A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (42 page)

I was never treated medically by the Germans. Soon I was loaded
onto a cargo train, and in five days, under a guard of four soldiers, we
were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp on Polish territory. In the same
carriage was a nurse who was standing next to me all the time,
crying. The German guards dragged her away and beat her, but all the
same she crawled back to me and never left me alone. She cried and
begged me not to die.

The camp was international, and there were prisoners who were
doctors. A Russian, Dr. Sinyakov, treated me. Sinyakov went to the
Gestapo headquarters of that camp and asked, in the name of all the
prisoners of the camp, that permission be given to treat the Russian
pilot. All of the prisoners, except the Russians, received a parcel with
food and medication from the Red Cross Society. Stalin had said
during the war, "We do not have prisoners of war, only traitors"; and
he forbade all help.

On January 31, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the camp. I, being a
woman, was suspected of being a collaborator. When Russian prisoners were released from the German prisons, they were immediately
imprisoned in the Soviet Union. They were deprived of their rank and
all their medals and were forced to stay in work camps for long
periods. While I was in the German camp, the Russian doctor who
treated me kept safe the documents of my two orders and my party
membership card. When the Soviet troops were advancing and approaching the camp, the Germans transferred westward to another
camp the Soviet prisoners who were able to be moved. Those of us
who couldn't be moved stayed in the camp. The Germans started
shooting those of us that remained, but the Soviet tanks rushed into
the area before they could finish and liberated the camp.

Russian prisoners were sent to Lansberg to be tested. But I was considered to be a special kind of a traitor, the worst sort, and as such
I was sent to a Soviet organization called SMERCH, which meant
"death to the fascists." I was to be tested there, where the fascists
were tested. It was operated by the (the secret police). There
were many fascists in the basement where we were confined. They all
lay on the lower bunks; I lay on the upper bunk. Above that cellar was
a room where officers questioned me. Through a small hole in
the ceiling I could see an officer examining my orders and
medals through a lens.

I was questioned every night for ten days. They wanted to know
how I had gotten to that camp: if I had really been a traitor, I would
have come to the camp voluntarily and offered myself into German
hands. They examined my orders and papers each night. But the
doctors who treated me in the camp, who described in detail my
condition when I was brought to the camp, told how they had taken
care of me and how I had been imprisoned. They asked that I be
released and sent to the camp at Lansberg to be tested with the other
Soviet prisoners. The officers would not do that; they questioned me
every night-ten of them. The soldiers on guard duty there called me
bad names: German bitch, fascist bitch, swine. I was constantly
guarded by soldiers, and a gun was directed into my back when I was
going to the bathroom.

On the eleventh night of the eleventh day, I pulled myself together.
I felt some strength inside my body, and I ran up to the second floor. I
had wanted to speak to the colonel every night, but they wouldn't let
me. While I was running upstairs a soldier behind me was shouting,
"Stop, or I will shoot you," but I rushed on into his quarters, a wellfurnished room with a rug. The NKVD officers lived quite well in the
rear, even during the war. I cried out, "Shoot me, but I will not let you
torture me."

I don't know what happened then because I fell unconscious.
When I regained consciousness, lying on the floor, I saw a glass of
water standing on the table. I was in the colonel's room, but it was
empty. I got up from the floor, sat on the sofa, and pulled myself
together, and in a moment the colonel came in and asked if I had
calmed myself. I said yes. He looked at me and said, "You are released." I asked him then to give me a certificate that said I was
released and that I had been tested, and he said that he would not do
that. I asked him if a woman had really given birth to him-I doubted
that he could ever have had a mother if he tortured everyone like me,
who came from the concentration camp wounded and burned, with all the bones in my body broken and having undergone in the camp
what I had to endure.

He didn't speak right away, and then he said that he would give me
the certificate. The officer then gave me a horse and cart with a
soldier as a guide who brought me to a control line. There I told an
officer that I was from the 16th Air Army and wanted to return to my
unit. They sympathized with me, put me on one of the trucks, and
sent me back to the army.

When I returned to the regiment everyone was so happy to see me
and to know I hadn't been killed in the crash. The regimental commander gave me an apartment to myself. They all brought me small
presents, like sweets. Captain Tsikhonja came to me with dresseslong dresses-and said that he was going to give these to his wife, but
the moment he heard I was still alive he decided to present the
dresses to me. Then he burst out crying.

I stayed in the army until the end of the war, but I did not fly. The
doctors have never let me fly since that time. They said I was an
invalid.

I found out that the commander of our regiment was also shot down
but managed to land the plane in Soviet territory. They all saw my
plane crash and were sure that I had perished. They never saw my
parachute. At that time the commander of the regiment sent an application to the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union to award me the
Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously. They sent my
mother a pokhoronka, a document saying her daughter had been killed.

My mother suffered greatly; she became sick after that news and
stayed motionless in bed for some time. She sent my sister to a nearby
village to a fortune-teller, because she had a feeling that I was still
alive. The fortune-teller said it was the truth that Anna was no longer
alive. My mother began going to the church to have the priest sing an
orthodox song for the dead.

The moment the camp was liberated, I wrote a letter to my mother
and passed it to the tankers, who sent it to her. When she received the
letter, she thought she had gone mad and that it was all a dream; she
thought it was a vision. Then she went to the neighbors and asked a
young boy there to read the letter. He read it word for word, and then
she did believe it was true. She went home and put on her best
clothes and went to the army staff that was headquartered near the
village. When she had been informed that I was killed, she began
receiving a small pension. So at the local army headquarters she told
them to please not send her that damned pension any more!

NOTE: Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova was the only woman pilot in her
regiment. She was granted the Hero of the Soviet Union medal only
in 1965. The award had initially been granted posthumously in 1944,
then withheld when it was discovered she had not perished but had
become a prisoner of war.

Senior Sergeant Anna Popova,
flight radio operator Toth Guard Air Transport Division

I finished the war in the rank of senior sergeant. I began flying in the
so-called Group of Special Role formed in Moscow, and by the end of
the war it grew into the loth Guard Air Transport Division, which
consisted of three regiments. This division used pilots from civil
aviation. I started flying on Li-2 aircraft, then on C-47s. These were
twin-engine American transport planes, ferried from Alaska to our
country in the Second World War. But I came to the air forces as a
ground radio operator and went to the front trained as a flight radio
operator.

Before the war I attended courses in Morse code. I cannot say I was
willing to become a ground radio operator in my youth, but in the
192os and 1930S it was more or less obligatory for a Komsomol member to actively participate in the sociopolitical life of the country. So
each young person of my age was supposed to join a club, an afterschool activity course or movement, to manifest loyalty to the political system as well as readiness to defend the regime when needed. An
adult's extracurricular activity was normally recorded in her graduation grade list and was very significant when applying to any educational establishment or for a job. Many young girls went to glider
school for reasons far loftier than demonstrating their loyalty to the
system-they dreamed of flying. But I didn't join any glider school,
because I was fully engaged in Morse code training.

In order to accomplish what I've done in my life I had to break
stone walls and apply unfeminine energy and effort to each step, but I
have always been inspired by the real feelings of my heart. When the
war was declared, a great number of young people went to the front
voluntarily. I applied to the Military Commissariat several times and
each time was rejected. Here is my story.

I was born on December 31, 1923, in the town of Vitebsk in Belorussia. When at school, like every Soviet youngster, I actively participated in the socioeconomic life of the country. But in 1939 the
N x VD (secret police) arrested a group of schoolchildren in our town, all
of them age fifteen-I among them. There were two girls and seven boys in that group. The people who arrested us were vigilant hawks of
the Stalin regime who spared nobody to curry favor with their governors. They totally ignored child psychology and completely lacked an
understanding of a child's fantasy. They were uneducated and ignorant,
ready to find anyone guilty of never-committed crimes; perhaps even
newborn babies who appeared to cry non-Stalinist tears! They converted the whole great country into a big concentration camp of lifeterm inmates. They would turn people into programmed robots stuffed
with slogans and cheers for the great Stalin.

My story, or rather the story of my group, is only one tiny, modest
example of how this evil machine operated. The boys who fell under
suspicion and were jailed were just like boys all over the world who
like to read lots of science fiction, adventure stories, thrillers, and
travel novels. Under the spell of world-famous literary characters,
three of them decided to run away from their homes and rode to
Odessa on their bicycles. Of course they were found and brought back
to their parents. After that they wanted to intrigue the girls and seem
mysterious, and they began signing any messages or notes to their
friends as 3+X. Several years passed. This childish game was forgotten, and no one even thought of it again.

On the eve of May I (May Day), celebrated in our country as the
Day of International Solidarity of Workers of the World, I was summoned to the secretary of the Regional Komsomol Committee to
report on the May Day preparations at my school. When I left that
committee one of the members asked me to accompany him to meet
his friend, who had allegedly returned from the Far East. I consented;
we climbed the stairs, the door opened, and ahead of me lay an N K V D
office. I still remember the man who played that evil trick on me and
so dramatically affected my life. His name is Vasilij Korsakov. He
asked me to repeat the information I had just told the committee
about the May Day festivities at school, about my schoolmates and
their grades, and about our after-school activities, when out of nowhere came a question about the 3+X group.

I explained to him the meaning of 3+X and the origin of this boyish
game. Then I was allowed to leave, but several months later, all of us
were arrested. We were accused of founding an anti-Soviet, subversive, underground youth organization in the territory of Belorussia. I
was included in the group because we were close friends, and we
spent our free time together. We were all sent to the central prison in
Minsk, capital of Belorussia, where I was held for six months in
solitary confinement.

By the time we were brought to trial a new secretary of the Regional Komsomol Committee, Ponomarenko, was appointed. He easily understood that we were innocent and did what he could to soften
our sentences. We were tried by the regional court behind closed
doors. We were sentenced, according to Article 58, for counterrevolutionary activity and anti-Soviet propaganda. At the trial it became
obvious to everybody, including the jury, that the accusations had
been fabricated. That nightmare affected me and changed my future
dramatically. Mariya Veitzer, the other girl, and I were released, and I
returned to my native town, but the boys were not released. I was
expelled from the Komsomol, and I was looked upon as a spy and an
enemy. If anyone had sympathized with me they would have had to
conceal it so as not to fall themselves under suspicion of the

I returned to school and completed ninth grade; then I moved to
live with my aunt in Smolensk, where I didn't have to hide from
people. But in December, 1938, my parents called me and said that the
group had again been arrested and put into prison, because the verdict
hadn't satisfied the In my youth I had a strong belief that the
state as governed by Stalin had nothing in common with the evil
people who performed such injustices on innocent citizens. I thought
Stalin was being deliberately deluded by enemies who paralyzed the
whole country with a spy network. Stalin himself, I believed, was not
involved in it and did not know about the Soviet concentration-camp
system. We believed that if only Stalin could learn of the crimes of
the spy machine, he would punish them severely. Ours was a boundless faith and an unbreakable love of Stalin-our God, as we symbolized him. Even after being imprisoned I only desired to prove that I
was a genuine Soviet girl, honest and loyal; a real patriot who loved
her motherland dearly and was ready to give her life for it and for
Stalin. My faith was boundless. Now that we all know the real truth
about what happened during those times-the system that caused it,
the horrors and crimes committed during Stalin's reign, the millions
of people victimized and murdered-I cannot perceive how shortsighted we were, how Stalin managed to charm and hypnotize the
whole country. It's beyond my understanding.