After a few days Lenina was allowed to visit her sister during the daily exercise hour. She would save whatever scraps of meat or sugar lumps she could after the older girls had picked through her food, hide them in her underpants and give them to Lyudmila to keep up her strength. Sometimes their aunt Feodosia would come by with little packets of food, which Lenina would pull up on a string through the barred hospital window overlooking the street. Mila remembers the string and the little parcels of food. She also remembers being scolded for wetting the bed at night, and her sister Lenina crying all the time.
In late December, three weeks after they had been imprisoned, Lenina awoke in the middle of the night to find the cell filling with smoke. The cell door opened, and a panicking warder ordered the children out into the yard. The building had been set on fire by some older children to cover an escape attempt. The guards had let the dogs loose and they snapped at the children as they were ushered into the exercise yard. Ever since that night, Lenina has been terrified of dogs. The children shivered in the cold as the fire engines arrived. Lyudmila had also been brought out, lying on a stretcher, with other children evacuated from the prison hospital.
The prison burned all night. By dawn it was gutted and useless, and the children were frozen half to death in the yard, still under guard. A convoy of open trucks arrived to take them away in groups of twenty. Lenina and Lyudmila were on one of the last, bound for one of the more distant orphanages in the region. Their truck rode them north for most of the day, hungry and freezing cold, through driving sleet. Finally, they were unloaded at an ‘allocation centre’ for parentless children in Dnepropetrovsk. Lenina and Lyudmila were blue with cold and shivering so uncontrollably that Lenina remembers that she couldn’t speak. They were herded into a large hall, already filled with the children of Spanish Republicans, evacuated to the Soviet Union to save them from the civil war. The Spanish children, far from home, were bawling and terrified as they waited to be assigned to local orphanages.
A harassed desk officer took the list of names and ages from the new arrivals’ escort. He told Lyudmila to go with the other little children, and Lenina to stand aside and wait her turn. Lenina fell on her knees, pleading for the men not to take her sister away, embracing the pigskin boots of the guards. As she pleaded, a man in civilian clothes listened, leaning on the doorframe; as she told the story sixty-five years later in the kitchen of her apartment in Moscow, Lenina lumbered up and leaned by the kitchen door, arms crossed, to demonstrate. The man stepped forward, put his hand gently on the shoulder of the guard, said, ‘I’ll take her,’ leaned down and helped Lenina up off the floor.
The man was Yakov Abramovich Michnik, the director of a giant newly built children’s home at Verkhne-Dneprovsk, created to rehabilitate 1,600 street children, criminals and orphans and make then into new Soviet men and women. That evening Lyudmila and the youngest children, plus twelve-year-old Lenina, were driven to his orphanage in a bus. When they arrived, the children were showered and deloused, and their heads were shaved. They were assigned to dormitories according to age. Lenina was given a cot beside her sister’s bed in the hospital dormitory, down the corridor from the others. The nurses and supervisors confiscated the Spanish children’s shoes and dolls and took them for their own children. Lenina still dreams about the way the Spanish kids cried without their beloved toys, their last physical reminder of home. All night, they cried out ‘Mamá’.
As the shock of their arrest and imprisonment faded, Verkhne-Dneprovsk turned out to be a relatively happy place. They had food, and the teachers were kind. In her first days at the orphanage, Lyudmila tried to cool her burning fever by burying her legs in damp sand in a sandpit, Within weeks, her measles were cured, but it was discovered that she had caught tuberculosis of the bones, which spread rapidly due to her weakened immune system.
Lenina came to see her little sister at the local hospital’s infection ward every day after school. Lyudmila would stand on a chair and lean out of the window and wave and talk. One day when Lenina came to visit, she found Lyudmila red-eyed and silent. Her little Spanish friend Juan, ‘Juanchik’, who slept in the bed next to her had been taken away in the night, and no one would tell her where he had gone. The nurse told Lenina that Juan had died of tuberculosis. One by one, every one of the eighteen children who had been in the ward when Lyudmila was admitted died. My mother was the only child to survive.
Lenina couldn’t write to her relatives in Moscow because she couldn’t remember their address; even if she had, there was little chance that they would risk saving the children of an enemy of the people. She did write to their aunt Feodosia in Simferopol, but she didn’t come for them. Feodosia did, however, send news of her sister Martha. She had been sent to a place called Kazakhstan, Feodosia explained to her young niece, to a prison camp called KarLag. Her address was a post box number. Lenina would walk three miles each day from the orphanage to the local school, and in her free time scrubbed floors for her teachers in exchange for onions, small pieces of smoked pig-fat, sugar and apples. She would take the sugar and apples to Lyudmila in the hospital, but she saved the onions. When Lenina had collected ten onions, she made them into a small parcel. She addressed the brown paper package carefully to the numbered post box in Kazakhstan, did more chores to pay for the stamps, and posted it from the orphanage. Months later, she got a letter back from Martha. She thanked her daughter for the parcel, but told her she was a ‘fool’ not to have wrapped the onions individually in paper. As it was, they had arrived frozen and spoiled, Martha complained. Nevertheless, she asked after Lyudmila and wished her daughters well. She promised to be back to collect them soon. It was the last Lenina was to hear from her mother until after the war.
My mother doesn’t remember having any toys as a child, apart from a teddy bear she’d brought from Chernigov, which she lost in the children’s prison. The doll in the photograph taken at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was a photographer’s prop. Lenina remembers Lyudmila crying when she was told she couldn’t keep it after the picture was taken.
Lyudmila had a passion for drawing, but never, as she put it, ‘had any talent’. Despite her illness, she learned to read very early and soon was passing the long, lonely days in hospital reading books from the orphanage library. Books, and the wonderful worlds the words contained, took the place of friends. It was during the many months of enforced idleness in hospital which punctuated her childhood that she learned to live a fantasy life, constructed in her own lively mind. The mysterious, brooding forests of Pushkin’s stories, the magic carpet rides above the sleeping houses of Baghdad in the Arabian Nights, the fabulous monsters encountered by Sinbad the Sailor, and the high-stepping horsemen and witches of ancient Russia illustrated by Ivan Bilibin – these were the places to which she would escape in her childhood imagination. The harsh, antiseptic, loveless world around her became more tolerable in the knowledge that somewhere, far away, was a better place to which she would eventually travel. Even when she grew into a woman and her crippled legs had finally healed, this powerful vision of another, magical life – and the sense that that life could be won by endurance and pure force of will was never to leave her.