Children of the wartime … Their childhood was not sweet. The Vladimirovsky (now Akhtubinsky) district of the Astrakhan region was separated from Stalingrad by some two hundred kilometers. At night, a glow burned in that direction - heavy battles were going on there. And here, in the "near" rear, both old and small tried to help the front. You cannot erase these years from your memory. So Zoya Ivanovna Melnik remembered everything to the smallest detail.
I come from the village of Uspenka. And I was born there, and my sister Valya. Our father Ivan Yegorovich Gaidyshev worked in a fishing artel in the winter under the name Churkina. There were several of them, and all of them were part of a fish farm, located on the outskirts of the village of Petropavlovka (now the city of Akhtubinsk). Mom was a peasant and managed to do a lot of things around the house.
In December 1941, the Pope was drafted into the army. For some time he was near Stalingrad, where the recruits were trained in military affairs. By some miracle, my father managed to come to our village for a day with an opportunity - to visit and say goodbye. Through a dream, I then heard the parents' conversation. "Vanya, how will I be without you, what to do, how to live?" my mother asked. “Go, Maria, to the fish farm, in my place,” my father replied. “It’s hard, but they’re fed and the children won’t die of hunger.”
Soon we found ourselves at the Churkina wintering. In those days there was a livestock farm there. The cows need a peek, so they took us with a neighbor's boy Vitya Guzhvin as shepherds. All day long we grazed the cows, for this we were given food - half a liter of milk, a little sour cream and cottage cheese. Sumptuous food for the time.
Village children grow up early - there was a lot of work, it was necessary to cope with everything. But all the same, children are children, so they came up with some kind of games. We go and go after the cows, and we ourselves notice everything around. We often met the same woman both in the forest and on the banks of the Kalmynka River. We saw her during the winter too - she lived on the outskirts, unsociable, closed. So Vitka and I began to follow her. Where she goes - there and we make our way unnoticed.
Saboteurs
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Barges and steamers often approached the steep Kalmyanka pit. Either the wounded were taken to Astrakhan, now the evacuees. And for some reason, near us, these ships fell under the bombing. As soon as the ship is on its way - a red rocket soars, from behind the river, searchlights are shining from somewhere, and the fascist plane is right there. After the bombing, the water in Kalmynka was red with blood. We saw how the courts burned, how people, dying, shouted, but what can you do!
And the woman, it seems, was a saboteur. They said that she and her husband fired signal rockets, gave a tip to the enemy. They say that from their house an underground passage was dug to a dugout in the forest. I don’t know the passage, but Vitka and I found this dugout. We somehow climbed into the thickets, and there the passage to the dugout is disguised with branches. We entered and saw - some kind of receivers, wires. None of the people. Otherwise, they probably would have killed us there, and no one would have found out about it.
We ran with all our might to the shore, where a large ship had just stopped. The sentries do not let us in, but we cry, we say to call someone from the authorities. An officer came out to us. We explained to him as best we could about the equipment in the dugout. He took the soldiers with him and asked us to see them off. When we reached that place, we were ordered to return to the shore and wait for the return of the group, not to leave. We heard bursts of machine gun fire, shouts … And when the officer returned, he ordered to give us food. Bread and canned food were taken from the ship. He wrote down all our data and said: "Dear children, what great help you have rendered us"
Scary picture
The war went on and on, life became more and more difficult. We especially suffered from hunger and cold. For a bread ration of 400 grams, my mother went with us every day from wintering on foot to the pier in Petropavlovka.
I will never forget one of the gloomy days of late autumn. We received our bitter bread and was already getting ready for the return journey when it started raining heavily. We cuddled up in a corner of the pier and stood. Two barges approached, full of people - mostly women, children, old people. The adults said that these were evacuated families, that they would be distributed to the villages of our region, and they would live and work there.
For some reason, panic arose, no one knew where to define these people now, from the road, the rain was gushing … I remember the terrible picture well. After the rain, frost hit the night, and many of those evacuees died of hypothermia. Until the last minute, the women tried to save the children, holding them tightly to themselves in order to warm them, soaked to the skin. I remember how these people were buried in hastily dug ditches near the pier …
Bright memory
Our father did not return from the front. His name is engraved on the obelisk in my native Uspenka. And he was buried in a mass grave 60 kilometers from Moscow. I went there when I was younger. For a long time we knew nothing about the fate of our father. The funeral was brought to us, ironically, on Victory Day, May 9. And father died much earlier - in the spring of 1943, as a fellow countryman who fought with his father told us later. Father brought up shells in a cart and died from a direct hit by a fascist shell. Blessed memory to him and to all people whose lives were taken away by the cursed war.