The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII

by Marion Kummerow

  “I have nothing to conceal,” Lyuba retorted. “I was with the Partisans first, then in German captivity. I was interrogated and cleared. If you want, I can show you the court’s decision and my release form.”

  “Now, now, relax. I myself was fighting with the Underground. I only want the best for the girl.”

  “Which girl? Do you mean Natasha?”

  “Listen and don’t interrupt me. Your friend Natasha warmed a Fritz’s bed. In 1943, the Partisans executed her. I’d better spare you the details. This is not about her, it’s about her daughter. To the girl’s misfortune, the locals know who fathered her. They will never forget the Nazi who sent many of their kinfolks to the gallows.” She lied resolutely, even with relief. For the girl’s sake. “But why should the child answer for her bad egg mother? Until Natasha’s aunt’s death, she protected the girl. Do you understand what I am hinting at?”

  “No, but why are you so interested in the girl’s fate?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Ulya retorted, then added, “Just consider me a kind person. Don’t you believe there are any such people left?”

  “Where is the girl?”

  “Look for her under the bed after everybody departs. You said you were her mother’s best friend? I leave it to you to decide what fate befalls the child.” She looked around and, finding the doll in the corner of the room where she herself had set it a week ago, went there to pick it up. Ewald. Her heart sank as she pressed the doll to her chest, feeling the pain in her stomach throbbing like a wound that didn’t heal.

  “What is your name?” The young woman stared at her, her gaze confused.

  This Lyuba turned out to be really annoying, she thought. “You needn’t know. If anybody asks, I’ll deny I have ever met you.” Already behind the wicket door, she turned around. “I executed your friend. With my own hands.” Without another look back, Ulya ducked behind a huge heap of rubble and quickened her steps, feeling her heart thrashing in her chest.

  The dream came in hard and fast and she found herself in a long alleyway, seeing people in NKVD uniform but oddly with death’s heads on their peaked caps. They were after her.

  Ulya woke up with a jolt and, staring into the darkness of her tiny, separated room in the military barracks, thought back to the time when a bold idea took hold of her. At that precise moment, she knew that all those war-time years, subconsciously, she was searching for who she was, asking herself if she’d taken a wrong path from the very beginning. But was it the choice for her to make? Not until now.

  Sifting through the memories, her mind brought to the surface so many things and there were even more she’d like to forget. She remembered various crosscurrents of feelings she’d preferred not to examine then. Was fate really at fault for her wrong turns?

  They cast her as a hunter—and she readily agreed thinking she was saving her father—but it turned out she was some game, a little kernel of grain caught between Stalin’s millstones.

  Was she ready to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, wondering when the wolves would close in on her?

  It was with a slow inevitability that she inferred she hated Stalin. If it were not for her patriotism—Hitler after all invaded her country and killed so many of her people—time would come when she would just as well fight Stalin. He or, at least under his rule, her father was killed. And millions of her compatriots. His compatriots. A dreadful realization overcame her: she could not go back to that regime, could not listen one more time to their commanding and deceitful voices, to be a part of their lies and machinations. By now, she knew with deep conviction that only by breaking these chains would she be free.

  No longer deluding herself, she acknowledged that both ways—Nazi and Soviet—were alien to her. The realization was liberating in a way she hadn’t expected, an astounding, bracing, and unanticipated release.

  The moment she made the decision, a peaceful steadiness spread inside her chest. This was who she was, or at least who she wanted to be. She accepted in a very strange way that she did not need to apologize to anybody for her decision: her Volga country and her folks were taken from her. Her father was executed for what she didn’t even know. She met her love, and the damned war took him from her by the hands of her own countrymen. With indifferent cruelty, her own countrymen took away another life from her—her future child.

  And yet she couldn’t take that last, crucial step as long as she carried the stone in her heart—the responsibility for the fate of the little girl whose mother she’d killed. Shall I ever deserve a pardon for that? Can I ever forget? It tortured her. It shackled her to the place. As she lay awake in bed night after night, she couldn’t rid her mind of the image of the young woman’s little body crumpled sideways on the thinly snowed ground, and she knew the disturbing images would forever be part of her memories.

  Would she ever achieve atonement? She faced the answer, and it landed heavy on her heart.

  The remorse slacked a bit when she saw Lyuba, the girl’s mother’s friend, carrying the little one in her arms from the sad, dilapidated hut to the road leading away from this godforsaken place, away from the people like Dobrova, like Zaitsev, like those who persecuted her in the same torture chambers the Germans tormented her Soviet compatriots. And finally making peace with herself, she had an intoxicating sense of radiance, of sheer weightlessness akin liberation, an entirely new feeling for her, something she had never before experienced, as if a missing piece of her had somehow been returned and stillness entered her heart.

  She would never know if her father was justly sentenced. She would never find out who shot at her. If Hammerer survived. What would happen to the little girl? All loose ends. And from now on, she resolved to simply acknowledge the fact that she’d live with it till her time came.

  MEMORANDUM

  November 1945

  Agent Hunter was spotted in the American Occupation Sector in Berlin.

  In handwriting: To capture dead or alive.

  Epilogue

  May 14, 1971

  Moscow

  Before exiting her tiny partitioned room in the flat of a formerly elite mansion that after the October Revolution was re-designed as kommunalka—communal apartments, Natashen’ka steals another glance at the picture of four young people she repaired with tape and framed. She can’t help but smile at it before closing the door behind her.

  A minute later, she walks along Petrovka Street, soon passing the Bolshoi Theatre on the right and the Maly Theatre on her street side then, through an underpass, she is at the Metropol Hotel. The uncertain light of the early morning sun illuminates its sophisticated facade in shades of white-and-gray. Seconds later, it’s behind, and through a narrow passage between the restored sixteenth century houses, she heads for 25th October Street. At the entrance to the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives, she climbs four-steps then more steps inside and, after turning to the right, she is in the assembly hall of her Alma mater, an applicant for a Doctorate Candidate degree.

  Internally, she is calm. As soon as the members of the Dissertation Council are in their places, as is her research advisor, and the official opponents, the academic secretary introduces her and her work, “The Archive Documents as a Source of Uncovering the Names and Heroic Deeds of the Forgotten Partisans in Byelorussia During the Great Patriotic War.”

  Natashen’ka enumerates the archives she worked at, stressing she had access only to declassified documents and that this restricted her work.

  Then, the first opponent takes the floor. “The studies have shown . . .” She listens to his comments, then a praising conclusion. The next opponent starts with, “She carried extensive research . . . The finds uncovered . . .”

  Natashen’ka tries to concentrate on their analysis, but her thoughts are miles away, lost in the recent past.

  In front of her mental eye there was that old woman, Anna Il’inichna Brekhova. She opened her door at Natashen’ka’s knock and invited her inside. “Are y
ou from a school?”

  Natashen’ka shook her head. “Anna Il’inichna, my name is Natasha. I’m writing a thesis on the Partisan movement in Byelorussia.”

  “Ah, call me Il’inichna.” She waved her hand in a gesture of dismissal. “I thought pupils from a school are coming. They like to listen to my stories. Or maybe their teachers compel them. They are good children anyway. Some go to a store to buy food for me, some chop firewood, in the spring and autumn, they dig up my vegetable garden. Now, what do you want me to tell you?”

  “Could you please tell me about your fellow-Partisans?” Natashen’ka asked, looking into the cloudy eyes of the woman whose face carried signs of hard labor and sorrow, yet lighted up at Natashen’ka’s question, “Do you remember?”

  “Of course, I do.” She started in a low voice, full of undistinguishable reverence. “Nikifor Petrovich, Ameliy Ivanich, Klement Sergeyevich . . .” Natashen’ka distinguished Klement—her patronymic name and sat a little forward in her chair, intrigued. “Semyon, Pasha, Gavryushka, Artem . . .” Names and more names. Then, among them, Lyubochka.

  “And this Lyubochka, what was her last—”

  “Zalesskaya.” Il’inichna interrupted her. “She was a lovely girl. First, like a princess, didn’t know how to do our things. A beautiful, a bashful girl, yet proved to be brave.” She heaved a deep sigh. “Our commanders once sent her to Polotsk. On a mission. She didn’t return. First, we thought, Germans arrested and executed her.” Another sigh escaped her. It rose from deep within, on the tide of the memories and feelings Natasha thought she has stirred up by her probing. “Later we learned through our people in the Civil Council she was captured and deported to Germany. The accursed fascists transported many young people to Germany then. To work for them. Uhh, Harods.” She shook a fist in anger.

  “What happened to her daughter?” Natashen’ka’s heart skipped a beat before she uttered the question.

  “A daughter? Hmm. Oh, yes, yes, she had one before she joined our Partisan unit,” Il’inichna said with a few quick shakes of her head. “The little one, I think she was five or six years old, perished with Lyuba’s mother in the first day of war. The Germans bombed their train. Anyway, Klement Sergeyevich, our Commissar, would not allow her to bring a child with her. In other Partisan detachments, they accepted mothers with children. Not in ours. The Commissar hated having young women in his Partisan unit.”

  She continued telling the stories about their everyday life in the forests, and it was obvious she did it often. When Natashen’ka saw Il’inichna getting tired either of the painful memories or just of so much talking, she got up to leave. “No, girl, without us drinking tea, I won’t let you go.” So, they drank an herbal tea “of black currant leaves” as her hostess admitted. With confusion from the revelation about her mother’s hidden past, Natashen’ka bid farewell to the old woman.

  Walking down the Polotsk quiet streets to the train station, she felt like crying. Her lead took her to a dead end. But why did her mother lie to her? Why did she give her the patronymic name of their Commissar? What if the answer lay somewhere close, and she’d just missed the hint? Something prompted her to think about Lipetsk. I must find that Natasha Ivanova after whom Mama named me.

  She telegraphed her research advisor asking for permission to go to Lipetsk and getting it, the next day, with the address scribbled on a sheet of paper from an information office clerk, Natashen’ka headed to the Stone Log settlement.

  A woman, perhaps between sixty and seventy, beautiful despite her age, answered the doorbell. Her eyes widened in shock and her hands flew to her mouth to silence the yelp that escaped her throat. Perhaps sobered by Natashen’ka’s undisguised surprise, she uttered, “Your eyes. Sorry, for a second, I thought you were my stepdaughter.” After a moment’s silence, and still staring at Natashen’ka as though in confusion, she continued, “Are you from the neighborhood committee? Regarding the gas pipeline?”

  “No, I’m looking for Natasha Ivanova.”

  “Natasha. She was my stepdaughter. I’m Svetlana Andreyevna.” She signaled to Natashen’ka to come in. “It is as cheap sitting as standing. Would you like to stay for a visit?” Motioning to the chair at the well-used wooden table, she lowered herself opposite Natashen’ka, searching her face and shaking her head as if still in shock. “Why are you asking about my stepdaughter? She is no longer with us.” A veil of mist in her eyes betrayed her sadness.

  “She was my mother’s best friend in the school. Lyuba Zalesskaya. Did you know her?” Natashen’ka placed on the table the halved picture of four youths.

  “That must be her.” Svetlana Andreyevna poked her finger at Natashen’ka’s mother. “I have never met her though. She was from an old aristocratic family as you must know, and Natasha was uncomfortable inviting her friend to our shed.” She moved her eyes to the taller of the two young men. “I have never seen him. But this one is Stepan. He was a pilot, came often to visit Natasha. She was in love with him. But your mother—”

  Natashen’ka gave her a questioning look.

  “So, she called you after my stepdaughter.” She shook her head, giving the impression she still was in disbelief. After a long moment of silence as though Svetlana Andreyevna hesitated about revealing something, she uttered, “Your mother broke them up, as much as I know from my stepdaughter. She wasn’t too candid with me.” Her lovely face stilled and grew serious.

  “What happened to Natasha?”

  “I don’t know much. When after the war her father—” She half-turned to glance at a framed picture of herself with a very handsome man whose eyes, despite the black-and-white snapshot, appeared as luminous as Natasha’s on the photo. “He set off for Vitebsk and came back with sad news. Natasha was killed and left a daughter behind. Afanasiy made an inquiry and only years later I—my husband had died by that time—received—wait, I’ll show it to you.” She rushed to the desk and, after rummaging for something in its drawer, brought an official document, judged by its letterhead.

  Based on your request, we could find the following information:

  Natalia Afanasievna Ivanova, born August 13, 1913 in Lipetsk, residing at Komminusticheskaya 11, Vitebsk, Byelorussian SSR was reported killed on January 3, 1943. She left behind a daughter, Lyubov Sergeyenva Ivanova, born on October 29, 1942 (as recorded in the civil registry books to the Civil Council of Vitebsk). Her daughter’s whereabouts are unknown. Your sister Anna Stepanovna Ivanova died on April 2, 1945. Buried in the Troichanskoye cemetery.

  “I have sent numerous inquiries about Natasha’s daughter to various authorities, but nothing came of it.” A sigh escaped her.

  After they talked a bit more while drinking some tea—a usual Russian hospitality—Natashen’ka thanked Svetlana Andreyevna and exited into the lovely warm day. A thought, a nagging thought, didn’t leave her. She set off for the house where she’d lived with her mother, sat on the bench tagged to its wall and, inhaling the sweet and ripe scent of their flowers, watched the linden trees, now much taller than she remembered them.

  Svetlana Andreyevna’s reaction stuck with her. And she mentioned eyes. What was it about my eyes that astounded her? All of a sudden, something clicked in her mind, thoughts swirling so quickly it was hard to follow them. Natasha’s daughter was born in October 1942 as to the statement from the Vitebsk Civil Council. When was Natasha killed? In January 1943? Her mother told her once they arrived at Lipetsk on May 8, 1945 and that’s where, soon afterward, her birth certificate was issued. According to it, she was two-and-a half years old then. On one occasion, somewhat vaguely, her mother mentioned she had been in German captivity. If I was born in captivity . . . It didn’t link with the series of events. To slow the sprinting of her heartbeat, she took deep breaths through her nose. She couldn’t be Lyuba’s daughter. But of course she was, she corrected herself. Her mind racing, searching for answers, seemed to connect all missing pieces together. Can it be possible that—? She moved her eyes up and as if looking for answers star
ed at the windows behind which she’d lived with her mother. Can it be really possible—? She covered her mouth with a hand, shaking her head and closing her eyes. Suddenly, as if experiencing a beautiful dream, she saw in her mental eye her mother and Natasha embracing each other and reaching each with one arm to her. That was it. She was sure she knew the truth now.

  Mama. You may have not been my biological mother, but you gave me so much love and care, you’ll always be my mom. Natasha, thank you for giving me life and I love you without remembering you and will always be thankful to you. So were her feelings as she sat on the bench by the house where she’d spent fifteen happy years with her mother and let hot exultant tears trickle down her cheeks.

  That was months ago.

  With much effort, Natashen’ka wills herself to return to the reality of the day and place and listen to the praising accounts of her archival work. She is aware of the smile spreading on her face and feels the weightlessness she’s carried in her since that fateful day when she met her mothers.

  Glossary

  Agitprop brigades—the groups of Komsomol and Communists members who spread the political propaganda, especially the communist propaganda used in the Soviet Union to the general public through public lectures. Typically, Russian agitprop explained the ideology and policies of the Communist Party and attempted to persuade the general public to support and join the party and share its ideals

  “Bitter! Bitter!”—an encouragement for newlyweds to kiss each other during the wedding party

  Budenovka—a distinctive type of hat, a classic part of the Communist military uniform of the Russian Civil War (1917-1922). It is a soft, woolen hat that covers the ears and neck. The cap features a peak and folded earflap that can be buttoned under the chin

  Belomorcanal—Russian brand of cigarettes, also the White Sea-Baltic Canal, a ship canal in Russia opened in August 1933