Читать книгу Inside the Rzhev Meatginder - Геннадий Федорович Русаков - Страница 8

On Monday, my sister and I went to school, classes were not canceled, no one knew that new owners would appear, although they appeared, but left, no orders were received from the school.

The school was located in a nearby village, in the same Tupitsino (stupidsino), 3.5 km from Egor’evskoe. All our relatives on my mother’s side lived there. At the end of the week, if I’m not mistaken, on Thursday, a German officer appeared in class. He spoke well in Russian and explained to the old teacher Elizaveta Kapitonovna (my mother also studied with her) that now she needed to conduct lessons in a new way. He will try to monitor the correct training of students. Students should know: The Soviets and Stalin are bad. Germany and Hitler are good. This was central to his rather long conversation with the teacher.

When the German left, the teacher said: “I don’t know how and what can happen later, but I think you don’t need to come to school anymore.” That’s how our school year ended.

About three days after class cancellations, my sister and I decided to throw ourselves a party. I think it was a Sunday, again there were no adults in the village, as I said, they cleaned the bread. And we: me, my sister and brother were at home and drinking tea. A samovar was boiling on the table, and under the table was a small bag of sugar. I took it out of the cache, it was our military reserve.

When one of the neighboring children shouted on the street: “Germans!”, I, remembering what happened on the first appearance of them in our village, climbed under the table to hide this bag back in the cache. I hurried, pushed the table and knocked over the boiling samovar on myself. The burn was terrible, probably half of my skin came off, and I was in bed for a long time. Naturally, there was no hospital in the village, my mother treated me – she lubricated the burns with the protein of raw eggs – so told my great-grandmother on my father,” she was considered a medicine woman in the village. All the villagers were treated by her.

The nearest medical facility was 12 kilometers away. I recovered slowly. While in our village the fascists were only raids – chickens were still walking through the streets and all other peasant animals were still intact.

But when the garrison was stationed in October, the chickens, the “eggs”, and other village animals very quickly ran out. But my mother, in advance, hid a number of testicles in different places and continued my treatment, taking out one, two pieces from the caches. At that time, there was no place for us in the house, the Nazis already lived in the living rooms, and we huddled in the kitchen. A gypsy woman with her children was taken somewhere.