“The Germans put my brother in a sack, tied him up and threw him into the river”

The 1,418 days of the fight against the “brown plague”, the countdown of which began 82 years ago, left an indelible scar in the history of our people – Soviet, post-Soviet. Unfortunately, in the movies, in books, episodes of that military suffering are increasingly being presented as some kind of fascinating “action”. And as the main “horror story” many of its creators prefer to show more bloody details and supernaturalistic battle scenes. But after all, the fascists, who unleashed a war against the USSR, demonstrated their absolute cruelty – savage, inhuman – precisely in circumstances that were by no means combative.

Galina Volynskaya, a long-time subscriber of MK, spoke about the “peaceful” everyday life in the territories occupied by enemies.

“When I ask my friends and acquaintances at what age they remember their childhood, I hear the answer: from four years old, from five, from six … And in 1941 I was not even three years old. But many of the events of that time have been preserved in my memory, including thanks to the stories of those of my relatives who were older than me. My God, how long can I remember!!!

Every summer, my mother took us – “four friendly guys” to my grandmother in the village, in the Oryol region, – explains Galina Aleksandrovna. — My elder brother was 10 years old, my sister was 9 years old, my younger brother was 4 years old and I was 2.5 years old. An aunt also lived with her grandmother with her three children – 9 years old, 8 years old and a one-year-old baby.

Here, in the village of Zolotarevo, located 25 kilometers east of Orel, the war caught on. How terrible it was! Terrible bombings began day and night – after all, an important railway passed through the village. We hid in the cellar. The women covered us, the children, with feather beds and also covered us with their bodies, as if this could save us from a bomb.

Then we heard the roar of cars, the crash of motorcycles. The Nazis entered the hut when we were sitting at the table – three adults and seven children. They pointed their fingers at us – “rusish schweine” – and laughed.

So we turned into “Russian pigs” for two long years of occupation.

The Germans occupied the upper room, and we, ten people, huddled in a kitchen with an earthen floor, a stove that smoked heavily, as it was heated with dung cakes.

Soon, a Gestapo man with a “spider”-swastika on his sleeve, accompanied by a policeman, came for my mother: since we came from Moscow, it means that our father is a commissar … But the wise grandmother taught my mother in advance to say that her husband was an ordinary ordinary soldier, like all the men in the village. You can’t check everyone. (In fact, my father was a pilot and fought from the first days of the war.) From that day on, every evening my mother was taken away for interrogation. She kissed us, saying goodbye forever, but then she returned home, although she was covered in tears.

On the first day at the commandant’s office, she saw the chairman of the village council. Before the arrival of the Nazis, he tried to evacuate with his family, however, having lost his wife and children during the next bombing, he returned to the village. Here he was captured by the Germans. There were also five boys aged 10-12 sitting on a bench near the commandant’s office. During the retreat of our troops, they, saddled with horses, galloped to the Red Army and reported where the German units pursuing them were. The Nazis arrested them.

Next to the commandant’s office was a van with a chimney on the roof. They put the chairman of the village council and the boys there, allegedly they were going to take them to Orel. But after some time, the bodies of these unfortunate rural women were found in a ravine. Everyone’s faces were blackened, their eyes were bulging … That terrible car was called a “gas chamber”.

Mom continued to be tortured by interrogations. Once, when she was once again taken away from the house, I clutched at the hem: “Don’t leave!” Angry at this, the Gestapo man hit me with his boot. I flew away, hit the back of my head on the handle of a large chest and lost consciousness … My grandmother saved me – she was our doctor in those years. And the bump from the German boot remained on my head to this day… During one of the interrogations, the Gestapo man, playing with a knife, cut – as if by accident – my mother’s little finger on her hand. Until the end of her life, this finger did not unbend.

In winter, all the women of the village were driven out to clear snow from the highway – the road to Yelets, Voronezh. If someone did not have suitable shoes, the Germans took off felt boots from old neighbors and threw them to those who could work.

Somehow, my mother returned from the next such road work in tears. She told her grandmother that the Nazis were driving a column of women with children past them. One of them carried a baby in her arms. The baby burst into tears, wanted to eat. The woman on the move tried to unbutton her coat in order to breastfeed the baby. Because of this, she began to lag behind the others, and the Nazi soldier-escort drove her with the butt of a rifle. This picture irritated the officer who accompanied the convoy. He snatched her child from the woman’s hands, pulled out a gun and shot the baby right in the face. And then he threw a terrible bundle of mother at her feet. The woman, losing consciousness, settled on the road. Others walking in the column picked her up and dragged her forward until the German decided to continue the massacre.

Soon, raids on girls and young women began in our village. They were put into wagons and sent to Germany. Grandmother hid mother and aunt in a haystack.

It’s time to find out what real hunger is. All cattle, poultry, the Germans took away from the inhabitants. They also emptied our cellar, but for some reason they did not take the beets stored there. Grandmother cooked it and gave us one at a time. Since then, I have had an aversion to this vegetable for many years …

In the spring, all of us, adults and children, went out into the field, looking for rotten potatoes left over from autumn in the softened earth. It was then boiled. Grandmother threw a handful of bran into the slush formed in the pot, smeared the frying pan with the butt of a candle and baked black pancakes for us, which the children called “vomiters” … We also had to eat quinoa, some other plants … My brother adapted to catch gophers in the field, a raven on the road … In general, I had to eat everything that was even more or less edible.

And next to our hut, the Germans set up their garden. They put a wire fence around so that we children would not steal anything. Yes, even connected to electricity! As preventive “lessons” we were forced to take this wire with our hands and at the same moment let the current flow through it. We writhed in pain, and the Germans laughed. After all, we were “Rusish Schweine”.

A river flowed along the village under the hill. On the opposite bank, the Germans grew turnips for their horses. There was a sentry with a machine gun. But hunger is not an aunt! The boys swam across the river at night, pulled out the turnip, and returned with the prey. If the sentry noticed them and started shooting, they dived deeper so as not to hit the bullets.

There was hunger, but there was also cold. After all, we came to my grandmother in the summer in sandals, panties, T-shirts. And I had to go through both autumn and winter in the village … I remember my coat from an old blanket that my mother sewed for me.

How restless children were drawn to the street in winter! Our neighbor grandfather Ivan wove us all bast shoes. And my mother sewed socks from silk bags that my older brother got. With his friends, he searched for unused shells left on the battlefield. The boys took them apart, took out the bags of gunpowder that were inside, shook out the gunpowder itself, and the fabric went to work: here you have socks.

The Germans had white woolen socks. Once, my mother picked up such torn socks, thrown away by one of the Nazis, mended them. My brother put on new clothes and went out into the street. The Nazis grabbed him, noticing these socks. As a result, my mother was threatened with the gallows: after all, she was considered a thief. Saved only by the fact that one of the Germans admitted that he himself threw away these ill-fated torn socks. In the meantime, such a confession did not appear, my mother was under arrest in the basement.

Our grandmother was the bravest woman in the world. Although she did not come out as a sprout, the Lord endowed her with a kind heart and courage. She has saved us from trouble many times.

At Christmas the Germans received parcels from home. And in them, among other things, were sweets in bright candy wrappers. Oh, how we children wanted to try this miracle. An officer once, noticing my greedy look, raised his hand with a candy over my head, and I jumped after it like a dog, but I couldn’t reach it – I held it too high. In the end, out of frustration and anger, I spat on a shiny officer’s boot. With a curse, the German began to take out his pistol from its holster. Everything would have ended very badly for me if not for my grandmother. She rushed to me, grabbed me by the whirlwinds and began to shake. I screamed, and the officer cursed again and left …

But one day my grandmother got it great. The German units in our village changed from time to time. Some came, others left. Late one night, a Nazi officer forced his grandmother to clean his dirty boots. It was dark, a primitive torch lit up the kitchen where we lived, and, of course, in such poor light, my grandmother did not clean them well. In the morning the officer saw the boots and was very dissatisfied. Angry, he began to beat the grandmother directly with these boots. Beat until she fell, losing consciousness.

My older brother, he was 12 at the time, quickly learned to understand and then speak German. One day he ran home happy and excited. It turns out that he overheard the conversation of German telephone operators. After all, then the invaders inspired the inhabitants of the village that Moscow had already fallen, the end of the war was coming, all the lands would be divided among the victorious Aryans, the Russians would only have to work for them, and who would work poorly, that “fluff”. Sad prospect. And then suddenly the brother comes running and shares the overheard German conversation: Moscow, it turns out, is standing, the German troops are retreating from it, they have many dead and wounded.

How happy everyone was! But this joy was short-lived. The brother managed to run around the whole village, sharing such news with neighbors. And the Germans knew about it. They seized the “enemy agitator”, put him in a forage sack, tied him up and threw him off the steep bank into the river. Thank God, the bag near the water got caught in the willow bushes, and the brother fell into the water only to the waist. “Tsuryuk!” (“Back!”) shouted a German with a machine gun when his mother wanted to pull her son out of the river. Until night, my brother sat like this in cold water, until he, stiff and frightened, was nevertheless rescued from trouble. The adults hid the boy in a nearby village. He stayed there until this German unit left our village. Such a terrible ordeal did not pass without a trace: after this incident, which almost cost him his life, his brother stuttered for a long time and suffered from bedwetting. But after all, for the invaders, he was just a “Rusish Schweine”, and not a child.

We were liberated in the hot summer of 1943. Again there was a terrible bombardment. We cried. And the whole village was on fire: a fascist with a torch in his hand rode a motorcycle, poked this torch into thatched roofs, and a flame immediately rose above the house.

In between the bombings, when there was a lull, the older brother and sister, with a company of other children, ran to the school garden. There, on the apple trees, large apples hung already – baked from the fires that had roamed around. They were high up, it was difficult to get them off the ground. Then the children, trembling with fear, pulled the corpses of the Germans lying nearby to the trees, they got to the apples – and rather back, so that before the next air raid began, they could run to the crack dug in the ground, where we all sat, hiding from the bombs. .

After this horror, only chimneys remained from our village.

There is no more strength to remember all that we have experienced. Turning to the younger generation, I want to say: do not believe if you hear from someone that the Nazis treated us, the occupied, well. For them, we were only “Rusish Schweine”.