So Yakov survived, and by 1942 had been made a Lieutenant-General. He lived in a large apartment in a handsome building for senior military officers. Varvara and her young child were hostile to the new arrival. Their reaction was perhaps a rational one. Harbouring the daughter of an executed and disgraced Party member put them in terrible danger. Nevertheless, Yakov insisted that his niece stay, and Varvara was grudgingly grateful for extra help with household chores. Lenina became a kind of unpaid servant, but she was at least comfortable and with her family. Yakov told Lenina about her uncle Isaac’s death. He also told her he’d had no news of Boris or Martha, and sternly warned her not to talk to anyone about what had happened to them. As the brother of a traitor, only good luck, and the war, had saved Yakov himself from a similar fate.
Lenina told the family how she had lost touch with her sister Lyudmila in the chaos of retreat. Varvara told Lenina, meanly, that she should not give herself any false hopes of ever finding her sister again.
Yakov secured Lenina a job as a radio operator at the Khodinskoye airfield in the suburbs of northern Moscow, where test pilots would fly the new Yak fighters rolling off the production lines of the Dynamo factory, where Isaac had once worked, as well as from the Lavochkin Construction Bureau, where Yakov was in charge of military procurement. She was good at the job, and the pilots liked her. They would sing duets with her over the radio waves as they flew their test flights. To the end of her life, she remembered her call sign – 223305 – and got indignant if anyone suggested she’d forgotten it. ‘I’ll forget my own name before I forget my call sign,’ she joked. In the evenings, with her uncle’s help, Lenina wrote requests for information about Lyudmila and delivered them by hand to the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, responsible for the Soviet Union’s orphanages. But there was no news.
Lenina spent the next two years with Yakov’s family. Like the years in Verkhne-Dneprovsk, it was a sort of peace. The tide of the war had turned after Hitler’s Sixth Army was surrounded and destroyed at Stalingrad, and the Red Army was beginning to advance westwards.
In the summer of 1944, as the fighting crossed into Poland and the Allies landed in Normandy, Yakov told Lenina he had a job for her. A colleague of Yakov’s, also a general, had heard that his son, with whom he had lost touch when the child was evacuated along with thousands of others from besieged Leningrad, was in a camp for displaced children in the Urals. Lenina was to fly to the camp with the necessary paperwork and bring the boy back to Moscow.
A week later Lenina was on a military flight to Molotov, now Perm, with the Russian crew of a Lend-Lease American Douglas transport plane. She wore her Air Force uniform, with her fore-and-aft pilotka cap jauntily perched on the back of her head. It was the first time she had ever flown.
In Perm the director of the local aircraft factory, a personal friend of Yakov’s, had arranged for an old twoseater Polikarpov fighter to take her to the displaced children’s camp to pick up the general’s son. The camp’s name was Solikamsk.
The battered little Polikarpov bounced to a halt on a makeshift airfield on the outskirts of the town, and Lenina and the young pilot walked together through the muddy streets to the main orphanage, an ornate pre-revolutionary red-brick building surrounded by a low wall. In the playground hundreds of ragged children were running around. As Lenina walked through the gates and up to the front door of the building she noticed a lame child lopsidedly running towards her.
‘Tak tse moya sestra Lina!’ shouted the child, in Ukrainian. ‘That’s my sister Lina!’
Lyudmila was toothless, her belly distended by hunger. As Lenina fell to her knees to embrace her sister, Lyudmila started crying and asking for food.
‘Yisti khoche! Yisti khoche!’ – ‘I want food!’
Lenina couldn’t speak. The pilot looked on in amazement, not understanding what had happened. Unable to separate the two sobbing sisters, he hustled them both inside and into the director’s office.
The director, a woman, broke down in tears when Lenina told her she had found her sister. She released the four-year-old boy Lenina had come for, but they had to wait agonizing hours as the pilot put a call through to his boss in Perm to ask him to call Moscow for permission to take Lyudmila back to Moscow. Someone reached Yakov by phone – no mean feat in wartime Russia – and he pulled strings. Permission was granted. Lenina flew back to Perm with two vomiting children squeezed on her lap in the gunner’s seat of the plane.
They stayed the night with a colleague of the aircraft factory director, who lived in one room of a communal apartment. Lenina noticed that the children kept getting up in the night to go to the toilet. In the morning she was woken by sounds of outrage from the communal kitchen. The children had eaten everything from the neighbours’ food cupboards, including a huge pot full of chicken and rice. Even as they left for the airport to catch a transport plane back to Moscow, Lyudmila and the boy began a massive bout of diarrhoea. Their malnourished bodies couldn’t cope with so much rich food.
Back in Moscow there was no room in Yakov’s apartment for the sick child, but he made sure that Lyudmila was sent to a centre for displaced Party members’ children in the Danilovsky Monastery. All the food was Lend-Lease aid from America, an unimaginable luxury. There was tinned Campbell’s tomato soup, corned beef, tuna and condensed milk. Most impressive of all were giant cans of Hershey’s chocolate powder, which Mila found so beautiful that she still remembers them fondly. Inside the tin lid was a seal of gold foil, which she would watch the hospital cooks reverently cut open. Nestling in the dark brown chocolate was a Bakelite spoon for measuring out the portions. Lyudmila felt deep wonder at seeing packaging so perfectly designed – and the idea of a disposable spoon was simply incomprehensible. To her it seemed that such a tin of chocolate could only come from the magic other world of her dreams.
7. Mila
Mila quickly put on weight, though her body was still deformed by tuberculosis. She spent six months at the Danilovsky Monastery, avidly reading big coloured American children’s comic books. She was ten years old. She had survived.
In the spring of 1945 she was transferred to a special home for sick children at Malakhovka, a short ride on the electrichka suburban railway from Moscow, where she began her recovery in earnest. Her belly was still distended from starvation ‘ it stuck out further than her nose,’ Lenina remembers – and her left leg was withered. But she was unfailingly cheerful, singing songs in the yard and playing hopscotch with the other children. Mila would volunteer for the food checking rota, in which children stood in the kitchens and watched the cooks open up the big tins of American corned beef to make sure that every gram of it went into their soup. Despite the wonderful American food, she was never to lose the psychological scars of starvation. ‘Childhood hunger stays with you your whole life,’ she told me. ‘You can never ever feel truly full again.’
All in all, among a generation which had survived the famines, the Purges and the war, Lenina and Lyudmila could count themselves among the lucky. They had their lives, and each other. All around them were those who had lost much more. Perhaps that is why the sisters were not torn apart by experiences so traumatic that it seems, to us, almost inconceivable to have survived. Mila had lived when the Spanish children with her had died; Lenina found her sister by pure chance when thousands of children never did. That was already plenty to be grateful for.