Valentina's mother Maria died in 1996. But long ago in 1941 the still young 'Masha' worked as a telephone operator in her home town of Lubna in the Poltava district in the Ukraine.
Posted on 09/23/2004 9:12:51 PM PDT by struwwelpeter
The story of Karaganda resident Valentina Grigor'evna Mikhno, who was born in a German concentration camp in 1945, is similar to a scene from a Soviet war film, but with a very touching ending. An ending which in a real life has yet to be. Still, Valentina hopes and waits for it. Through the television program Zhdi menya ("wait for me"), the Karaganda resident is searching for a female Soviet spy who was working right under the very noses of the Germans. She wants to meet her so that she could bow low before the person who helped a newborn girl survive German captivity..
Valentina's mother Maria died in 1996. But long ago in 1941 the still young 'Masha' worked as a telephone operator in her home town of Lubna in the Poltava district in the Ukraine.
"Mama was the first to find out that the war had begun," Valentina quietly says. "On the 22nd of June she was working on the telegraph and received a message for the district party committee. On that very day they took mama to the front. She didn't even get to say goodbye to her parents."
Maria met her future husband Grisha after a few months in Kuybyshev. A real-life field romance bloomed between the young lieutenant and the communications specialist. "By 1944 our soldiers had already pushed back the Germans," Valentina explains. "All this time my parents never separated. They served together. Father was the commander of an observation post, and was also a comunications specialist, while mama was already pregnant with me. They offered to send her home, but she refused: 'Why? Victory is close'. But on the 20th of August mama was captured by the Germans."
The most frightening day "In the unit where mama served there were three Marias: Mikhno, Lomakina, and Kulikova," Valentina says. "And two of them were captured, it happened below Riga at the battle for Koenigsberg."
From the book Sources of courage, by a soldier from Maria Mikhno's unit, Ivan Vyborniy, who included the comm specialist's narration of her capture:
... on 20 August 1944 tanks broke through in the Tukums region. I was on duty at the switchboard. Suddenly Lomakina ran in, pale, shaking from fear. 'Fascists!' she yelled. 'Run to the woods!' I was already worried. Something had fallen on the comms line and I wasn't getting any messages. When Lomakina ran in, we knew what was up. They cut the wires! It was already too late to run. What could we do? 'Into the hay!' someone yelled..."Father yelled that," Valentina tells us. "Three army pals: mama, Lomakina, and Kulikova quickly changed into civilian clothes. They ate their party membership cards and buried the covers in the bomb shelter. And somehow made it to the haystacks. Kulikova climbed into the hay, but mama was undecided. She was afraid that the Germans would poke the hay with their bayonets and kill me. And so, together with Lomakina, they ran into the woods. Lomakina didn't desert the pregnant woman, so that's why I consider her my second mother. But they couldn't make it very far - a German grabbed her by the hair: 'Haende Hoch!'."
Maria Mikhno's recollections from the book Sources of Courage:
They began the interrogations. What units, they asked, where are they located. The interrogations continued on the second and third day. And so we lived: from the cell to interrogation, from interrogation back to the cell. The fascists tried everything to get us to talk, tortured us with thirst and hunger. They made us put on wooden shoes that had nails projecting inside, and run in a circle. They thought that it would make us more talkative. No dice! We made it through this torture.On the walls of the torture cells in the Riga prison the girls - in their own blood - wrote to their soldiers. The text of one such appeal was later written down by a platoon leader and sent to the commander of the 51st Army:
Dear friends! The little Hitlers wanted to find out from us comms girls our unit designations. After torture they threw us all in here in this cold cell in the Riga concentration camp. Dear comrades. We live in the hope that you'll soon free us. But today was the most frighting day: they are sending us to Germany. Rescue us from German captivity! We believe that you'll come. We await you!The detainees were taken at first to Danzig, later to Paderborn....
Born under a the barrel of a machinegun
"In Paderborn concentration camp all the prisoners without exception were forced to drag heavy stones and iron about," Valentina says. "Mama told how the prisoners - in order not to go to work - would make lumps on their legs by beating them with wooden spoons."
From Maria Mikhno's recollections in the book:
I was then readying to give birth, but somehow, I don't know how Masha Lomakina succeeded in doing this, they allowed me to be taken to a maternity hospital. There they laid me right on the floor, though it's true they put down some kind of sackcloth for a bed."Mama said that she gave birth to me right under the barrel of a German machinegun," recounts Valentina. "In front of her very eyes a fascist shot a woman and her newborn baby boy. A little boy - so that he wouldn't become a Soviet soldier, and his mother - so that she couldn't give birth to any more... When I showed up in this world, an air-raid started. Everyone who was in the maternity hospital ran away. They threw me on the floor, and mama laid next to me. Later Maria Lomakina, mother's friend came in and saw me, naked and blue from the cold, and she tore up her shirt, wrapped me in her overcoat and took me to the barracks. It was the 25th of January 1945... Maybe I was a white crow, because the Lord allowed me to survive.
"She'll live!"
After a few months the prisoners were freed by the Americans. The allies offered to let many of the prisoners stay and not return to the motherland.
"Our prisoners were afraid of Stalin's policies," explains Valentina. "His example, when he refused to exchange Paulus for his son, declaring that he was a traitor, that was proof. But mama decided to go home to the Ukraine. The homecoming was just like the cinema. Mama came home to her parents with me in her arms. Her father, my grandfather, was a strict man. Therefore mama told him right on the doorstep: 'Papa, I didn't whore around, I was married to Grisha on the front, but he's dead.' But grandpa says: 'Dont' worry, your Grisha is alive.' Mama dropped me from shock. It turned out that my father came to grandpa just before mother's homecoming. He told grandpa that he thought that Masha - grandpa's daughter - was pregnant by him, but Masha was dead. Father said this, and left. But mama was alive... This is how it is in life. On that day they took me to the doctor, I was very weak, and the doctor said that I wouldn't live. Mama came home and cried, but grandpa took me from mother's arms, sent her out of the hut and decided to treat me with folk remedies. What he did, I don't know, but he told mama later: 'She'll live!'. Well, later father came for mother and me and took us to live with his parents."
In 1961 Valentina Grigor'evna arrived in Karaganda and lived with an uncle on her mother's side while she worked as a letter carrier and finished 10th grade. She climbed the ladder to control auditor. She got married and had children who presented her and her husband with four grandchildren.
"Well, that's my life," Valentina sums up with a smile.
But the Soviet spy, the one you're looking for? Who is she?
Valentina Grigor'evna leans over to a book on the table. It opens immediately to the right place. She reads from her mother's recollections:
In the maternity hospital worked one girl. Either a nurse or a nanny. Her name was Asya. She begged the midwife to look in on me from time to time. Asya game me an old blanket to wrap my baby, and later came to me several times. Secretly she'd bring me packets of jelly; we fed the baby with these, because I had no milk. Yes, and why not: they only fed us watery gruel..."Mama told me that this Asya worked in Soviet intelligence. Under the very noses of the Germans. Just before the end of the war she came up to mama and said that they'd found her out, and that she was on the run. And she took off. And that's all that I know about her. But I'd like to find Asya and bow before her and even kiss her feet. To give a her a human thanks... Don't misunderstand me."
Two years ago Valentina Grigor'evna wrote a letter to the television show Zhdi menya ("wait for me"). She is keeping contact with the Russian talk show through a friend from Vladivostok. The friend is a member of the counsel of the international union of former underage prisoners of fascism. In her last message to her Karagandan friend, she gave Valentina hope that she would really meet Asya. Apparantly the television people have found her and what happened to her. And then Valentina will know her not just by her name.
(Dmitriy Kim, foto Valeriya Kalieva)
Original in Russian
Wow...what an awesome story. Thanks for posting it.
Thank you.
Thanks for the great story.
"I'm looking for myself, because I don't know who I am," noticeably perturbed, she spoke into the video camera from Kazakhi television station Khabar. She was not a tall woman, squeezing in her hands a yellowing photograph. "In December 1942 an echelon of children came to Karaganda from Leningrad. I was on that train. The sent us all to the orphanage. In a year a family from Karaganda adopted me, these people gave me my name. I don't know my real name, just as I don't know who my parents were and where they may be..."
About 40 Karaganda residents, who are looking for relatives that have disappeared without a trace, assembled on Friday on the square before the city Akimat (Kazakhstani city administration). They recount their stories laconically to the film crews for the program Barmysyn, Bauyrym ("Wait and Hope"), from Khabar TV.
The television people from the southern capital came to our city in order to record a touching meeting between Almaty resident Saulesh Nursultanova and her two sisters with two close relatives they had never seen before. They found each other with the help of this local clone of the famous Russian talk show.
"Before she died, mama told us that she had two other stepbrothers. And she asked us to find them," said a smiling Saulesh Nursultanova. "They lost each other half a century ago, when mother was only seven years old. Her stepbrothers were taken away by their father, who took off in an unknown direction."
In July of this year Saulesh went to the program "Wait and Hope". By September they told her about the results of their searches. It turns out that during the years of their separation, the lost relatives settled in Karaganda, and live here to this day. They could not come to Almaty for the show, so the television brigade - as in the proverb of Mohammed - moved itself to their heroes.
"We were do worried," Saulesh shared with us. "Indeed, we'd never seen our relatives even once. Should we bring presents? Of course. Sweets and other hospitality."
The happy finale to Saulesh's story - this is the third part of what the Almaty television people want to do in our city.
"For two days the camera crews will visit five 'zones', where they will film the stories of prisoners who are looking for their relatives, and give the prisoners letters from them," says Raykhan Taukebaeva, a collaborator from the program's search division. "One girl from Karaganda, for example, wrote that she is looking from her mother. I found the woman. I called her long-distance, but she wouldn't come to the phone. Here our film brigade will give the girl her mother's address, and let her write to her herself.
So that those on the business trip used their time to the maximum benefit, they decided to film other Karaganda residents who were searching for loved ones that had disappeared without a trace. The square in front of the Akimat was designated the meeting place for our television heroes. Karaganda residents arrived, filled out forms indicating the name and surname of those whom they seek, and their own address. Later, they present their stories to the camera, carefully clutching to their breast a photograph of the 'missing'.
"So and so left home and didn't return..." as a rule, thus begins each small monologue. And with hope it ends: "If you are still alive, respond, we await you..."
"On August 17th, 1994, my brother Kanat Valekanovich Omashev left home and didn't return," said Aman Omasheva. "A friend came for him that evening, and they left together. That fellow came to us the next day. But my brother to this day we've never seen again."
"My daughter Irina Strekalova left home in 2000," said Sarana resident Lasia Semenova. And she breaks into tears: "I am raising her daughter."
"My son Pyotr disappeared 11 years ago," a different woman recalls. "On the 27th of June he was coming back from 'Gorbachev' coal mine in his car, but he never made it home. No car, no son. Disappeared without a trace..."
"Our show 'Wait and Hope' is at the moment only in Kazakhi," program search department collaborator Raykhan Taukebaeva explained to 'Noviy Vestnik'. "But we've already filmed a pilot program in Russian. Soon it will be on the air. And the material that our film brigade took in Karaganda, we will certainly show that.
"It's possible that someone will see those people who were looking for their loved ones, they'll recognize them and call. Besides that, we're also looking for the 'missing' ourselves. How? If the form they filled out shows the approximate address, we'll contact the Akimat, the address bureau, the passport office. But in the villages we search through the district, the post office, the village counsel. You know, in this matter all means are fair. It's so nice when people are get found again."
| Dmitriy Kim, photo Valeriya Kalieva |
It's so amazing when families can reunite after so many years when the separation was through no fault of their own. Beautiful!
It shows that only the Kremlin was totalitarian-communist. The people of Russia are a warm people in a cold place.
I hope that Mr. Putin also sees this in his people and realizes that by removing their democracy, he fails them as their president. There is another way. No man wants to live without some control, some say in his circumstance. Putin must not now fashion some new social capitalist makeover of the old Soviet days.
=== Take a break from long threads about Putin.
With GIJoel banned, I suppose Warmhearted Stories will continue to be the norm where former GRU/KGB and their counterpart Nazis are concerned.
It's kind of amazing, no? Maybe if we'd only legalized abortion, sanctioned "civil unions" (reserving the word "marriage" for heteros, natch), and began farming human life like a cash crop 50 years earlier, we'd have prevailed that much sooner over militant atheist communism!
Gosh, I love stories with Happy Endings, don't you.
Zzzzzzzzzz ....
BTW: A friend from Erfurt in what was once E. Germany is coming for a visit. Should I be concerned?
Tongue and cheek, forever yours,
Struww ;-)
I know, I know ...
I've just still got my stockings twisted over the fact that our Commissars must share anymore the same Spike Sheet as the "lying liberal media".
Forget Golitsyn ... someone saw Putin bow to an icon! Whoo-hoo! Russia's converted! What a piece of cake that was.
(I've seen actual pix of JPII kissing the Koran ... he must be a Muslim now. Or, given the rigamarole at Assisi and Fatima, perhaps a Buddhist break-dancer instead?)
Anywya, it's much the same feeling one gets when wanded at the airport by some high school dropout. I have yet to learn to bend my neck, shut my mouth and keep my eyes on the floor.
(Saw the pic, btw ... I like her cut. Keeping her in my prayers.)
Amazing stories - my heart bleeds for these people.
On Thursday a villager from Shygys Abayskiy region came into the offices of our paper. Emotionally, he described some strange incidents in his town, about how unknown thieves were stealing livestock from the village residents, and in the most insolent of ways - at night they would lead cattle, horses, sheep, and goats out from the closed barns and slaughter them on the spot. The next morning the owners of the animals would find nothing outside their homes but hides, hooves, and horns.
Last year invalid Bakhyt Rakhimzhanov bought a milk cow for 30 thousand tenge (about $200). The animal was sold to him by a neighbor as settlement of a debt. Besides some chickens, the retiree had no other livestock. But there were children and grandchildren, for whom the cow became like a wet nurse. In May the cow calved. On the night of June 5th, however, she was stolen. Local shepherd Fyodor found the remains the next morning about a hundred meters from the Rakhimzhanov home.
"Just imagine, past those bushes there were laying the still warm guts, and milk was spilled on the ground," Bakhlyt frowned. "I'm sorry for her. What kind of people can do such a thing? The calf bawled for weeks after this, just like it was crying. Besides milk, he hadn't eaten anything until then. We barely were able to feed her after that."
According to the villager, the police were unable to find the cattle rustler. The next month, yet another theft occurred in Shygys. Evil-doers took a mare from a pasture. And once again the guardians of law and order barely did anything. Since it was obvious that they would get no benefit from the law, the villagers began to stand guard over their livestock at night. On one such night, the Abikenov family caught the rustlers in their own yard. Two residents of the village had been trying to steal a bull. As respectable villagers might be assumed to do, the Abikenovs did not take justice into their own hands, but decided to await the morn and tell all to the people in epaulets. Their impudent visitors were released "under their own recognisance".
"When the police came, one of the pilferers had disappeared. His relatives said that he'd left," remembers Bakhyt Rakhimzhanov. "But they didn't arrest the other one. Because he was deaf. Even though they found in the ash pile by his house the hides of a horse and several stolen goats, they let him off because he's related to some commander in the police."
In despair, the residents of Shygys started writing complaints to the regional Akimat (administration) in order to bring attention to the situation, and get some action to make the cattle rustling cease. Alas, the villagers received so such reply. Because of this, last week they sent yet another collective letter to the district Akimat. In it they told Kamaltin Yeskendirovich (governor of the district) that he was the 'only person' who could help them, since their 'patience was past the breaking point'.
"Almost everyone here has suffered from thieves," said Bakhyt Rakhimzhanov "They've gotten so that when a sheep or goat disappears, no one asks the police for help. What's the use, if large animals are stolen and the police can't catch the rustlers, why would they bother with smaller animals." The next day correspondents from 'NV' went to Shygys.
It was as if a parade of planets had occurred over the village. On our arrival at the first home we saw two guardians of public order. Later we met several others. As it turned out, they were by no means just hanging about, but were occupied in investigating crimes. Just since that morning. They were going to the homes of local residents, questioning them, taking statements if there were any.
Bakhmyt Rakhimzhanov was not at home. The reason was a weighty one.
"We detained a suspect in a cattle theft. An investigation is underway. The host together with detectives is now driving to the steppe, to the scene of the crime." This was explained to us by a man wearing the epaulets of a police captain.
In truth, the guardian of law and order did not explain why Bakhyt needed to drive out onto the steppe if his livestock was stolen from his own yard. His wife, Karlygash Sakenovna, was mowing the grass alongside watchful policemen and did not seem excited about going into great detail, but repeated the story that her husband earlier had told her. She only complained a little at the end of the conversation: "It was a good cow. I milked her three times a day, five liters each time. But now the children and grandkids will be without milk, and we still owe the neighbor 21 thousand tenge ($150) for her."
The retired woman had but one wish - that the thief, at last, would be found and forced to pay compensation.
We went then to the addresses of other Shygys residents in the company of the police. "Aye, it doesn't matter, nothing will change, what more is there to say?" said a shepherd's wife by the name of Svetlana, waving her hand. "Last year we had more than twenty head stolen. My husband rented a car and for two days drove about region, looking for our cattle. He found them, caught the thieves. But the police then said: 'we found them'. They hadn't even begun to look. Five head were gone, and to this day we haven't received a kopeck."
At Abikenov's home were also guests in epaulets. Deputy chief of the Toparskiy police, Major Kaskirov, explained to us that they were questioning residents about their written statements. The fact of the matter was that relatives of the accused rustlers had threatened to burn the hay that the Abikenovs had put up for the winter. Because of this, the frightened farmers had withdrawn their claims for compensation, but the guardians of law and order had somehow found this out and decided to rescue the Abikenovs. Which is why they came.
The couple did not wish to tell us of their adventures. And it was understandable - perhaps they hoped that the police would finally help them. Yes, and the rest of the villagers, perhaps, were basking in the attention from men in uniforms and decided not to tempt fate by complaining about their plight.
"You know, the residents are partly to blame that their livestock are being stolen," local policeman Toletay Bekenov told us in parting. "They leave animals out on the steppe at night, they don't lock their barns before bed. They're just inviting criminals. More than once we've gone from house to house and asked people to be more attentive, we're not living under communism anymore. It's no use. But to put a policeman in every yard, that's not real.
| Polina Plakhotnikova |
You have such a great eye for good stories.
What a kicker is the communism line (though -- researching the past hour religious freedom in Russia -- it's pretty clear most, especially among the pensioners, long for the old days).
I especially love this: "It was as if a parade of planets had occurred"
Here's a pic from five years ago in Kazakhstan. From the looks of the article, not much has changed:
(ping)
Thanks for the translations and stories. I'll buy the first several rounds when you get over here again.
There is much to be shared in this thread.
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