Chapter 14
At Burma camp, news of the situation on the front lines reached the camp irregularly and with delays. The war had little effect on camp routines, but the prohibition of correspondence tragically compounded the emotional distress of those prisoners whose relatives were in the war zone. Braina had more than enough cause for worry. Ever since the news of the Germans’ capture of Minsk and Bobruisk became known, anxiety for the fate of her mother, her sister, her brothers, and Ida had been increasingly strongly gripping her every thought.
Disturbing letters came from Lena in Kharkiv. She became convinced that she had made a big mistake when she left the collective of the orphanage. And although trying not to upset her mother, by attempting to poke fun about her uncertain situation, beneath her deliberately cheerful words Braina sensed the confusion, anxiety, and fear of her inexperienced, defenseless young daughter, who unexpectedly found herself in conditions of dire need and real danger. Lena looked forward with great impatience to her mother’s return letters and begged her to hurry, but Braina was deprived of such an opportunity, and her heart trembled from a premonition of calamity!
In Kharkiv, at first, everything for Lena went as well as could be. Together with Natasha, she managed to submit documents to the admissions committee of the Automobile and Highway Institute, and per the lack of competition, they both were without delay immediately enrolled as students, issued student ID cards, promised stipends and a place in the dormitory.
Natasha and Lena — students of the Automobile and Highway Institute. Kharkiv, 1941.
Classes were scheduled to begin on September 10th, and in the meantime, the girls were offered a small wage to clean the classroom buildings. This offer came in very handy for Lena, who was already running out of money from her meager savings. A few days later Lena was offered to relocate to a private house where the Institute rented a room for its students. She was happy to move into the dormitory from out of Natasha’s relatives’ apartment, where she felt uncomfortable and awkward.
The house in which she, along with three new students, had been placed, was surrounded by a large, beautiful garden. Ripe apples, pears, and plums grew on the trees. The landlady was friendly to the tenants, the girls also quickly got along well, and Lena with good spirits was ready to start classes, continuing to earn extra money by scrubbing floors and windows in the offices and lecture halls of the institute. Busy with this work, she did not see Natasha for a few days, and when they met, she learned that the collective of their former orphanage were in Kharkiv for three days, and then went by rail to Saratov.
Natasha managed to see her sister at the freight station and saw Kim there, who looked quite well, but she was not able to talk to him. Lena wrote to Braina about all this, and she regretted very much that she had missed the opportunity to give him her address.
Despite the increasingly alarming situation, classes at the institute began in the first days of September. Meanwhile, German planes were bombing the city every day, and artillery cannonade was increasingly heard somewhere in the distance. Only a small portion of the students appeared in the auditorium. Next to the cramped class schedule board, an announcement was posted that no stipend would be paid out during the first semester. Many departments and offices were closed. There was a rumor that some professors and faculty had already left the city and that others were preparing to depart.
A few days later, instead of a lecture, a general meeting was held at which a representative of the directorate announced that the Institute was temporarily suspending its activities due to the danger of bombing. Despite this, the speaker also assured them that there was no reason to panic, no need to leave the city, and expressed confidence, that soon the Red Army under the leadership of the Communist Party and the ingenious leader Comrade Stalin would successfully complete the defeat of the Nazi invaders, the bombings would cease, and the Institute would resume its normal mode of operation.
But these formal assurances could not assuage Lena. She was not prepared for this unexpected turn of events, and she was unprepared and confused. Her earlier plans and hopes related to her studies and living in Kharkiv were crumbling. Intuitively, she anticipated the impending danger, and her instinct for self-preservation told her to get away from the front lines to safe areas of the country before it was too late. But she, a lonely girl, almost a teenager, with no means, no relatives or friends, was afraid to venture at random into the unknown, where no one was waiting for her, no one knew her, no one would shelter her. Like never before, during these days she needed the sensible, intelligent, benevolent advice of her mother, the dearest and most devoted person, but she had heard nothing from her since the beginning of the war. Lena was at a loss as to guess the reasons for Braina’s unusually prolonged silence, and the latter, in turn, grieved to the point of exhaustion, deprived of the opportunity to support her daughter in need with advice and a kind word.
Lena’s agonizing thoughts culminated in her decision to remain in Kharkiv and wait for the return of normal living and studying conditions, out of fear of being homeless and destitute in a foreign land. This decision was helped to no small degree by the daily assurances on the radio that the city would never be surrendered to the enemy, and by the example of Natasha and her relatives, who did not think about leaving.
Like most of the Soviet people befuddled by official propaganda, Lena sincerely believed in those days that the turmoil caused by the war would not continue for long: surely the great and wise Stalin had foreseen all the coming events in advance, the complete victory of the legendary Red Army over the Nazis was near, and she would soon wait for it along with hundreds of thousands of Kharkiv residents!
Having finally decided to stay, Lena began to look for work in factories, manufacturing plants, and institutions. Contrary to her expectations, it was not easy. Specialists were needed all around, and a seventeen-year-old girl with a high school diploma was rejected everywhere. Meanwhile, poverty ever more strongly tightened its noose. Worn out to the limit were the only pair of shoes – summer sandals; the entire wardrobe consisted of only two light dresses and a short autumn coat. There was enough money only for bread and milk, and now, after the closure of the institute, she needed to pay for her apartment also.
In the end, Lena was forced to apply to a large restaurant, where waitresses were required, although it was a job she did not like and that seemed humiliating. The wages of the waitresses in the restaurant were small, but they were entitled to get decent meals for free. With her first paycheck, Lena bought secondhand but sturdy shoes, a dress at the market, and paid her portion of rent for the apartment. She cheered up, things got better, even the regular bombings seemed less dangerous than before.
But at the end of October, a real disaster came: unexpected, terrible, irreparable. After fierce fighting, German troops entered the city. The death trap slammed shut. For a few days, life in the city froze. Then appeared the new government and city council, established by the occupiers. Intimidating decrees about the new orders were spread by radio, newspapers, and bulletin boards, for disobedience of which there was the threat of execution.
One of the first orders was that all home-owners together with the authorized representatives of the local authorities had to register all the people living in the town within the shortest possible time, and it was obligatory to state their nationality and religion. Jews, who were officially starting to be called nothing but kikes, had to be listed separately on specially designated yellow-colored paper. Jews were forbidden to use public transportation, to walk on sidewalks, and were required to wear distinctive yellow tags of a certain size on their outer clothing on the front and back.
Posters and caricatures appeared on streetcar stops, storefront windows, and billboards accusing Jews of the most incredible crimes. For Lena, everything that had happened in the city after the Nazis had arrived was so unnatural that it seemed like some kind of nightmarish fixation. She could not pull herself together, concentrate and think about how she ought to act in this terrible environment.
Frightened, confused, miserable and lonely, Lena sat cooped up in her room, where she was on one instance caught by her landlady, who resolutely stated that Lena had to hide her Jewish identity to save herself. She advised Lena, taking advantage of the fact that her neighbors only knew that she was a student from an orphanage and did not look like a typical Jew, to carefully correct her last name on her student ID card to German, after which she could safely claim that she was Russian. She should hide her passport safely underground until better times, and wherever required to, present only her student ID card. When asked about her passport or birth certificate, she was to say that shortly before the arrival of the new authorities, the certificate had been submitted to the police for the passport registration, which resulted in the passport not being received and the certificate being lost.
Lena followed her savior’s advice with deep gratitude and even cheered up. The landlady registered Lena at the district office as a Russian student and advised her not to stay at home, but to find a job, somewhere she would be safer and more calm. Lena returned to her former position at the restaurant, which already had new owners and new rules, but she was accepted without the usual red tape procedures, as the staff remembered her and treated her in a friendly manner. The restaurant was often frequented by German officers, officials, and local policemen. Serving them, Lena could not cope with the stress and fear. It drove her until the end of her shift to the point of exhaustion. But even after work, in her room, there was no peace from the constant feeling of danger, of doom, of despair. Again and again, shedding tears, Lena bitterly regretted her hasty, short-sighted actions, which had led her into a trap from which she saw no way out. In hopeless longing she appealed for salvation to providence, to the images of her parents and relatives, to the image of the great and wise leader and teacher Stalin.