Читать книгу Inside the Rzhev Meatginder - Геннадий Федорович Русаков - Страница 5

I met the beginning of the war in the Moscow region, in the urban-type settlement of Novopetrovskoe, where I lived with my father and mother.

I was in my eighth year. We lived renting a small room in a private house. We found ourselves in Novopetrovskoe because in 1934, during a thunderstorm, my maternal grandmother’s house was struck by lightning, the house burned to the ground.

Only my great-grandfather’s elderly father was in the house, he was 104 years old. All the village adults worked in the fields; it was August – the height of the harvesting work. When they saw and realized in the field that he was on fire, his grandmother’s son rode into the village on horseback, but all he managed to do was pull out his grandfather, resting and not understanding what was happening.

Everything was burned, including the property of our family, because after the wedding, my father and mother lived with their grandmother, my mother’s mother, in this village with the offensive name of Tupitsino. They were still building their house, in another, neighboring village, where his father was born and all his relatives lived, with the name Egor’evskoe. It turned out that from the clothes we had only what we were wearing that day.

His father asked the chairman of the collective farm to let him go so that he could earn money for clothes. In collective farms, money was not paid, earnings were accrued in working days. By the decision of the board of the collective farm, my father was released, but not immediately and with the condition that he would return after some time back. He worked in a collective farm as a livestock breeder. Why he ended up in Novopetrovskoe, and not in Moscow, where he worked from the age of eight for a merchant from this village, “a boy on the run”, I do not know. A year later, his mother left for him, and we: my sister, me and my younger brother stayed with my paternal grandmother. But the following year, my mother, having been in the village and leaving again to live with my father, took me with her. Why me, and not my brother or sister, I don’t know.

That’s how I ended up in this village. All the money earned, except for housing and food expenses, mom tried to spend on the purchase of everything related to clothes. I bought a manual sewing machine, searched and, if possible, bought different fabrics. We were small and growing up quickly, so it was not practical to buy ready-made clothes. My father’s job involved traveling around the neighborhood, so he bought a bike for himself. By June 1941, we had accumulated a large suitcase of all sorts of fabrics.

My father left on conscription on the 4th day of the war – June 26. Saying goodbye to us, he told my mother that the war would be hard and long, so he advised her to go home to the village. There, as I wrote above, we had our own house. A Roma woman with her children temporarily lived in it, she left the camp in 1936 and got a job on a collective farm, her father allowed her to live until she built her house. In the same village lived all our paternal relatives – four of his brothers, their mother – Maria Ivanovna 63 years old, her parents – father Ivan Severyanovich 96 years old and mother Natalia Egorovna 92 years old, with them lived their daughter, grandmother’s sister – Elena Ivanovna 57 years – disabled since childhood.

“In the village,” he said, “on the ground, it will be easier to feed children and the elderly.” And we went to the village of Tverskaya, then Kalinin region, Pogorelsky district – not far from Rzhev, taking with us all the property that we had managed to accumulate.

It was a very beautiful village called Egor’evskoe, located along the banks of two streams: Derzha and Sukromlya, which flowed into the Derzha.

My mother took my sister from my grandmother 9 years old and my younger brother 5 years old, they lived with her, as I said, while my father and mother and I tried to settle in the suburbs, and we settled in our house. The gypsy was not touched, it seemed to be safer together, she and her mother were the same age, especially since she had nowhere to move or leave.

In August, the harvesting of bread began and all the adult, able-bodied population, all women, worked in the fields from morning to late evening. Of the men in the village, there were only old men, but they were also engaged in various repair work, even my paternal great-grandfather, at the age of 96, was engaged in the repair of equipment, harnesses, wagons – everything that fails from hard work.