Читать книгу Inside the Rzhev Meatginder - Геннадий Федорович Русаков - Страница 7

For the first time the fascists appeared in our village on September 7. I remember this day well, it was a Sunday, and my sister and I were at home, not at school. I went to the first grade on the first of September and my sister to the second grade. We studied for only one week. There were no adults in the village, as I said, there was a harvesting of bread. The day was warm and sunny, and almost all the kids were outside, we played something with balls. It was about noon when we saw something strange approaching us from the village of Tupitsino and dragging a huge tail of dust with it.

The Germans arrived in a car that had tracks instead of rear wheels. There were 4 people in the car. In the village, in general, we never saw any cars other than tractors, so we looked with surprise at this “miracle – yudo”!

An officer got out of the car and on a broken Russian, poking his finger into some paper, as I found out later, in the map, pointing his hand in the direction of the river, asked: “Is this Derzha? Where is Sukromlya?”

We guessed that he was asking about our rivers and replied, “Sukromlya at the other end of the village.” He wrote something down and got in the car. She turned around and moved, but then in the next yard, for some reason, a pig squealed, the car stopped, two came out of it – this officer and a soldier. They went to the house and started knocking on the doors, but no one answered because the adults were in the field and there were two small children at home. The eldest was probably five years old, and maybe even less, I don’t remember exactly. Without waiting for an answer to the knock, the officer said something to the soldier, he went to the car, brought and put what he brought under the door. The officer said something to us and waved his hand to get us off, we walked away. An officer and a soldier walked around the corner of the house. Almost immediately there was an explosion, the door was torn down, the soldier entered the courtyard, a shot rang out.

The soldier came out of the yard, dragging the dead pig by the leg. The officer took some papers out of his pocket, put them on the rubble of the house, crushed them with a small pebble, said: “Payment.” These were, as it turned out later, occupation stamps. The pig was loaded into the car, got on their own and drove away. I described in such detail the first meeting with the occupiers because the second visit to our village by the Germans directly affected me.