 In the summer of 1941 the war was taking its first steps. I heard despair in Stalin's voice, despite being only eleven years old.
His landmark radio address to the nation began, "Dear brothers and sisters!"
In other words, my grandfather Kuzma, my father Vasyl, and my uncles, Petro, Semen, Ivan and Tymofiy were Stalin's brothers and their wives his sisters.
Our railway station was far from the front lines, with a village of railroad workers on the left and a kolkhoz on the right. Exempt from military service because of his past traumas, my father was allowed to leave the kolkhoz and move to the village. He mended steam engines in a depot.
The other four brothers worked as collective farmers. Ivan and Petro married when they were still young. In fact, they married so young that when they reached the age of Christ (33 years), as my grandfather used to say, their daughters had already turned fourteen. The unmarried Tymofiy was the first member of the family to enroll in the army, two weeks after school graduation. His schoolmates mocked him for his fondness for the German language.
The eldest brother, Uncle Ivan, was the last man in the family to become a soldier. He angrily thrust pitchfork into a stack of hay and went to the village. When I saw this I thought he would thus kill those foreign enemies.
I also remember Ivan saying to my dad, "War is a family business. Vasyl, help our wives save our children. Neither Stalin nor Hitler needs them." Although not graceful, his words were just as meaningful as Stalin's grandiloquent imperatives.
Damaging the Reich
In the summer of 1942, Germany's Sixth Army was using our railway station to prepare for a Stalingrad assault. At the same time, my father was inflicting economic damage on the Reich.
Guarded by local police officers, a train with girls destined to become Ostarbeiters (Eastern workers) was about to leave for Germany. My father went into a car with the guards. He told them he was going to a wedding and had good vodka in two jerry cans.
When the train stopped at night, the intoxicated policemen opened a car in which my father's two nieces were traveling. They freed the girls to thank "their friend Vasyl" for the treat. However, all the thirty girls escaped into the night, and so did my father.
Tight-fisted Hans
My dad and his nieces hid in a house of their distant relatives. His cigarette supplies soon ran out.
Officer Hans suffered from lung disease but doctors stubbornly refused to send him to the rear. Hans regularly received cigarettes but did not smoke. He treated his lungs with eggs. My hens laid those eggs.
On one occasion, I was sitting with Hans by a fence. My cap was laying nearby, full of eggs.
"One egg will cost you six cigarettes,"
I started with the highest price.
"No, no, no!" he replied, shaking his hands. "Three cigarettes an egg."
"No way," I shouted. "Five cigarettes an egg."
Soon, we agreed on the price and the tight-fisted Hans gave me four cigarettes for one egg.
A captive with horns
In the summer of 1943, the German troops were devastated by their efforts at Stalingrad. The lack of provisions made their commanders order the slaughter of cattle on the kolkhozes (The prudent Germans in 1941 had ordered that the collective farms not be disbanded as had been done in other areas.)
One day, a few German soldiers were driving a herd of cows. One of them lashed our peacefully grazing cow with a whip. I saw those familiar and dear horns among other horns, which were to become stuffing for Germans in a couple of hours.
I ran to defend my property. Someone fired a gun and dust exploded next to my feet. I stopped and burst out sobbing because our family would starve without the cow. Suddenly, the beast turned around, put its tail up and galloped to me.
The Germans laughed. They must have also appreciated the swift reaction of my horned feeder.
Jack London under my bed
In the August of 1943, my mother, younger sister and our cow moved to relatives living in the country. My father was still hiding away from the Gestapo.
I was made to watch the house and feed our hens. I promised my mother I would also go to the village if the Soviet army began to bomb the station.
Our railroad station with its steam engines and trains was mercilessly bombed on Transfiguration Sunday night. Even the Communists had failed to root out the celebration of this holiday when people gave apples and honey to one another. I had also prepared some treats: a basket with apples was standing by the gate leading to our yard.
In the middle of the night, a police officer in charge of our street recommended that we all leave our houses. I had other plans. I had just started reading short stories by Jack London and could not stop. His protagonists prompted me to put a mattress under the bed and light a candle in a plate with water.
Faraway explosions distracted my attention from the plot but one particularly forceful blast forced me to appeal to God.
"God, if I survive, I will go to the steppe," I said.
Pardoned, I was given some time for thinking: God had sent the Soviet planes for a resupply of gasoline and bombs.
I deceived Him and continued to read Jack London, lying under the bed. Soon the Soviet planes came back.
In the morning, I saw traces of that violent explosion in my garden. The walls of the house had cracks all over. One of the splinters had bored through the hamper of apples and stuck in the trunk of a pear tree.
Watermelons vs. Projectiles
In the September of 1943, German units were withdrawing westwards, shooting back languidly but sometimes aggressively. Shells were whistling over the steppes.
Opportunity knocked as I came out of corn thickets and saw a watermelon field. The day before it had been German, but with their retreat, it belonged to no one when I arrived.
I put a few watermelons in my sack, tied it to my bicycle and rode home.
As I left, five German soldiers came to the field. One minute later they were enjoying juicy red pulp with black seeds. Then they disappeared into the thickets.
Five minutes later, Soviet soldiers appeared in the field. They looked exhausted and were thirsty. They put their rifles away and greedily dug their teeth into the remaining watermelons.
I shouted to them there were the Germans ahead. One of them waved his hand casually: "They will not go far." I understood their meaning and I knew that was exactly how the Germans had treated Soviet soldiers only two years earlier.
A post-war war
In 1945, the market in my village began changing. One could still buy sauerkraut, milk and clothes there but there were also unknown sounds of crutches and medals ringing on the blouses of these crippled war veterans. This mutilated flesh seemed to annoy our market vendors.
That flesh yearned for comfortable hospital beds and dreamed of having artificial limbs that would not rub their skin sore. Their stumps tortured them both night and day. The cripples would leave their houses and come to the market where they drank vodka until they lapsed into oblivion and slept under the counters, embracing stray dogs.
Those drunken cripples told stories full of shocking, brutal details. "We were attacking. His mouth foamy and tongue aside, one guy wiped his muddy rifle with a sleeve. Another guy had his legs torn off. He grabbed a rifle with his fingers and cried, 'Brothers, don't leave me alone!'"
Two men put an epileptic next to a beer shop, waiting for his seizure to end. When he regained consciousness, he asked for a mug of vodka. He said he had developed epilepsy after an attack on German fortifications near Kyiv. He saw barges turn upside down in the middle of the Dnipro River, with people and their weapons slipping from the deck like sand. Then a diver searched the bottom of the river. He reported seeing so many dead bodies that they were standing instead of lying down and were moving as if they were regiments headed toward Turkey.
These homeless cripples died earlier than other veterans. Some of them mysteriously disappeared because they spoke too much. Others died of other causes, some with lice so thick they could not be eliminated.
The Brandenburg Gate
Some of the scars of war were all too real and others were more obscure. One such case was Anatoly who publicly insulted his wife Maria with the phrase, "The Brandenburg gate!" They were both war veterans and got married when they returned to our village on May 9, 1945.
At the end of the war when Berlin capitulated, Maria was in charge of a transportation battalion near the Brandenburg Gate.
One day, a Jeep stopped nearby. A U.S. major put a box with a ribbon to her feet, then saluted and left. Inside the box, Maria discovered a beautiful pair of shoes.
She kept the shoes but eventually had to sell her beautiful Berlin gift in the local market, because her jealous and possessive husband did not believe that those shoes were a simple present. He thought they had been payment for some kind of service.
Many post-war families were plagued by such noisy quarrels.
The Viennese waltz
Uncle Petro and Uncle Semen at last returned from the front in 1946.
Petro could walk and played the accordion, his strong fingers pressing the keys dexterously; he could have chosen any job on the kolkhoz. However, Petro had no face but a petrified, grim mask. He had been a tank mechanic during the Kursk battle and the battle had burned his nose, lips, forehead, ears and cheeks. Those ugly scars disfigured what had once been the most handsome young man in the village. He also had no eyelashes, eyebrows and hair, and was left with only his black eyes glistening on the crimson face.
He did not believe his wife could look at him without disgust. This unbearable thought drove him to join the others drinking in the market every day. Uncle Semen left his house and accompanied Petro. He too had his reasons.
Uncle Semen had been in the infantry and served in Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. A German bomb blew his legs off.
The legless Semen used a board to which he was fastened with belts and touched the ground to move. He liked talking to his accordion, threatening to give it away for vodka if it sounded out of tune. He also loved playing the Viennese waltz for a woman in the market who we all called an Austrian widow. Her husband was buried in Vienna. She could not visit the grave. All she had were his two posthumous medals and that waltz.
My grandfather Kuzma came to the market to scold the widow for selling too much vodka.
The two truths
My grandfather, who had taken part in World War I, was convinced there were two truths about the war, one in trenches and one in the rear. He was loyal to the Communist Party despite his occasional freethinking, and he loved people, birds and animals. His kindness was so boundless that he always recalled one episode from his war experience.
He said that Russian soldiers were sitting in trenches for three summer months near the fortress of Khotyn in 1916. The young soldier Kuzma healed a bird with broken wings. The bird got so used to its savior that it stayed in the trench. It died on the parapet during a gas attack.
My grandfather's kindness contrasted with Uncle Ivan's uncompromising cruelty. He returned from the front in a beautiful leather coat. Ivan was always a family leader and he had been the political officer of his battalion during the war, enrolling soldiers in the Communist Party.
During a family supper, Ivan explained how he, an apolitical peasant, had become a political propagandist. As a junior lieutenant, he was invited to join the party. Soon he was promoted and began to register "trench" communists.
He once argued with an inspector of finance who came from the front with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He wore many orders and medals on his jacket, hiding his fat belly under it.
Ivan, who was by then a captain, attacked the inspector in the yard of his house, threatening to exclude him from the party for bringing home with him a German Opel auto as a trophy. Ivan thought only generals could have such cars. The pot-bellied lieutenant colonel replied there had been many trains laden with such German trophies for generals and marshals.
My grandfather was running around, trying to reconcile the two men. He told them they were disgracing their orders.
One week later, the Communist Party Committee reprimanded Uncle Ivan for insulting the veteran.
It seems that grandfather might have been right: there are two truths, one in the front and one in the rear.
Uncle Ivan fought with another soldier in the market once. As far as I understood, Ivan had sent that soldier to a death battalion during the war, accusing him of being a coward. The soldier tore Ivan's shirt and explained that it was not the only reason. It turned out that Ivan had signed an order to send many soldiers to this squad. They were doomed but a few survived. Then I realized that Ivan's aggressive loyalty to Stalin helped him assuage that burdensome sin.
An old lady and Italians
I represent the generation of war children. I grew up listening to bomb explosions. Stalin and Hitler's atrocities devastated my soul. I was trying to explain to myself why adults told more lies and committed harder sins during the war. Some of my answers were found at our local market, that forum of pathetic cripples.
My mother did not want me to mature at the market. She must have been right. I no long desired children's games when I was thirteen; my mind generated only adult associations and thoughts.
A gloomy old lady lived in our village. She would stand on a road outside the village every day, covering her forehead with a coarse palm. We all knew her four sons had "courageously died" in 1943 on the steppes between the Don and the Volga. She came back home every night but stood by the road every morning, hoping to see a young soldier running to hug his mother.
My painfully tenacious memory preserved another tragic scene. An Italian division in blue jackets was marching to Stalingrad along the same road in the summer of 1942. Some of them had field flowers in their hands. They violated their regulations and left the formation to give the flowers to young women.
Perhaps they later gunned down the sons of that Ukrainian lady.
All people are people
Negative emotions in our family calmed down when our last soldier, Uncle Tymofiy, returned home. He was the first member in the family to go to that war after graduation and the last to come back. His knowledge of German proved useful and he interpreted for high army officers.
Now I know that Tymofiy healed my aching heart, for his stories were different from those I had heard before.
One such story was that of Klavdia Shulzhenko's songs that were flying over the trenches for the whole day on the radio. The German presenter announced that the Soviet singer had taken the side of the Wehrmacht. Then the broadcasts had been interrupted. Tymofiy asked a German prisoner why he thought the concert was stopped. His answer was strange and unexpected. The German soldiers complained in their letters home that her voice and lyrics made them homesick.
Tymofiy celebrated the victory that brought an end to the war in a small town near Berlin. There he met municipal deputies and officers who tried to surrender to him and another Russian lieutenant. He told the Germans that his rank did not allow him to accept such a surrender and promised to call his staff. They went to find a telephone and the disciplined Germans followed them obediently.
My generation has been characterized by humaneness. In the 1970s, when post-war children grew up, we composed a song "Do the Russians want war?" This popular hit drowned out an earlier song hit that began, "If a war starts tomorrow…"
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