraine's slow-motion war years, I got mad at our local cinema operator - Alyosha. The boys in our small town loved Alyosha and his movie booth. He always used to tell us when there would be a clip shown of our country's leaders so that we would know to clap and cheer loudly.
As the camera chirred in the dark behind our backs, the screen was covered with massive Soviet tanks on the move and planes in the air. Then there was the mausoleum decked with the mysterious figures of our country's leaders. As soon as we caught the glance of Stalin, we open fire with a roar of rambunctious applause. We were sure that we were firing from the winning side.
Several months later, in fall 1941, the Red army was retreating along a muddy road. Ragged and weary, the soldiers appeared to be moving along on a treadmill in front of me. Their overcoats were soaked and their foot wrapping dangled from their boots. No tanks and no planes -just rifles hung from the men's thin frames.
On the same stretch of road, several hours later, I see an endless line of trucks, each one is carrying a dozen beefy, clean-shaven Germans in black helmets. Of course, it never occurred to me that it was the mysterious men at the mausoleum, not Alyosha the projector operator, who had fooled us boys.
An occupied garden
The Soviet authorities didn't trust the inhabitants of places that hadn't been burned to the ground by the Germans. And maybe they were right. My little town on the steppe wasn't prepared to conduct guerilla warfare. It was, however, an ideal place for the new German authorities to introduce their various programs.
We really got lucky with the burgomaster put in charge of us. Before the war, he had been a farmer. Now, on the edges of the Reich's eastern frontier, he was again involved in what he liked and knew how to do. Soon, the infant Soviet plantations were divided into countless private vegetable gardens. Moreover, the tithe exacted from the people was purely symbolic: We simply were expected to cultivate the land.
My father, who had been disabled during a ferry accident long before the war, was relieved of his conscription obligations. But his disability didn't prevent him from doing fieldwork. To the envy of other families, he filled our house with buckwheat, millet, watermelon, cantaloupe, corn and sunflower. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1943, our burgomaster had ordered the liquidation of the local land class. It was thought that the land had been cultivated enough, and the German command wasn't about to keep feeding a bunch of eternally hungry Ukrainians.
Goebbels and the family cow
Going back a little earlier to August 1942, when the fruits of our labor were still well hidden in attics, basements and cellars, I recall getting snagged in the gears of the machine created by Herman Goebbels. Our neighbor, the editor of a Ukrainian-language newspaper, inquired as to whether I had signed up for school. I was honest and said "No." This author of glorious articles dedicated to the valiant victories won by German troops near Stalingrad then promised to take me under her wing.
Then a scandal broke out. My father, always the careful one, persuaded a German policeman to strike my name off the list of educationally enlightened collaborators with a bottle of his best homemade vodka. But the polizeiman got caught and was punished along with our family cow: As a fine for corrupting German justice, we had to donate half our milk to the local occupiers. All in the name of a good private education - with no political affiliations attached.
I will always remember the smell of the freshly typed ink that my Ukrainian textbooks exhaled. It seemed like Goebbels himself had just printed them especially for me. There were also plenty of illustrations, depicting the brave deeds of German troops. To the joy of my mother, the school soon closed. It was rumored that the Gestapo arrested the teachers along with any other suspected Ukrainian nationalists...
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