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The troops marched for about a day, the infantry went for the equipment, in an organized manner, in tight formations. Along the entire road, on both sides, apparently along its entire length, there were cover posts: a trench in the snow with a machine gun and three soldiers, and so it was in front of our house. Two weeks earlier, nervousness was felt in the behavior of the fascists, all the villagers, even children, understood that something terrible and unpredictable was approaching and they went to bed without undressing in order to be ready for anything at any time.
Around midnight, on January 26, we heard the sound of breaking glass and saw flames of flamethrowers through broken windows. It was soldiers in black uniforms who set fire to houses. The night was very cold. From the conversations of adults, I remember that it was more than 40 degrees below zero. My mother sat my younger brother on the same suitcase, wrapping it in all the warm clothes that could only be found, and tied it to a sled, So he sat on a sled near a burning house.
Our entire family and a few neighbors gathered outside my great-grandfather’s burning house, apparently because he was the only man in this corner of the village. We warmed up by this fire for two hours. During this time, one of the soldiers of that flanking cover from the river, came to warm up at the burning house and, leaving, took off his great-grandfather’s hat and boots.
In the old man, thrown out of the burning house, the great-grandfather found an old hat – budyonovka and cotton pims, like, the way out: both the head and legs are covered. But then suddenly a patrol came, checked the flank posts, saw my grandfather’s budyonovka with a red star and took him somewhere. We thought he wouldn’t be back, but he did. He was released when, apparently, it turned out that he was 96 years old and was squandered by their own soldiers. We were very happy about his return.
And soon after, another soldier from the flank cover came to the burning house where we were staying. He looked around and walked over to me and tried to take the hat off my head. The ribbons of the ears of my hat were tied under my chin. When he realized that he needed to untie the ribbons, he reached under my chin with his hand. Without hesitation, I involuntarily pressed my teeth into his hand and bit it to the blood. He howled in pain and hit me in the right ear with such force that I flew away from him three or four meters away. It’s good that I didn’t go in the direction of the burning house and buried my head in the snowdrift. My mother saw this when he stepped towards me again, she, without hesitation, slapped him with such a slap that he was in the same snowdrift, next to me! He did not expect this, he was frightened, jumped up and ran to where he came from, since he was unarmed. The grandmothers were worried: “He will return with a weapon and not alone, you need to hide,” they said and buried me and my mother in the snow 10—15 meters from the place where it happened.
They were right – he came with a gun and not alone. Everyone who was by the fire was interrogated for a long time, threatened, but they pointed to the road and said that we had left. Later, the grandmothers said that these two felt the snow for a long time with bayonets, fortunately for us, not where we were buried, and then went to the machine gun nest.
Sometime after the incident, a group of soldiers appeared in black uniforms, with the image of a human skull and crossed bones on the sleeves of overcoats. They began to drive people away from burning houses to the road, it was freed from military units, apparently everyone went through, and now they are engaged with us – the inhabitants.
All the other events of this night are described by me in the poem “We Remember”, in which everything is true, without any artistic or other fiction.
And with an infant, too, the truth. I didn’t remember that young woman because I hadn’t lived in the village for three years before the war, but she was walking next to us, at the back of a column with a small knot and an infant in her arms, supported by a sling over her shoulder.
The child was crying loudly all the time, it looked like he had a cold. The woman often stopped, corrected something in this bundle in her arms, tried to calm her down, but the child cried, not stopping. When she stopped once again, the escort who was walking nearby pushed her in the back with the butt of a rifle, she fell face forward, and naturally dropped the child. The bundle rolled back a meter and a half or two, while she was trying to get up, the escort poked at this bundle with a bayonet and threw it to the side of the road. The woman rushed to the bundle, but she was driven back into the column with her rifle butts.
The poem was written for the tenth anniversary of the victory in 1955 in Spitsbergen, where I often visited in those years, working as a ship mechanic of the Murmansk Arctic Shipping Company, there sometimes, it happened to have free time to remember everything I had experienced in the heat of the war.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of these events, already living in Moscow, I tried to publish this poem in “literaturnaya Gazeta (newspaper)” and in Izvestia. But it either did not reach the editors, or they did not find anything interesting in it that was worthy of the seal of that time, I do not know.
And then, after we, the inhabitants of the burned Egor’evskoe, were driven to the village of Aleksandrovka and, in some ways, as we were resettled, famine began.
Chapter 7. The year is 1942. Hunger
None of the residents of our former village could stock up on at least some food, and what could be taken with them – after all, you cannot carry much on yourself, since almost every family had young children.
That’s the situation. It seems that they saved children from death: they were carried on a sled, carried in their arms, but it turned out that they were brought to die of hunger. Local residents themselves survived with difficulty, they also had children, they also had to be saved from all the hardships and dangers that the war brought with it.
Mowed rye and wheat were in the stacks, it was possible to thresh them before the arrival of the nazis very little, so the villagers had minimal grain reserves.
Usually the main threshing was carried out in late autumn and winter, the sheaves were first dried in the rigs, and then threshedincovered currents. And this autumn it did not work, the villagers were forced to build fortifications, and, most importantly, these buildings and devices served as wood for the ceilings of trenches, machine gun nests and dugouts.
Apparently, the Nazis were going to survive the cold in warm huts, so the houses were not touched when fortifications were built in the autumn, but sheds, rigs, barns and even baths were dismantled and used in the construction of these defensive structures.
Stacks with unthreshed sheaves were burned. Livestock had already been eaten by the Nazis and the main product for the inhabitants of almost all villages, became potatoes, but they also tried to put a paw on it by insatiable hordes in uniforms. And then, they drove us in, who had nothing but hungry mouths. People began to starve to death.
From the first day, when we were driven to the village of Aleksandrovka, grandmother Manya and I went with a bag to the houses of local residents – to beg for alms. Mom began to help the old grandmother with housework in the house where we settled. My sister helped my mother and looked after my little brother and the elderly. We were all starving. A bucket of potatoes, which my mother received from my grandmother in advance, was eaten in two days – there were as many as seven hungry mouths. Collecting alms turned out to be almost an empty affair, because there were no fewer beggars than residents in Aleksandrovka itself – our entire village.
In order to understand how limited the space in which the villagers and we who were driven here found themselves turned out to be, it is necessary to describe the spatial situation that developed at that time.
As I have already said, the first line of German defense passed behind the village houses 50—60 meters away – where there were outbuildings. The houses themselves with palisades and fences are about 25—30 meters, the road in front of the houses is 20 – 25 meters, and further, 150 – 200 meters along the bank of the Derzha River, wire barriers. And beyond the river, with a channel width of 30 – 35 meters – a field resting on the forest, which arced around this field and rested with a wide tongue on the Derzha River. This forest was already occupied by our Soviet troops in February. From the village to the forest along the riverbed was about 800 meters. This is the picture that we got – houses with residents reliably covered the first line of German defense from the fire of our troops.
