Partisan Years

The Coming of the War

On my 19th birthday, June 21, 1941 I had a family, a village, a life, even a man who wished to marry me when he finished his time in the Red Army. The war took all that from me.

But this is not my war story. It does not matter how many trains we destroyed, how many villages we organized, how many Fascists and Polizei we killed. Even the intelligence work doesn't matter. I did my part. You would've done the same. This is the story of what I felt, what I experienced. It is about the men who fought with me, who used me, loved me, betrayed me. Some were good, some were evil, most were somewhere between.

They're all dead now.

When the war started I was in my village. I'd come home from Minsk a few days before my birthday to help my father through a bout of illness before resuming my work in a print shop between university terms.

The war was on us so fast I had no time to get out, and when Minsk fell I had nowhere to go.

The Red Army reeled under the first blows, falling back from the border as the Germans cut round the flanks, seized bridges, captured roads, and drove the people from the fields in the early days of the harvest. Hundreds of thousands fell in defense of the great cities, hundreds of thousands more were forced into slavery at the point of the German bayonet.

Lazar, to whom I'd promised my hand, fell at Brest. He was twenty, a promising man, tall and strong, but kind and bookish. The notice of his death came days ahead of the Germans. I was one of the lucky ones in this, many others never knew what became of their men.

Some of the retreating soldiers were cut off near our village and lived in the woods for weeks, they were led by Felix, a political commissar from near Gomel. The fighting spared our village at first.

The executions started within days. The Germans shot party leaders, intellectuals, lingering soldiers hidden in the forests and the marshes, Jewish men old enough to fight. Some in the villages cheered this, those who'd lost lands or cattle in the late 20s, those who thought we were to blame for everything from rain to hunger. They turned in some of the partisans. Some signed up for the Polizei, they beat my father in the street because my mother was Jewish and he had raised us as Jews even after her death.

Felix and his band evaded the Fascists for a month until, in mid-August, short of everything, they attacked one of the German rear-area units on the Gomel road east of our village. I could hear the gunfire in the woods that night, the short pops of the bolt action guns and the barks of homemade shotguns, the clatter of pistol fire, then the machine guns.

Felix was dying when his comrades brought him into one of the barns. His men clustered about him, arguing in whispers. I could see them from the window of our hut. I'd heard what the Germans did to their own Jews, and something like fate moved me from where I stood. Some of the others who prayed for the victory of Soviet arms came running too, out to where he lay in the straw.

The shot that felled him had broken several ribs, torn something in his chest and crushed his lung, but the commissar looked up at his men, then at the few civilians around.

"They'll come for you in the morning," he said, his breath a rasp. "We meant to hit them and lead them north. But a second patrol..."

Just then, a couple of the villagers who hated the partisans appeared at the barn door, men I'd known from childhood, their faces contorting with some combination of glee and rage. One of them looked at me, his name was Pavel.

Behind, Felix gave a shuddering gasp and died. Pavel stepped into the dim lamplight. The partisans had removed their caps at the death of their commander, and Pavel's intrusion drew their eyes.

"Your day is coming now," Pavel said. "You Jews and you Reds. Stalin won't come to save you now."

I woke my father, my little brother, my little sisters, but they would not come.

"None of us are party commissars," my father said. He was still ill, still weak, and the beating Pavel had given him after the German occupation started had left him exhausted and cowed.

"They'll kill us all. Pavel and the--"

"We'll go in the dawn," he said. "The Prussians have paid with money for everything they took."

"The Prussians?"

"Go if you want, Natasha."

"Papa, Mama was in the Labor Bund, all of her things are still here. Your things from the war too. It won't matter to them that you're a Russian. It will matter that I am a Jew, that I am in the Komsomol, as are Shoshana and Rosa, and Joseph is in the Young Pioneers. That would be enough."

"Go if you want," was all he said. "We will follow in the morning."

I stuffed everything I could into the pockets of my jacket and a bag I could sling on one shoulder. Apples, half a loaf of bread, a tin cup, my one good sweater if the night should turn cold, the two books I'd brought with me from the library at the print works, Pushkin and Kollontai. I put on my good boots, which had belonged to my mother, and left.

But at the edge of the village I saw Pavel mounting one of the farm horses, his cap pulled low, the moon shining on him. He kicked the beast with his boot and it jumped away, off toward the Minsk road.

One of the partisans, a villager named Alexey Ivanovich, dropped to a knee and fired thrice. The last round struck Pavel on the shoulder and he nearly fell, but still he raced on.

The gunman stood, and looked back at me. He'd volunteered for the army the day the war started, but his unit was overrun before they could embark for training.

"Natalia Yakovlevna," he said. "You're going to the creek, to follow it to the marshes aren't you."

I nodded.

"Go west instead," he said. "Cut through the fields, to the stream at the boundary there, then upriver, not to the marshes, go as far as you can. The stream begins with a spring on a wooded hill, far from any road. It was not enough for our company, but it will hide one girl. The Germans will search the marshes in the morning, and that is where we will fight them."

"What if I want to fight?"

"Do you?"

I shrugged, a welter of emotion had me. I crossed to him. Alexey had a red star on his cap and the damp air about him was thick with the smell of his sweat and efforts of the last few days. He looked so handsome like that, in the moonlight, with the gun and his jacket open and grime on his face, like one of Chapayev's men.

"Do not come with us, Natasha," he said. "We are lost without Felix."

"Where else is there?"

"Vladimir Masovka is leading a band north of us," he said. "He's a bandit, but a fighter."

"Will they take me?"

"You can dress a wound, yes? You can walk twenty miles in a day?"

I nodded.

"Then to me you'd be as good as any man."

I threw my arms around his neck. He pressed his lips to my cheek.

"Goodbye Sasha," I said.

In the dawn, the plain was silent, from the low hills along the Gomel road to the east to the marshes below the village. Cool wind stirred the trees, and I felt absurd for running, how could anything terrible happen on such a soft morning.

But at noon, under the hammering sun, dark smoke rose from the direction of the village.

I found them when I returned at the next dawn.

A pile of my neighbors.

I did not stop to count. I did not look for my father, for my siblings. They'd gone to the marshes or southeast along the Gomel road, I told myself, though even then I could not believe it.

The houses were still smoking, save for Pavel's and the homes of a few other collaborators. The grain stood ripe and gold in the fields, the heavy black of the forests surrounded all, and cool mist clung to the earth. In the sky a perfect, cloudless blue held the promise of a hot day. The sort of day that would shake you with its heat, make the sweat run hard when you bent to the harvest, but give a taste of the autumn chill with the night to cool all but the little spot at the back of your neck where your sister gathered your hair in a tight black braid for the hour when everyone gathered to talk, to dance, to sip on the vodka a little, in the endless summer twilight.

Only there would be no quiet words at the edge of a grove that night, no smiling Lazar to come and pull me to the dance, my body on fire under his touch. There never would be again.

Everyone who'd danced or drank with me, who'd known my name, loved me since I was a child, who'd called me beautiful, was dead.

Vladimir Sergeyivich Masovka

It took me five days to find the partisans of Vladimir Sergeyivich Masovka.

Five days of skirting the roads, of hiding in trees, bathing in the streams, stretching my food until it was done, and then of walking to keep from feeling my hunger. Five days of dodging every human form, of weeping when I stopped walking, or when the smell of the fields reminded me of home, or the long shadows of the trees in the evening sun recalled the days before even the Polish war, when it seemed at last the grip of the Yezhovshchina was ended and we would work as brothers all.

Five days of following the rumors of the partisans.

In a thicket, well north of the village, all the way in another district, I found them.

Before the war, Vladimir Sergeyivich was the sort of man who could get you anything: cigarettes, clothes from abroad, phonograph parts, smuggled food, books the censors had rejected. No one knew for sure how he made his trade, save that during the terror, many around him had gone to Siberia without the right of correspondence, and several of his customers had vanished entirely. He worked, as far as I knew, between Minsk, Gomel and Mogilev as something of a fixer for anyone with money or power.

He was a gangster of the sort to flourish under any government, and I'd wondered why he opposed the Germans when there was so much money to be made in working with them.

It was only because I had nowhere to go that I sought out his band.

I heard the click of the revolver before I saw it. Five days in the woods had accustomed me to the silence of the woods, the buzz of insects and the snapping of branches. The sound of it was alien.

"Still, little one," a voice said.

I raised my hands to the cap on my head, turning to find the voice. Bitter fear flooded my mouth.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"The avengers of the people."

"Are you with Masovka?"

The voice said nothing. I heard stirring in other bushes and sensed I'd made a mistake.

"How do you know that name?" Another voice called.

"The partisans of my village gave it to me when they told us to run from the Germans."

"Which village?"

I told them and they said nothing for a long moment.

"I have come to avenge my people," I said to the silence.

Vladimir Sergeyivich's camp was far off. To reach it, I was marched blindfolded by what I sensed was a circuitous route. By the time we reached it, I was faint with hunger.

The camp itself was well concealed, compact, a warren of burrows and huts built into the forest floor with a disused dacha as its headquarters.

The men were Byelorussians mostly, a few Russians and Ukrainians, a single Armenian from a tank company, a pair of Jewish men who'd fled Minsk ahead of the Fascists. They had guns, Mosin-Nagants, captured Mausers, pistols, shotguns, hunting rifles. I counted thirty men and twenty rifles as I waited with my hands bound on the porch of the dacha.

Vladimir Sergeyivich returned from one of his patrols. He was a big man, broad shouldered, imposing, with a mustache and several day's stubble. He called his section commanders, a bespectacled soldier in a Red Army uniform and a one-eyed peasant, together.

They interviewed me, and I answered as I'd rehearsed, Name, village, how I came to know them, how much I wished to fight the Germans. At last, Vladimir asked for my papers and I turned them over.

"Natalia," he said. "What sort of Jewish name is that?"

"My father loves Tolstoy."

His eyes returned to the paper.

"Komsomol, university student," he said. "Another fucking idealist, coming to eat our bread and waste our bullets."

"Volodya," the one-eyed man said. "She's tough enough to find us."

"So were others," he said. "Who have fallen already."

"We need more," the bespectacled one said. "If she can work, I vote she can stay. If she can shoot, I don't see why she shouldn't be with us as a soldier."

"Look at her, Kiril," Vladimir said to the bespectacled one. "She can't be more than fifty kilos soaking wet. She's a kitten. She'll sicken and die. She'd collapse with hunger right now. Push her over like a blade of grass if you want. She'll never be strong enough to contribute anything of military value."

"I had some medical training in the civil defense," I said. "I know the land south of here and towards Gomel. And."

"Quiet, girl," Vladimir said.

"Even if you're right," Kiril said. "It wouldn't tax us much to have her on. We don't have a doctor or a nurse."

"It's men who die of hunger," the one-eyed man said. "That one would survive on acorns and winter air. Besides, look at that face, she's beautiful with hatred for them."

Vladimir looked me up and down. He had green eyes, flecked here and there with brown, and his dark hair was streaked in places with gray and combed back to show his broad, intelligent face.

"Fine," he said. "Kiril, she's in your section. Put her with the other idealists. Get her some proper clothes and a bath, we can't have her spreading any typhus."

"Yes, Comrade Masovka," Kiril said.

There was no running water in the camp, but Commissar Kiril Denisovich gave me soap, a razor and led me to a zinc basin full of water behind a screen near the dacha.

"Shave what you can," he said. "The typhus lice live in the seams of clothing and in the body hair. If you sicken with it, they will shoot you far enough away from camp that the lice won't come back."

"Why?"

"Disease is worse than the Germans," Kiril said. "For us, for now. We're building our strength, not wasting it the way Commissar Felix did. We will move among the people like fish through the sea. To do that we cannot be vectors of contagion."

"I see."

Kiril told me, as he introduced me to the men of his section, that he'd been a commissar in a rifle regiment, that he'd escaped execution at the Germans' hands only because his pack was destroyed by a shell fragment and his coat was too blooded from tending his wounded soldiers to keep wearing. There were so many prisoners in those days some could escape just by leaping into the rivers or sneaking away in the night.

He told me too how Vladimir had come from Minsk with remit from the NKVD and the Army to organize the men, how he could smuggle arms, how the men believed in him not because he was a communist, but because he was smart enough not to throw their lives away, he was fighting the war to win it, not to prove a point.

I liked Kiril from the start, he was light eyed, dark haired, slender with a sharp, handsome face that had a hint of boyish sentiment left in it. He was twenty four, he told me, and he'd joined the party fresh out of school. He said nothing of his role in the terror--that would come later.

I was inducted alongside two volunteer boys from a nearby collective farm.

Then we ate potatoes and cabbage soup leavened with horseflesh for our rations. I'd never tasted anything so good. Later, there would be kasha in the mornings, and turnip stew or black bread or nothing at night. Lots of nothing. Enough nothing to kill.

But that night, clean and fed, in the company of soldiers, I felt halfway like a human. Maybe, maybe my father had made it out. Maybe he wasn't running to putrescence in the open fields. Maybe the armies before Kiev and Leningrad and Moscow would stop the Germans before the autumn rains. All this seemed possible in the dim closeness of the burrows.

Before we slept, Vladimir Sergeyivich called the three of us inductees to him. He spoke briefly, of the sacred vow we'd taken, how we had to be hard, how the war had changed everything.

As the others left, he spoke my name.

"Natalia Yakovlevna, remain for a moment."

"Yes, Comrade."

"I'm sorry for your family," he said. "For your village."

"Thank you."

"They've killed many of your people already. Because they think you're weak. Because they think you won't serve the Soviet Union. Because they think you won't fight."

I said nothing. My chest was tight with feeling, anger maybe, that he implied the Germans might be right about us, relief that he suggested they were not.

"I don't know if you'll prove them wrong."

"I intend to."

"Intent is nothing," Vladimir said, rising from the pine chain behind the lone desk in the dacha's main room. "Action is everything."

He came around the desk, between me and the door.

"Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I said.

"Men fight. Women, I don't know. Kiril thinks that all mankind have it in them to be lions. But there are other forms of worth."

I nodded, hesitating. Then he looked at me close in the dim light of the oil lamp.

"Yuri was right, even with one eye," he said. "Under all that dirt you are beautiful."

My stomach was going in knots. I was unnerved by the softness of his voice.

He drew closer.

"If it's not fighting that will make you worth our bread, maybe it's beauty."

"Comrade," I said. "Comrade. I'd like to sleep. I'd like to go."

He placed a hand on my face and a second at my waist and kissed me as only Lazar had, pushing his tongue into my mouth with a force that shocked me. I wanted to call out, to push him back or scream.

But what flashed through my head was an image of the pale bodies at the back of my village and Pavel's house standing. Pavel whose eyes had roamed my body as freely as his tongue had lashed me, Pavel the Polizei, and all the others like him who would pass me to the Germans for a loaf of bread, or just for the joy of seeing me hurt.

I pulled my head back.

"I don't want to."

"You had a volume of Kollontai in that schoolgirl satchel," he said. "You little slut. It's just as serious as a glass of water." He kissed me again, his grip tight on me. "And I am parched."

I shied again, backing away, but he followed the movement and pushed me into the wall of the room, so hard the breath left my lungs. He slid one rough thumb across my lips.

"I saw how hungry you were at the mess."

That thumb and his hand slipped down to my throat, pressed hard at it. His other hand worked at the buttons on the shirt I'd been given, then into the gap, sliding down to the cloth that supported my breasts.

He brushed one of my nipples as he kissed me again and a jolt of feeling, not pleasure, not pain, just intensity, followed. Fear had made me run cold, and in my head I heard no words, just the howl of wind. He slipped his mouth to my neck, kissing at it. His big hand cupped my breast now, massaging gently.

I thought of Lazar broken by a German shell, how soft his hands had been before the war, how hesitant he'd been to touch me, afraid for my virtue, afraid of his own desire. I set my feet and shoved.

"Do not touch me like that," I said. I shifted to try and break past him, but Vladimir caught me in his arms and his voice rang in my ear.

"I've had many girls," he said. "You can make it pleasant for yourself, I know what I'm doing, or you can struggle and I will fuck you anyways. Then later, maybe in a month, maybe in six, the pleasure will come for you."

Everything in my body revolted at this and I struggled in his grasp, trying to plant my feet and get some purchase, I could shove the both of us over maybe and tumble from his grasp. But he broke my balance before I had the chance.

"Pity," he said. "I was going to be gentle. I only wanted you to suck me off, and I would've rubbed you in a way to steal your breath."