- When on 22 June 1941, soon after 4 a.m., the first German bombs were brought down to the village of Nowe Miasto in Poland, where was quartered a unit, in which served my husband, Captain of the Red Army Ivan Alexeyevich Safonovsky, no one knew that the war began, - Valentina Grigorievna Kozinko recalls. – I have never heard any talks about that among our military before. Like many others, at that moment I thought that was just a breach of the border.
Officer Safonovsky and his family got in that part of Poland occupied by the Soviet troops (according to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, under which Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland in 1939), two years before the war. A Polish town of Przemysl, which chanced to be left on the German side, was separated from Nowe Miasto, which had become Russian, only with a small river. Flights of the German planes over the very border were ordinary, and people became accustomed to them.
- We woke up from the roaring of planes and the bombardment, which started, - Valentina Grigorievna continues her story. - I dressed quickly, grabbed the hand of my daughter Nellie, who was not yet five years old, and jumped out into the street. What I saw were the military running embarrassed, nobody understood what was happening, asking each other. In the meantime bombs were falling and falling. A panic was raised. There was one commander, who ordered that women with children would leave into the forest. And the military were called to the unit on alert. As we were, empty-handed, we fled into the forest. It occurred to nobody that we would never return.
We knew that the war had begun only in the town of Khirov, which is eighteen kilometers away from Nowe Miasto. We went there on foot. I immediately ran to my former apartment owner Mrs. Kotko (prior to Nowe Miasto the unit, in which my husband had served, was located in Khirov). She was the first to tell me that the war began. I decided not to stay long and hurried to catch up with fellow travelers. Mrs. Kotko rushed out after me and called. I returned. With her hands trembling, she put a small icon on my daughter’s neck and was endlessly repeating: «Valentina, do not take it off. Valentina, do not take it off!». In those days Nelly and I underwent a terrible ordeal, but we survived. And I think, that icon may have saved us from death.
In Khirov I met my sister-in-law Zina Zhurankova with her two-year-old son. Only thanks to her husband, also a serviceman, we hardly managed to get into one of the two trucks that were to take out the wives of officers from that hell. But so many people stayed there still...
The trucks were sometimes driving through a forest, then through a field. We were on the way mostly at night, hiding in the forests and field at daytime. As soon as we heard the Nazi planes, we were scattering over the field at once, lying down in maturing rye, which was «biting» so severely, that our bodies were itching terribly after. My daughter was so tormented that I sometimes refused to hide in the rye. «Mom, it’s better the Germans would kill us, but we will not lie in the rye any more», - the poor child cried.
The war that fell upon people was so sudden that many could not just come down. During one of the raids Zina fled into the forest, having forgotten her little son in the truck. The boy seized the side of the truck and was crying. Valentina Grigorievna saved him. Leaving her daughter, she returned for the boy. Until now, her sister-in-law cannot remember that episode without horror. A lot of trying situations met them on the way: once the truck had almost fell down into the river from a bridge (they were going at night without headlights), once they had miraculously escaped the bomb that fell nearby. More and more often they were seeing the bodies of dead soldiers and peaceful people, killed by the bombs. There was nobody to bury them. The truck passengers, one of which were Valentina Grigorievna, were even lucky: they reached the destination. Those who weró øò the second truck were killed during one of the raids.
Finally, the refugees came to the Polish town of Stanislav. From there, a freight train was going to Kiev with the local evacuees. The families of the border guards managed to get that train. All the papers were arranged according to their words, because none of them turned out to have documents.
- We were not allowed in Kiev, - the widow of Ivan Safonovsky stirs up in her memory the tale that is old. – It turned out that the Germans had been bombing it since the first days of the war. The freight train stopped at the Konotop station, and we were told that we would be taken to Siberia. Me and my sister-in-law Zina refused at once, but they wouldn’t let us go, perhaps for fear that we would disclose the truth about the beginning of the war. As soon as the train started off, Zina and I jumped out of the wagon, but were taken to the commandant’s office. We had to explain that we wanted to return home, to the town of Prokhladny. After some delays, one organization, I don’t really remember, gave us money for tickets.
The women returned home lousy and ragged. The relatives of Valentina Grigorievna received the first news of Ivan Safonovsky in some six months. Some kind of uncertainty was felt in the letter. However hard he tried, he was unable to conceal that he had no hopes that his wife and daughter survived this hell. So negligibly small was the chance to survive at the border in the early hours of the war. Even if they had not been killed during the bombing, captivity or shooting awaited them. It was unlikely that the Germans would have spared the wife of a red officer.
Valentina Grigorievna Kozinko has seen a lot in her lifetime. Much has been forgotten, but the flight from German invaders has engraved on her memory for life and remained there as a terrifying reminiscence. |
FACT
