BlogKharkov, 1941.
On June 22, 1941, without declaration of war and in direct violation of the peace agreement between Soviet Russia and Germany, the Nazis invaded Soviet Russia.
It was a tragic day for both the soldiers who fought the Nazis and the civilians whose lives were turned upside down. Many of our family members were at the front, but only a few made it back home.
We would like to mark that date with this story, which was told by Lisa Mondrus, Sasha’s mother – one of the episodes from her memoir. She was 19 when the War came to Kharkov’s doorstep.
Lisa chose the following epigraph for that story – two lines from the Russian poet Aleksander Kushner.
Your epoch is not for trying,
It’s for living and for dying.
“We – my mom Leeba, my younger sister Sofia, who was twelve at that time, and I – left Kharkov on one of the very last trains saved for evacuees, when Nazi soldiers were already approaching the outskirts of Kharkov.
Nobody on the train knew where we were going and what awaited us ahead, but we were certain that if we stayed in Kharkov, we would die. It was not a passenger train, of course – it was a teplushka (теплушка) – covered and insulated freight cars, which were converted to carry people. At the time people agreed to board anything that moved out of the city.
The train’s wagons and cars were assigned to different plants and factories and only the workers’ family members were allowed on those cars. Each factory equipped their train car to accommodate as many family members as possible, but some space still was needed for water, food and a toilet.
Our car was equipped, perhaps, better than most – it belonged to the Kharkov Furniture factory, where Uncle Misha, my father’s older brother, worked as a head of the finance department. He was appointed as a Commandant of the factories’ civilian evacuation. Our car was the very last from that factory, and Uncle Misha was with us. He was one of the only few men, the vast majority were women and children of all ages. Our car was a big one, there were more than one hundred people inside (instead of the sixty allowed).
Uncle Misha’s wife and children had left Kharkov a week before, as well as the rest of our relatives who were not in the Soviet Army. It had been clear for a while that Kharkov will not withstand, although the battle to protect the city had never stopped.
My father, Aaron, initially was not mobilized because of his heart disease, but when the Nazis moved in close to the city, he was taken to the Army anyway – in the middle of his working day, among other men from his office – and he was not even permitted come home to say goodbye to his family. We did not know what to think when he did not come home from work and only a late night messenger told us what had happened.
That was the main reason to delay our departure – we tried to find my father or, at least, to get his field-post address. Somehow my mother learned where to write to him, but it was only a year and a half later that we would see him again – he came for a short vacation to visit us in a village in Kyrgyzstan, where we stayed for a while as refugees.
It was late afternoon when our train moved out, and soon after Nazi airplanes attacked the train for the first time. They did not bomb it, may be because they flew back after bombing other targets, may be they did not consider the train as a valuable target, but they did strafe the train with their machine guns. People started jumping out of the train and the pilots hunted them down, one by one.
Uncle Misha locked the door of our car and did not allow anybody outside. “There is nowhere to hide out there,” he cried, “You run, you die! If we stay here, at least we have a chance! Everybody – on the floor. On the floor, now!” People did not listen, they yelled, hit him, ripped his clothes, tried to break the door. Some looked out from the only small window and saw people dying outside, and started helping him to protect the door and calm the crowd. The door was saved – but hysteria inside the car never ended.
The train moved again, faster and faster. Those who ran out and survived tried to catch the train, but only a few could. The train did not stop when the planes returned – again and again. It became even worse when the dark night came. No light was allowed inside, of course, and outside, at that moonless night, the only light was from random villages on fire.
The sounds of explosions, machine guns and airplane engines – it was horrible. It was beyond imagination.
On the second day we were out of The Luftwaffe’s range of operation, but even then, when the train made short stops to load coal and water for the train’s steam engine, Uncle Misha still did not allow anybody out.
We were more than lucky – our car was hit by bullets several times, but nobody was wounded. Three days and five hundred miles later we arrived at the city of Saratov. It was the first time when Uncle Misha unlocked the door and let the people out.
Uncle Misha, dear Uncle Misha! He saved us all.
I cannot find the words to describe the condition of our train – some cars were totally destroyed or burned, some barely survived, many people were wounded or dead, and everybody was in shock. There were very few cars in the train that did not have significant damage – our car was one of those few. Only then we understood that we did survive the first leg of our journey.
On the twenty-first day we arrived at the “Burnaya” station in Kyrgyzstan. It would be another seven hundred and sixty-two days until we returned to Kharkov.”
But that will be another story.
