In September, autumn is just beginning in Krasnodar. The sky is blue, the city’s trees heavy with ripe fruit, and the sun, although lower in the sky, is still warm. When you come there from autumnal Moscow, you immediately feel more alive, especially if there is someone warm and kind waiting for you. In Yekaterina’s apartment there was also borshcht waiting for us, the real borshcht you find only in Ukraine and the southernmost parts of Russia, and “wee blues” (aubergines to a Russian), and slices of bread and baloney and tea with chocolates, and stories and more stories. Our new friend, who a week ago had not known we existed, welcomed us like family. Almost ninety years old and limping heavily from a severe wound suffered at Sevastopol, she bustled round the apartment carrying cups and dishes. Her round, pleasant face was wreathed in smiles. She was pleased to have visitors, and talked endlessly about the war, about herself, her sons, her grandchildren, about her city and her neighbours and friends.
We had come to Krasnodar because, seventy years ago, Yekaterina Terekhova, Katya Peredera as she then was, had been a sniper in the war, with a tally of thirty Germans killed or wounded. I had already met many women snipers. I had drunk tea with them, listened to their tales of sniper school and the front line, and about life after the war. My heart went out to them, I pitied them in their old age and infirmity, but all the while I was listening out for an answer to one particular question: were they tormented by the thought of the lives they had taken?
The sharpest, most clear-cut answer I got to that was the one Yekaterina vouchsafed, on behalf both of herself and, I felt, the rest of her comrades. She was telling me about some lunatic sectarian preacher who had latched on to her and called upon her, in view of her great age, to lose no time repenting her sins. To this she had said in surprise, “What sins do I have? I have never stolen anything. I have never killed anyone.” This kind, sweet woman had spent her life trying to help people in the entirely peaceable profession of a doctor, and she had not the slightest doubt that the whole of her existence had been occupied by doing good, including the time when she was at the front. In fact, especially then.
How many of my generation, the “children of perestroika”, would go out today to die for our country? How many would be willing to kill for it? We would do well to try, at least partly, to understand the young women, contemporaries of our grandmothers, who took up arms in that war. This book is an attempt to see the Second World War through their eyes.
LYUBA VINOGRADOVA
JANUARY 2017
MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE