In the suburbs of Moscow some civilians who were digging trenches, Solomon Slepak among them, suddenly found themselves surrounded by German troops. They fought their way out, using their shovels as weapons.
On December 3, with the temperature at minus 36.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the Germans began to withdraw from the suburbs of Moscow. By then Solomon Slepak and the staff of the publishing house where he worked had been ordered to evacuate the city. A train brought him and Fanya southward to Engels, a city near the Volga River north of the Caspian Sea. About two hundred miles to the south lay Stalingrad, which remained under siege by the German Army until February 1943. Nearly nine hundred thousand Russians perished in that siege.
Solomon and Fanya Slepak knew nothing of the whereabouts of their children. And Volodya and Rosa, having written home repeatedly and received no reply, were certain by now that their parents were dead. It took Solomon several months of trying, through the office of the Supreme Soviet, before he learned where his children were. More months passed. Then, in April 1942, a letter from him arrived at the town of Bolshaya Sosnova, and Volodya and Rosa discovered that their parents were alive.
Rosa at the time was working in the munitions plant in the nearby city of Molotov (now Perm), making shells for guns. That winter the temperature in the village plummeted to minus fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Volodya fell ill with rheumatic fever. He lay in bed for a month and survived only because of the care given him by Dr. Bogorad. Able to walk once again, he worked in the dining room, collecting and washing dirty dishes, then some weeks later in the kitchen, carrying water from the well, sawing and chopping firewood, and eating all he wanted. His health improved; he returned to school. During the summer he worked in the fields with the other children.
The months went by; the war raged on. Everyone knew by now about the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad. War news came to them from radio speakers that carried broadcasts twice a day from the Central Moscow Radio Station. There were no private transmitters; they had always been prohibited, even in peacetime. In the early days of the war the government had ordered that all radio receivers be turned in, to prevent the population from listening to enemy propaganda. You had to bring your receiver to a special store or you faced immediate arrest. Speakers were then distributed throughout the country; usually they were hung from a nail in a wall and connected to a special socket. Every town and village had a radio-receiving station that broadcast news from Moscow to speakers in houses and apartments and offices.
When the news arrived in the village of Bolshaya Sosnova that the German Army threatening Moscow had been defeated by the Red Army, one of Volodya’s teachers, speaking to a group of children, expressed doubt about the victory. A day or two later he vanished and was not seen again.
Then rumors began to come-not over the speakers but by word of mouth-of the killing of Jews by the Germans. It was said that many thousands had been murdered near Kiev. But not until 1944, when Kiev was liberated, did the Russians learn of the slaughter of ninety thousand Jews in the ravine called Babi Yar.
In late January 1943, his health much improved, Volodya joined many others from his school who enlisted in a training course given in Moscow for munitions workers. That March they were informed that they would soon be going to Moscow, and some days later they climbed aboard horse-drawn carts and began a twenty-eight-mile journey to the town of Vereshchagino, which held the nearest railway station.
The air was glacial, the road frozen. They could not sit on the carts for any length of time but had to walk or run alongside to keep themselves warm. In the town of Ocher, they were given a brief respite and hot food. They waited two hours in the cold in Vereshchagino for the train that was to bring them to Moscow. It arrived at night and was crowded with children. All were traveling to Moscow from the region east of the Urals; all were enlisted in training courses for the munitions factories.
Volodya found a third-level upper bunk, normally used for trunks, and lay there trying to sleep. The train moved slowly and stopped often, taking on passengers. At some stations there were dining rooms for the children; at others, only bowls of soup or cereal. They were all hungry. At one stop Volodya exchanged his jacket for a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk. The train began to leave, and he raced after it and leaped from the platform to the step of the last car but could not push his way through the dense mass of passengers to get to his car. He rode outside in the arctic night until the next stop, when he made it to his friends, cold and blue as ice but with the food. They thought he had been left behind.
The trip from Bolshaya Sosnova to Moscow took four days. Volodya arrived in Moscow on the first day of April 1943. He had been unable to inform his parents of his time of arrival-not enough money for a telegram; a letter would not have arrived in time-so no one met him at the train station. He took the Metro home.
His father, who had been back in Moscow since the fall of the previous year, opened the apartment door and stood there a moment, dumbfounded. Then they embraced. Volodya’s sister, Rosa, had returned home earlier that year and now came running out of a room and clung to her brother. Fanya had gone out to shop for food, and when she returned and saw her son, she began to weep. He was fifteen years old and had been away from home twenty months.
Their apartment on Gorky Street was the same as when he had left it. The wallpaper looked a little older. The city, too, was the same. Some additional broken-down houses; here and there an area fenced off because of bomb damage. At night there were no lights in the streets.
The apartment building had been completed in 1940, half a year before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and at a time when the Stalin terror was coming to an end. The front of the building, which looked out on Gorky Street, was of light-gray stone; the rear, facing the yard, of plaster painted a grayish yellow. The Moscow Soviet-the city hall-down the street was of a reddish color. All the other buildings were white, gray, and yellow; nearly all had stores and restaurants on the first floors.
The building in which the Slepaks lived was clean save for the cockroaches that cascaded across floors and walls and against which one fought endless and futile battles. One entered from the rear, because the Gorky Street side was entirely occupied by shops. The building had eleven entrances, with nine floors in its vast center section and seven in each of its two side sections. Each of the approximately two hundred apartments, in which there lived, all told, some twelve hundred people, opened onto an elevator and a stairwell; there were no hallways. The radiator on the wall near the stairwell always gave off ample heat, save during the years of the war. The inhabitants of the building were actors, musicians, journalists, architects, engineers, and a few workers. Rarely did friendships develop among the occupants.
The Slepaks lived on the eighth floor in two rooms of a three-room apartment that faced Gorky Street. The third room was always rented to another family, because Solomon Slepak thought it wrong for one family to occupy more rooms than it needed, especially during a housing shortage. The third room changed hands five times during the years Volodya lived there: a Tass clerk, a noted violinist, a retired colonel, a militia officer, a postal clerk.
In the next apartment lived the noted filmmaker Michael Slutsky, the producer of the remarkable documentary Day of War, and his wife, Mimi. The documentary had been shot on June 13, 1943, by hundreds of cameramen, and then edited by Slutsky. One night in the autumn of 1943-Volodya is uncertain of the time-the KGB came to the Slutsky apartment and arrested him. Some days later Mimi Slutsky knocked on the door to the Slepak apartment and showed the Slepaks the order she had received to appear at the office of the KGB. She returned some time afterward with the news that the KGB had informed her that because she had been born in Vienna, she would be interned as a German citizen. (All German nationals were imprisoned in special concentration camps during the war.) She produced the necessary documents to prove she was not German but Jewish, and was told she would not be interned but had twenty-four hours to leave Moscow. She gave the Slepaks her jewelry and some other possessions and asked that they all be handed over to her husband’s brother, whose name Volodya does not recall. They never saw her again. Michael Slutsky’s brother was ordered by the KGB to remove all the furniture from the apartment. Not long afterward a KGB colonel moved in.