Escape into Danger: The True Story of a Kievan Girl in World War II
328
Escape into Danger: The True Story of a Kievan Girl in World War II
328Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781442214682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2011 |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
ESCAPE INTO DANGER
The True Story of a Kievan Girl in World War IIBy SOPHIA ORLOVSKY WILLIAMS
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Copyright © 2012 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4422-1468-2
Chapter One
FULL OF SPUNK
My mother never wavered in her assertion that the Soviet Union and I were born by accident. She never wanted to have any children, and she pined for the czar. My father, eight years younger than my mother, welcomed both of us—his only daughter and the Soviet regime.
My mother and her family were Roman Catholics of polish and German ancestry. My father was Jewish—never mind my mother's claim that he had converted to Catholicism. When in time I became aware of such things, I understood that my father could not have converted because he was a Bolshevik inclined to atheism. I was born on December 29, 1923. They named me Sophia and a priest baptized me, but I was not reared a catholic.
We lived with my Jewish grandparents and Uncle Lazar in Podol, a low-lying district of Kiev, where my small life was steady and secure.
Chestnut trees were in bloom when in 1928 we moved up the hill to Vladimirskaya Street No. 45, in the very navel of the city and diagonally across from the opera house. This location delighted my mother, a former singer with the opera. My father was quite satisfied: he found two large rooms for us in an eight-room apartment occupied by seven families. In those days, that was a feat.
My delight was the courtyard, large and alive with noisy children playing games of hopscotch, hide-and-seek, and tag. Boys were kicking a ball and running madly after it. Even while the movers were unloading our furniture and trying to get me out of their way, I met my future playmates, classmates, and friends.
The movers struggled with our old grand piano up the 109 steps to the top floor. As soon as they left, I ran upstairs. My mother was singing an aria from The Barber of Seville. She surveyed the unfurled Oriental rugs and set out to decorate the creamy walls with paintings, a stuffed baby crocodile, and a Caucasian dagger. She hung her portrait over the marble fireplace where logs would burn in winter.
These were the final days of the New Economic policy, the brief period after the Russian Revolution when private enterprise was permitted. The firewood to keep our rooms warm was still plentiful, and the water to flush our communal toilet was still running.
Every summer we spent at our dacha in the forest of Pushcha Voditsa. Wild strawberries and mushrooms grew in the woods in profusion; a heavenly scent hung in the air when the jasmine and wild cherry trees were in bloom. Aunts and cousins and both grandmothers often spent the day with us, and we went on picnics in the meadows alive with butterflies. We carried blankets and baskets filled with food and drink. Many visitors flocked to the dacha for joyful social evenings. They drank vodka from cucumbers cut in half and scooped out—one of my mother's inventions. She claimed vodka tasted better that way.
My father usually arrived at the dacha after work. I'd always be there, waiting for him at the streetcar stop. "How are things, Sonyechka?" he'd ask me, his Sonya, lifting me on his shoulders and carrying me home. I felt proud of my father; he was tall and lean, and his full head of hair was dark and wavy. I loved to watch his long fingers dance across the piano keys or strum the mandolin. Unlike my mischievous mother, he was serious most of the time, but even then his big brown eyes seemed to smile. Surely he was the smartest, the best-looking papa of them all.
Sometimes he did not come, and I would go home feeling sad. The summer of 1929 was the saddest. One early July day, as I returned from romping in the meadows, our summer furniture and bedding were on the porch. A horse-drawn dray was waiting to be loaded.
With tears in her eyes, my mother said, "We're going home." I asked her why, and she cried. "Your papa found someone else, my little dove."
I had never seen my mother cry before, and it frightened me. "Mamochka"—I touched her face—"don't cry."
She hugged me closely to her and sobbed.
Soon after, my parents were divorced. My mother was inconsolable. Bitterly she complained about her lot in life, blaming the Revolution for everything, cursing Stalin and the Bolsheviks. I was four-and-a-half years old and couldn't understand what Stalin and the Revolution had to do with my father leaving us, but I too was hurt. I missed my papa.
* * *
My mother, a well-groomed, green-eyed beauty with a sweep of reddish-blond hair, easily attracted the opposite sex. Yet she never remarried. Two months after the divorce she met the proprietor of a bookstore she said would be my new papa. I remembered him only because the world map on the wall beside my bed and many of the books on the shelves above my desk came from him: Gulliver's Travels, a well-worn collection of poems by Pushkin, Pinocchio, exquisitely illustrated old Russian fairy tales, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and more. The man died that summer from fish poisoning, and my mother grieved.
The gloomy summer had faded into a golden October when a man I called Uncle Otari appeared in my mother's romantic sanctuary. He was from Georgia, a handsome man with blazing dark eyes, tall and wiry. Mother's eyes sparkled when he arrived. Both loved company, and on many nights a jovial group gathered around our table, eating, drinking, and singing Russian romances and Gypsy songs. On my fifth birthday I ate with the grown-ups. Then I danced Lesginka, Uncle Otari's native dance, which I had learned from him. I grabbed our dagger from the wall and brandished it as I moved my feet in the fiery rhythm of the caucasian Mountain dance. I loved to dance and would soon enroll myself for free ballet lessons at the opera.
The following spring, Mama took me into the woods where the trees were immense and it smelled of pinesap. She seemed deep in thought for long moments as she watched a bird soaring in the sky. Then she leaned against a tree, tilted her head up, and in a full voice began to sing a poignant Ukrainian ballad: "Why wasn't I born a falcon? Why can't I fly? Had God given me wings, I would've abandoned the earth. I'd have flown to the skies." I wanted to know why she wanted to fly away, but she did not answer. Instead, she told me that Uncle Otari had been sent far away. She prayed for his return. But he never came back. He perished in Siberia.
After Uncle Otari, men came and went, ringing our doorbell whenever the notion struck them. I didn't like these "uncles," but I did like the cheese and sausages they brought.
One day I returned home from an errand empty-handed. "I'm hungry, Mamochka."
"I gave you money to buy something to eat."
"I gave it to a beggar woman in the street." With her wispy white hair she looked like Babushka, my darling granny.
Mother made a sound of frustration. "There's some bread in the kitchen. Have that and I'll make you a nice cup of tea."
Each family in our communal kitchen had a table with shelves above and a Primus (a one-flame kerosene burner). The tantalizing aroma of Ukrainian borscht hovered in the air. Other times it smelled of fried potatoes, meat dumplings, fried or gefilte fish, chickens. Mama ignited our Primus and put a kettle on. As usual, the kitchen faucet was dripping. I ate quickly and ran downstairs to play. In the evening, I asked for another piece of bread.
Mother sighed. "You finished all we had, Zosik. There's nothing in the house ... and no money. Maybe somebody will come."
My mother's men friends gave her money or brought food wrapped in newspapers. I understood nothing about sexual politics at that time, but I knew we depended on these men. I hoped, as Mama did, that our doorbell would ring.
The bell did not ring. "I don't know what to do." Mama's eyes began to overflow. "You can thank your papa for leaving us destitute."
"Can't you sell something?"
"I have nothing left to sell." She had already parted with some jewelry, also an Oriental rug. "What about the other rugs and paintings?" I asked. My mother was horrified. "I would rather starve."
"Why can't I see my papa? He won't let me starve."
Aunt Yulia, my mother's sweet-natured sister who loved to cook and bake, was concerned about my growing up without a father. She admonished my mother, "You can't let the child run around unattended, Mimi. She's barely six years old! What will become of her? Send her to her father, let him take care of her." My mother would have none of that. "Don't you worry about my Zosik. She's a bright girl and full of spunk. She'll be all right."
"Your papa doesn't love you anymore, Zosik," my mother told me. "Why must you insist on seeing him? He's no good. He and that—that witch with shaggy hair he married."
"Then why don't you go to work?" I exploded. I did feel mean. Papa had stopped paying alimony to make Mama go to work because he did love me. Uncle Vanya had said so to Aunt Yulia.
Mother didn't like what I said and became hysterical. Father had destroyed her singing career, she sobbed, and then he deserted her. After a time she calmed down, as I knew she would. She dragged her fur coat from the wardrobe—a luxurious otter lined with emerald green silk—shook off the mothballs, and declared in a dramatic soprano voice, "This is the last thing I'm going to sacrifice."
Mother's wardrobe from previous years was substantial; she was always well dressed, bucking the trend toward the drab attire of the day. It pained her to part with the coat, while I gloated when it was sold and we went shopping for food at the Bessarabka farmers market.
The market was colorful with berries, melons, ropes of onions, and flowers. It swarmed with plump women bargainers and farmers hawking their own produce.
A peasant called out: "Chickens! Young, fat chickens!"
Mother stopped with regal poise, inspected a chicken, and sniffed and pinched it. "Fat, you dare say? I see nothing but bones wrapped in skin. Blue skin!"
The shrewd peasant answered, "Wouldn't you be blue if everybody pinched you all the time?"
"Well, at least I wouldn't smell like that," Mama fired back, and she shot away to avoid hearing the reply.
That day we ate beef roasted with potatoes, sweet corn on the cob, and a huge watermelon. What a feast!
My old shoes were flopping out their last days. Our expedition to buy a new pair was a fiasco. We combed the stores and, finally, found a pair that fit. The cashier took the money from my mother and then coolly claimed she had not been paid. We had been robbed in the most blatant way possible. My mother stormed out of the store like all three Furies in one. I grabbed my old shoes and trailed barefoot behind her.
Mother finally had no choice but to go to work at the arms-producing plant, called Bolshevik. She hated the job, but her lack of qualifications made it impossible to find anything better.
My father found out that Mother had started working. To get me off the street, he somehow managed to enroll me in School No. 54 on Lenin Street. Children in the Soviet Union did not start school until age eight. I was not yet seven. I set off for school on September 1, 1930, wearing brand-new ankle-high shoes with laces. Mama strapped my brown satchel across my shoulders and kissed me good-bye.
Mother worked long hours and rarely cooked. I fended for myself, spending my daily allowance gleefully on ice cream and seltzer water sweetened with fruit syrup. Or I'd buy a long string of tiny bagels, hang it around my neck like a necklace, and munch on the go. My friends had no money of their own—their mothers were at home and cooked for them—so I was the richest little girl on our block but also the hungriest.
Yet, I did not feel deprived. I was a happy, active child. Each day was a new beginning, and I accepted cheerfully what each day brought.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ESCAPE INTO DANGER by SOPHIA ORLOVSKY WILLIAMS Copyright © 2012 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Part I: Spring of Youth 1 Full of Spunk 2 “Let It Rot!” 3 Politics 4 Internationalka5 An Omen Fulfilled Part II: The Steppes Aflame6 Partings 7 Flagship Stalin8 Narrow Escapes 9 Flight to the East 10 The Turning Point 11 My Purse! 12 Stranded 13 Waiting for the EnemyPart III: German Occupation 14 Facing the Invaders 15 To Register—or Not? 16 A Promotion 17 “You Haven’t Lost Everything.” 18 German Studies 19 A Lamb in Spring 20 RescuedPart IV: Eye of the Hurricane 21 On a Nazi Train 22 “Good Little Farmer” 23 A Red Silk Camisole 24 Lord of the Manor 25 Red Cross Nurse 26 The Truth Comes OutPart V: Inside Nazi Germany 27 Nemesis on Horseback 28 Found! 29 A Proposal 30 Beethoven’s Fifth 31 Hope 32 Half-Crazy, or in Love 33 Crisscrossing the Third Reich 34 “Imagine, Running into You!” 35 Off to the AlpsPart VI: Postwar Germany 36 Liberated by the Americans 37 A Changed Man 38 Ten Centimes Short 39 Pedaling through the Slush 40 A Twenty-Mark Fine 41 In the Cards 42 Bird in a Maze 43 A Double RainbowWhat People are Saying About This
Sophia’s retelling is so vivid, and the book so successfully transports the reader back into the world of Sophia's youth, that your imagination doesn't trust what the cold logic of your intellect is telling you. . . . [This] is one of the all-time great stories, one of those true stories that no fictional writer could ever sell convincingly because some life goes beyond what art can imitate. . . . Williams takes you back to her world as a teenaged Ukrainian Jewish girl caught in Ukraine's national nightmare of Nazi occupation—yet [this world] is not a nightmare world. Looking back sixty years later, with the wisdom of eighty years in her pocket, Williams manages to recreate for the reader the . . . always charming teenager who was too busy falling in and out of love and friendship—too busy living—to be always dwelling on the Damoclean sword looming over her days. . . . This is no mean feat for a first-time author writing in her fifth language.