When the Leningrad Front moved west, I moved with it. So much death had passed before my eyes by then that I couldn’t comprehend how my soul could still take more in. I was almost numb, and yet we had to keep walking, pulling our cannons and machine guns and carrying our backpacks filled with rations, ammunition, and unsent letters home. I walked and pulled cannons, like everyone around me. As the Germans retreated, they mined the roads, and we had to move carefully, inching forward. In my mind, I can still see an armored vehicle twisted into a tangle of metal parts, bodies of soldiers blasted out of the truck. A wounded cow baying by the side of the road, the image of a burning building reflected in its eyes. I still see a dog running across a charred field, a human bone in its mouth.
Somehow I survived the worst two years of the war, the Leningrad Front, and then I almost didn’t survive. One foolish misstep got me captured, although it should have cost me my life. Would it be better to have been killed than captured by the Germans? After being a soldier, would it be better to be dead or be a prisoner of war, with the big letters SU—Soviet Union—painted on the back of my military coat in indelible white paint? We were marched west, hundreds of prisoners, in our torn boots and uniforms infested with lice, until we arrived in a prison camp somewhere in Germany. It was as bad as you can imagine: yellow drinking water with stains of machine oil, dysentery, rotten turnips, routine beatings with a gun barrel, and yet I only grasped at one thing, life. I would have never known, even after three years at the front, how fiercely we claw for life, even life in a German prison camp.
We escaped just before the camp was liberated in April of 1945, those of us who were still alive, everyone ecstatic and free, no longer prisoners of war. We were ready to go back home. Or were we? There were fifty-six nationalities in the camp, but I only made friends with two men. Yura was from Pinsk and slept on the bunk below mine. He was captured just as I was, on a reconnaissance mission, stalking through the woods right into the enemy position. My other friend from the bunk above was John from Saint Petersburg, America, who was captured in Normandy. Saint Petersburg, can you imagine? We were born on different sides of the world and yet our cities had the same name. He taught me some English, and I taught him some Russian, so he called me Nick and I called him Vanya. Yura didn’t trust him, accusing him of being a capitalist spy. But one look at John’s face—freckles and a gap between his front teeth—made me laugh off Yura’s warning, despite Yura being a veteran and having served in the Finnish War.
Yura told me stories about that war, about him witnessing how our prisoners were exchanged for captured Finns. He saw them marching in columns toward each other, the Finns reaching their comrades first, embracing and kissing them. When our captured soldiers reached our side, Yura and thirty or so other soldiers were ordered to encircle and escort them to a nearby barrack behind rows of barbed wire. One of the released soldiers tried to embrace Yura, who fought off the soldier’s hug as if he were contaminated. The lieutenant’s command was clear. ”Freeze!” he yelled. “One step and we’ll shoot.” Those prisoners of war, so happy to be back on their home soil, were now our enemies. We all knew what Stalin said: “Soviet soldiers do not surrender. There are no prisoners of war. There are only traitors.”
There were no trials. There were days of interrogation, all ending in the same verdict. They were all declared traitors for having been captured and were given six years in labor camps in Vorkuta.
So was I ready to go home? Yura was, despite what he witnessed in 1940. He was ready to see his family in Pinsk, silent about a possible Vorkuta camp diversion. The end of the war was in the air: we knew it when the guards deserted during the night and those of us who could escape, escaped. A day later, the US troops liberated the camp, although there weren’t many of us left to liberate. “So what are you going to do?” Yura asked as we stood in the field, our former barracks still in sight. I didn’t answer right away, and he became impatient. “Don’t you want to go home and live in a great country?” he asked, looking over the forest, where the sun was rising. “The country that won the world war?”
I thought of all of you. I thought of Nadia, wishing I were as sure as Yura, as clearheaded and free of doubt. “I want to live in a normal country, not a great one,” I said. “A country that doesn’t kill its own.” Yura just shrugged, saluted us goodbye, and started walking east. I wish I felt as optimistic as he did, as certain about the future.