Caterina’s Reviews > Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II > Status Update

Our house burned down. The garden burned down. There were baked apples hanging on the apple tree. We gathered them and ate them.
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-- Varema Presnikova Kaminska, 6 years old. Now, a worker. (Spelling of name unclear; this is an audiobook.)

She lay for two days & couldn't walk, and on the third they took her away on a stretcher. There was only one way out of the camp: thru the chimney. Straight to heaven. . At night, she & I talked. "Does an angel come to you?" I wanted to tell her about my angel. "No. Mama comes to me. She always wears a white blouse. I remember this blouse she had, with cornflowers embroidered on it."
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I don't understand what strangers are, because my brother and I grew up among strangers. Strangers saved us! And what kind of strangers are they? All people are one's own. I live with that feeling, though I'm often disappointed. Peacetime life is different.

It's frightening to live alone in the house...When I come out from [the cellar] tanks are moving down the street..Suddenly I see a red star on the turret. Ours! I run to our house..If our tanks have come, Mama has also come! Some women with rifles are standing by the porch..One of them looks somewhat familiar. She reminds me of somebody. She comes closer to me&embraces me. The other women begin to cry. I shout, Mama!

I'll tell about the war, how war smells. ...the months of May and June in 1941 were cold. Usually lilacs blossom sometime in May, but that year they blossomed in mid-June. The beginning of the war for me is always associated with the smell of lilacs, and of bird-cherry. For me, these trees always smell of war.

I missed the time of childhood, it fell out of my life. I'm a man without a childhood. Instead of a childhood, I have the war.

It became connected like that in my memory: that war is when there is no papa.