Inside the Rzhev Meatginder. Gennadiy Fedorovich Rusakov

go so that he could earn money for clothes. In collective farms, money was not paid, earnings were accrued in working days. By the decision of the board of the collective farm, my father was released, but not immediately and with the condition that he would return after some time back. He worked in a collective farm as a livestock breeder. Why he ended up in Novopetrovskoe, and not in Moscow, where he worked from the age of eight for a merchant from this village, “a boy on the run”, I do not know. A year later, his mother left for him, and we: my sister, me and my younger brother stayed with my paternal grandmother. But the following year, my mother, having been in the village and leaving again to live with my father, took me with her. Why me, and not my brother or sister, I don’t know.

      That’s how I ended up in this village. All the money earned, except for housing and food expenses, mom tried to spend on the purchase of everything related to clothes. I bought a manual sewing machine, searched and, if possible, bought different fabrics. We were small and growing up quickly, so it was not practical to buy ready-made clothes. My father’s job involved traveling around the neighborhood, so he bought a bike for himself. By June 1941, we had accumulated a large suitcase of all sorts of fabrics.

      My father left on conscription on the 4th day of the war – June 26. Saying goodbye to us, he told my mother that the war would be hard and long, so he advised her to go home to the village. There, as I wrote above, we had our own house. A Roma woman with her children temporarily lived in it, she left the camp in 1936 and got a job on a collective farm, her father allowed her to live until she built her house. In the same village lived all our paternal relatives – four of his brothers, their mother – Maria Ivanovna 63 years old, her parents – father Ivan Severyanovich 96 years old and mother Natalia Egorovna 92 years old, with them lived their daughter, grandmother’s sister – Elena Ivanovna 57 years – disabled since childhood.

      “In the village,” he said, “on the ground, it will be easier to feed children and the elderly.” And we went to the village of Tverskaya, then Kalinin region, Pogorelsky district – not far from Rzhev, taking with us all the property that we had managed to accumulate.

      It was a very beautiful village called Egor’evskoe, located along the banks of two streams: Derzha and Sukromlya, which flowed into the Derzha.

      My mother took my sister from my grandmother 9 years old and my younger brother 5 years old, they lived with her, as I said, while my father and mother and I tried to settle in the suburbs, and we settled in our house. The gypsy was not touched, it seemed to be safer together, she and her mother were the same age, especially since she had nowhere to move or leave.

      In August, the harvesting of bread began and all the adult, able-bodied population, all women, worked in the fields from morning to late evening. Of the men in the village, there were only old men, but they were also engaged in various repair work, even my paternal great-grandfather, at the age of 96, was engaged in the repair of equipment, harnesses, wagons – everything that fails from hard work.

      Chapter 2. The year is 1941. The rolls of war

      And from afar, the sound of war could already be heard. Soon the retreating units of the Red Army began to pass through the village, first in groups with commanders, with weapons. Then in groups, and alone with weapons and without weapons. They said we were coming out of the encirclement – the Smolensk cauldron.

      At the end of August, the retreating Red Army soldiers cautiously entered the village – they were afraid that there might already be fascists in the village, and then, they asked what we knew about their presence. The village did not know much about the situation in the district, but if possible, they tried to help with everything they could: clothes and food, if they asked for it. They explained how to go through the forests, bypassing large settlements and roads.

      I remember very well one of the last groups, there were 7 people in it. Among them, the sergeant stood out, he was armed not with an ordinary rifle, but with some other, the barrel of the rifle ended in a thickening, similar to a basket. As I found out later, it was a semi-automatic ten-shot Simonov rifle. And I remembered this because by this time it had already become known: the Nazis had taken Volokolamsk. Fighters from this group decided to go to the front without weapons, dressed in civilian clothes. They changed into the old clothes of my father and his brothers. The weapons were buried in a sheepfold, in dry manure. The sergeant was not Russian, it seems, as I understand it now, Turkmen or Tajik, but he spoke Russian well. He refused to change clothes and did not leave the rifle, said: “I will go as it is, lucky – I will get there, I will not be lucky – I will take the fight.”

      It may seem like I’m making up the details, since I haven’t had eight yet. But I remember everything verbatim, even the fact that his comrades persuaded him to leave their documents here in the village, and even more so – the party card, but he refused. I already knew about the party card then, my uncle, my mother’s brother, had a party card, he was a participant in the war with the Finns, there he joined the party and was proud of it.

      Whether they got to theirs or not, I don’t know, but everything happened before my eyes. I myself was a participant, because I took out of the pantry, at the direction of my mother, these clothes, in which they changed. A neighbor threatened my mother: “The Germans will come, I will tell you that you are helping the Communists, they will hang you!” Why she did not love our family, I do not know, maybe because we let into the house the same Gypsy family that left the camp, the Roma in the villages were not very fond of.

      Chapter 3. The year is 1941. September. Fascists

      For the first time the fascists appeared in our village on September 7. I remember this day well, it was a Sunday, and my sister and I were at home, not at school. I went to the first grade on the first of September and my sister to the second grade. We studied for only one week. There were no adults in the village, as I said, there was a harvesting of bread. The day was warm and sunny, and almost all the kids were outside, we played something with balls. It was about noon when we saw something strange approaching us from the village of Tupitsino and dragging a huge tail of dust with it.

      The Germans arrived in a car that had tracks instead of rear wheels. There were 4 people in the car. In the village, in general, we never saw any cars other than tractors, so we looked with surprise at this “miracle – yudo”!

      An officer got out of the car and on a broken Russian, poking his finger into some paper, as I found out later, in the map, pointing his hand in the direction of the river, asked: “Is this Derzha? Where is Sukromlya?”

      We guessed that he was asking about our rivers and replied, “Sukromlya at the other end of the village.” He wrote something down and got in the car. She turned around and moved, but then in the next yard, for some reason, a pig squealed, the car stopped, two came out of it – this officer and a soldier. They went to the house and started knocking on the doors, but no one answered because the adults were in the field and there were two small children at home. The eldest was probably five years old, and maybe even less, I don’t remember exactly. Without waiting for an answer to the knock, the officer said something to the soldier, he went to the car, brought and put what he brought under the door. The officer said something to us and waved his hand to get us off, we walked away. An officer and a soldier walked around the corner of the house. Almost immediately there was an explosion, the door was torn down, the soldier entered the courtyard, a shot rang out.

      The soldier came out of the yard, dragging the dead pig by the leg. The officer took some papers out of his pocket, put them on the rubble of the house, crushed them with a small pebble, said: “Payment.” These were, as it turned out later, occupation stamps. The pig was loaded into the car, got on their own and drove away. I described in such detail the first meeting with the occupiers because the second visit to our village by the Germans directly affected me.

      Chapter 4. The year is 1941. Military reserve

      On