FRIENDSHIP AS A GERMAN QUALITY

PEOPLE

The editor received a thick letter. A lot of hastily written sheets, a half-century segment from the life of two friends. The author of the letter, Anatoly Fedorov, spoke about his friend, the Russian German Vladimir Schwartz. “The war made our lives similar...

The editor received a thick letter. A lot of hastily written sheets, a half-century segment from the life of two friends. The author of the letter, Anatoly Fedorov, spoke about his friend, the Russian German Vladimir Schwartz. “The war made our lives similar,” Anatoly Mikhailovich wrote. “Only if she ran over my adolescence and youth with a loaded cart, then Volodina with a heavy skating rink.”

To Siberia

People always got to Siberia in different ways. Anatoly's grandfather went on the Stolypin reform, received loans in Altai. Tolya was born in 1930 in the village of Gornyak. Volodya was brought in a cattle car.

Stalin's decree on the deportation of the German population of the USSR to Siberia and Kazakhstan was signed on August 28, 1941. Volodya Schwartz was 12 years old. On the same day, the men of the German village of Olgenfel near Taganrog were sent to the front. Only later did the villagers learn that all of them, not having time to change into military uniforms, were surrounded and killed.

The eviction was announced three days in advance. On September 13, people were herded into calf (goods) wagons with butts, and it was forbidden to open their doors. They were taken under guard by NKVD troops armed with rifles. We drove for over a month. Not everyone moved the road.

On October 17, the exiles were unloaded at the Neverovskaya station and transported in carts around the Loktevsky district of the Altai Territory.

At this time, trains with exiled Poles were passing by the station in the village of Gornyak. One train stopped. Ten-year-old Tolya Fedorov looked into the open doors of the car.

I saw them standing and looking at me. City people, in suits, trousers with suspenders. I have never seen these braces. They were different from everyone I knew, even the city ones. Some other, unknown, rich world. If only I knew a little more then. But the family kept silent about it.

War

The Schwartz family was settled in the village of Gilevo, in the house of a local woman. They slept on the floor in the entrance hall, spoke only Russian: the husband and son of the hostess died at the front - and the Schwartz decided that German could not be heard in this house. Later they dug a dugout for themselves.

Both Volodya and Tolya did not study for long. Every day, on the way from school, local boys met Volodya, threw him to the ground shouting “Fascist!” and beat. After a couple of weeks, the parents could not stand it and allowed him to stay at home.

Tolya studied only in autumn. The felt boots she and her mother had were the same for two, and she had to go to work.

“All our fellow villagers were divided into two parts: those with a cow, and those without,” Anatoly Mikhailovich recalls. “Children from families with cows grew up faster, they were ringleaders. My mother and I - we were left alone - did not have a cow. Saved the wagon-shop. She came every other day by rail, dumping bread for the store. 400 grams for children, 600 for adults. Sometimes sugar was given, sometimes vodka, it was like a currency. The day without the shop wagon was a rainy day. I had to go fishing. He gathered beets in the collective farm gardens, millet in the elevator, dragged cake from the wagons, picked up quails that flew into high-voltage lines.

From Volodya's letter:

At the beginning of 1942, all girls of German nationality were mobilized to the labor front through the draft board. At the end of 1942, they began to call on women who had no more than two children, at the beginning of 43 - with three or four. The mobilized women were taken to the Beloyarsk station along with their children, the guards could not tear them away from their mothers. When boarding the wagons, a terrible cry arose. Some women, unable to stand it, fainted, and were thrown into the cars. When the train set off, the crying and shouting reached such intensity that the driver could not stand it, stopped the train, approached the leadership of the NKVD and declared that he would not lead this train.

The women and children were returned home. I don't know what happened to the driver.

In 1944, Volodya was also called to be sent to a labor camp. To the village where the mobilized were gathered, he was driven by a Russian old man. “Take a walk for now,” he said, and he went to the military enlistment office. He called Volodya only when the group for sending to the camp was recruited. That is what saved me.

“When the war ended, I began to work,” Anatoly Mikhailovich recalls. A mine was opened nearby, where zinc, lead and copper were mined. That's where I went. I was 15, I no longer had one jersey for two with my mother, but my own overalls, I brought home the first legally earned money, received a work ration - a kilogram of bread - and went to the fifth grade of a school for working youth. Became a man.

At school, they met Volodya. It was 1948.

From Volodya's letter:

My father guarded melons, where watermelons and melons were grown. The plots were more than a kilometer long, and the youth often raided them. One day, the manager who arrived I saw the kidnappers there with a beet punch, gave my father a scolding and beat him. My father was in his seventies at the time.

The next day, in the yard of the beet shop, I got into a fight with the manager and hit him on the head with a bottle of milk. After that, my father and I announced that we would no longer work for him. Soon the manager came to our house with three men to tie us up, take us to the district and hand us over to the police station. The father took the ax in his hands and declared that he would not surrender alive. They could not defeat us, but it was clear that they would not leave it without consequences.

Then I decided to go to the district to the commandant and tell him about everything that happened. At four in the morning I got up, at eight I was already at the commandant's. He listened carefully to me and gave written permission to move to the village of Gornyak, where I was going to work and study at an evening school.

Together

Everyone lived together in Gornyak: exiled Germans, Poles, Russians. Anatoly Mikhailovich remembers that the deported German and his and Volodya's friend Vanya Reizvik read Shakespeare, which they had never heard of at the time. And the teacher Genrikh Ivanovich, expelled from Rostov, recited Eugene Onegin to the children by heart. The first years after the deportation, he was forbidden to work at the school. But there were not enough teachers - and after a few years he taught half of the subjects.

German and Japanese prisoners of war worked in the mines around Gornyak.

“They worked strangely,” Anatoly Mikhailovich recalls. - I still remember: one will bend over and slowly shift the stone. Whether they were simulating. Was it how they were fed?

From Volodya's letter:

At home, I managed to finish four classes, two in German, two in Russian (by Stalin's decree, shortly before the war, teaching in German was banned in the USSR). In Gornyak I was admitted to the sixth. Do you remember how we wrote the first dictation? 43 mistakes! I was red with shame. Sasha Sarmin jumped for joy and shouted that now he was not the last student in the class. And there were only four of us.

Volodya worked as an apprentice carpenter, Tolya worked at the mine.

“The Germans were modest, especially Volodya,” Anatoly Mikhailovich recalls. - New in the company, insecure, quite rustic. They made fun of him a little, but did not insult him - they knew what we would have punched in the face for. He came from the village, got to our mine - and was happy that we are on an equal footing: we go to school, to dances, we fall in love with girls. But the mothers - both Volodina and Vanina - treated us dryly. Polite, correct, but as if aloof.

By decree of the NKVD, those who treat the deportees with sympathy were equated with anti-Soviet elements and were taken under special control. Gornyak did not know this. The neighborhood was too close, the German workers were industrious, the exiled Poles were beautiful.

“We didn’t divide people into Germans and Russians,” Anatoly Mikhailovich recalls. - We were friends. Then I did not know what they experienced, and I did not see any special attitude towards the Germans. Although I didn't see much at the time. I thought we were the ones making the planet happy. After all, we felt sorry for those working for the capitalists. So I did not hide anything from Volodya and Vanya. And they, it turns out, hid.

Volodya mentioned that every month he goes to check in with the commandant. That he could not move more than three kilometers from the village (for this, according to the law, 20 years of camps were supposed). Didn't say anything more. Never. Neither about deportation, nor about life in the war. Whether out of caution, fear, memory ...

“As long as I know him, so much memory controls him,” Anatoly Mikhailovich leafs through Volodya’s letters. “He didn’t come to me with his grievances. Yes, and I did not climb.

When Tolya was escorted to the army in 1950, Volodya and Vanya cried. They were forbidden to repay their debt to their homeland.

From Volodya's letter:

We checked in with the commandant every month until August 1956. German prisoners of war returned to Germany by 1954. Tolya, it turns out that the Soviet authorities were more afraid of their Germans than the Wehrmacht soldiers?

The friends parted ways after school. Tolya joined the army, graduated from high school, a military topographic school. They sent me to serve in Kemerovo, then to Donetsk. After retiring, he moved to Dubna.

Volodya graduated from the construction institute in Barnaul and moved to Alma-Ata. He headed the construction department, then became the deputy manager of the Kansk-Achinsk fuel and energy complex in Krasnoyarsk. And the motherland suddenly became generous with the Order "For Valiant Labor".

From Volodya's letter:

... Being in a sanatorium, I learned from a former NKVD worker how they, dressed in German uniforms, were parachuted into one of the regions of the German Volga region.

“But all the same,” the NKVD officer said, “we did not succeed in contacting the Russian Germans.

Instead of an epilogue

- Volodya visited me twice in Dubna in 1991 - Anatoly Mikhailovich and I are sitting in the kitchen of his apartment. - I did not stutter about emigration. And a couple of months later he suddenly called: “I'm leaving for Germany. I have already completed the paperwork." He said he would be glad if I came to see him off. And later he called back: “You know, it’s such a mess here ... We stand for documents for days. You'd better not see me off, otherwise it will be inconvenient for me. I didn't go.

The first time after leaving Volodya called a week later.

- I'm in heaven! he shouted. And he talked about clean streets, big pensions and free medicine. That in Germany he and his family immediately received everything: documents for citizenship, housing, money. That 24 hours in a day seem very long to a person who is used to working 18 hours a day.

After a couple of months, he started arguing. Furiously, mother. “We were fooled, Tolya. I just now began to understand how we were fooled. Volodya devoured volumes about Russian history, deportations, and repressions. I read Russian newspapers, was interested in politics.

Volodya often calls Tolya from Germany. He tells how he first trimmed shrubs in the gardens of native Germans, then sold bioadditives. A terrible story about how Volodya almost drowned seems like a fairy tale: "In the Mediterranean Sea near Valencia ...". The offer to buy bioadditives is a joke: "For only 200 euros ...".

Volodya's indignation has already passed. The nostalgia remains. Now in Germany, after drinking, he teaches the Germans: “The devil knows how you live! Let's see how the Russians live."