At the orphanage Lenina had a dream. She was wearing her white blouse and red Young Pioneer tie. Some children called out to her, ‘Your father! They’re bringing out your father!’ She ran outside and saw her father from behind, being led by three men with rifles. They took him to the steep bank of the great Dniepr River, at the edge of the orphanage’s grounds. He stood on the edge for a long time, as Lenina looked on, frozen in the paralysis of the dream. Then the three men fired their rifles into her father, silently. He fell, bouncing down the bank. It was the only time Lenina ever dreamt of her father.
By the end of 1938 Lyudmila had recovered sufficiently to go to kindergarten, but was in and out of hospital for a series of crude operations to cut away more and more tissue. The bones of her right leg had been rotted by the tuberculosis and she walked with a heavy limp. Nevertheless she was a cheerful and intelligent child, devoted to her sister. The orphanage was the only world she could remember, and she attained a kind of happiness there.
It was harder for Lenina, for her former life began to haunt her. She had been told by her teachers that her parents were ‘enemies of the people’, and were being punished. She should try to forget them. Uncle Stalin, whose portrait hung in the classroom, was looking after them now. Lenina chanted along with the other children, ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.’ But she still never doubted that she would see her beloved father again. When the teachers talked about the ‘bright future’, Lenina pictured being reunited with her father.
The steppes of the eastern Ukraine were flat and featureless, a land of giant skies as big as the whole world. In summer, Lenina would often go down to the Dniepr with the other children to bathe in the wide, slow-moving river, sliding on its muddy banks as they scrambled into the water. The stern rhythms of orphanage life left Lenina little room for reflection. And among hundreds of parentless children like themselves, the Bibikov sisters were more fortunate than most. They at least had each other.
But the peace the sisters found at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was soon shattered in its turn.
In the summer of 1941, Lenina was sixteen and Lyudmila seven. Lyudmila was looking forward to starting her first year of school, and Lenina was a senior member of the Young Pioneers, proud to wear the smart, starched uniform. Most mornings there was a parade, the various school classes dragooned into neat rows, with two older children acting as honour guards as the Soviet flag was run up the flagpole to a scratchy recording of the Soviet national anthem. Lenina and the older children sometimes sat reverently in front of a large Bakelite radio, listening to improving speeches and homilies on the children’s programme of Soviet State Radio. Later, in private, the adults listened to the evening news of the war that Germany had unleashed on France and Britain. But the conflict seemed a distant thing, the death throes of the decadent capitalist world as it turned in upon itself. The Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact two years before. The war concerned other people, far from the Dniepr plains.
It was a scorching summer. The steppe wind blew in clouds of dust from the dry fields, covering the orphanage buildings and the trees in the playground with a fine brown pall. For the children, life continued as normal during those baking days, as the German Army massed on the Soviet-Polish border.
Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler launched the blitzkrieg assault codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which quickly crushed Soviet resistance. Unbeknown to the sisters, their uncle Isaac, the engineer now turned pilot, was shot down and killed over Belarus in the first days of the war at the controls of his Polikarpov fighter, outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the swarms of Messerschmitt fighters who cleared the skies ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht. His family never found out where, or even if, he was buried.
Lenina and Lyudmila only heard the news of the attack days later from their solemn teachers, who had in turn heard it on the radio, which announced that the Red Army was heroically repulsing the invaders. It wasn’t true. Within ten days, Minsk had fallen. By 27 June, two German armies had advanced 200 miles into Soviet territory, a third of the way to Moscow. By 21 August the Werhmacht had cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway line and German Panzer divisions were advancing fast across the wheat fields of the Ukraine, pushing towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields.
Kiev fell on 26 September. Days later, the sound of distant guns could be heard at Verkhne-Dneprovsk, carried eastwards on the wind. Lenina was at school when the trucks came to mobilize the older orphanage children to dig trenches. They were told to leave their books and load up as quickly as they could. Lenina thought that they would be back soon, even in time for supper. Her sister, at school with the junior class, didn’t see her leave.
Lenina never returned to Verkhne-Dneprovsk. Her detachment of child trench-diggers was driven to the outskirts of the city, where they spent days shovelling the black earth on to the four-handled trays Russians use in place of wheelbarrows. Within days they began to fall back eastwards as the Germans advanced. They slept when they could, on sacks on the floors of hastily evacuated factories, or on the soft freshly dug earth. They would dig during the day and walk at night, moving back daily before the German offensive. There was no way to return to the orphanage, or to find news of Lyudmila or the other children they had left behind.
Lyudmila herself remembers very little of what happened next. Her recollection of that time seems as opaque as Lenina’s is clear. Lenina only heard the story after the war from one of her classmates who had stayed behind to do chores the day the older children were taken to dig, and again from Yakov Michnik, the director of the children’s home, who came to be a friend and benefactor.
As the front line approached Verkhne-Dneprovsk in the first days of October, the children left at the orphanage and at the hospital were stranded. All available transport had been mobilized, and as the bombing grew closer the last remaining staff decided to evacuate the infants by the only route still open to them – via the great steppe river which ran by the end of the orphanage’s territory. The orphanage director commandeered two large river rafts, designed to be hauled up river by horses, from a local collective farm. He loaded the forty remaining children on board. Then, as dusk fell and an artillery barrage flashed in the sky, the six remaining staff pushed the barges full of children out into the stream, propelling the rafts with poles until the current caught them and carried them away into the darkness.
6. War
Die, but do not retreat.
The barges drifted in the Dniepr’s slow stream all night. At dawn they ran aground near a village on the eastern bank of the river. The local peasants still had carts and horses, and the orphanage director arranged for the children to be loaded up and transported to the nearest railhead at Zaporozhiye. There, amid the tumult of a city preparing to be overrun by the Germans, Michnik passed his children into the care of the local authorities. He saw no more of them – except for a few who survived the war and came, as Lenina did, to visit, in curiosity and gratitude, as adults. At Zaporozhiye, the children joined a giant, chaotic stream of human flotsam fleeing before the German advance.
Lyudmila’s own memory of her evacuation through the chaos of the Red Army’s retreat in the autumn and winter of 1941 is a disjointed series of images. She remembers standing at a high window, looking out over a flat landscape, watching bombs falling in the distance with great white flashes, feeling the percussion through the floorboards. She remembers standing with the other orphanage children in a line by the side of a muddy road one rainy autumn day, holding out mugs of water for an endless stream of soldiers trudging by on their way to the front. She recalls spending nights in the forest, shivering under thin blankets and listening to the eerie woodland silence.