Scary figures appear in the newspapers: in Russia, 2 million school-age children do not go to school. They remain illiterate. Thousands of schools are closed in rural areas. There are purely street children growing in the cities. When I read these messages, I involuntarily remember how we studied in the destroyed Stalingrad. The revival of the hero city began precisely with the schools.
The wooden streets around our house burned down, and it seemed that the Mamayev Kurgan, dug by craters, moved even closer to us. For hours I wandered in search of ammunition boxes. We made trestle beds out of them, made a table and stools. These boxes were used to stoke the stove.
We lived in a huge ashes. Only charred stoves were left of the houses around. And the feeling of hopeless melancholy, I remember, did not leave me: "How are we going to live?" Before leaving the city, the fighters of the field kitchen left us porridge briquettes and half a bag of flour. But these reserves were melting. Mother and 4-year-old sister were lying in the corner with a cold, huddled together.
I stoked the stove and cooked food, reminding myself of a caveman: I spent hours picking flint stones, holding tow ready, trying to make fire. There were no matches. I collected snow in a bucket and melted it on the stove.
A neighbor boy told me: under the Mamayev Kurgan in the destroyed workshop of the Lazur plant, food is being handed out. With a sack over my shoulders, in which a German bowler hat rattled, I went to get some groceries. We were not given them from the first days of the defense of Stalingrad, even the blockade 100 grams of bread. The soldiers fed us.
Under the Mamayev Kurgan in the ruins of a brick building, I saw a woman in a shabby sheepskin coat. Here they gave out food without money and without ration cards. We didn't have them. "What kind of family do you have?" She only asked me. “Three people,” I answered honestly. I could say ten - among the ashes you can't check it. But I was a pioneer. And I was taught - to lie is shameful. I received bread, flour, and condensed milk was poured into my pot. They gave us an American stew.
Throwing the bag over my shoulders, I walked a few steps, and suddenly on a charred post I saw a piece of paper glued on which was written: "Children from 1st to 4th grade are invited to school." The address was indicated: the basement of the Lazur plant. I quickly found this place. Steam billowed from behind the wooden basement door. It smelled like pea soup. "Maybe they'll be fed here?" - I thought.
Returning home, she said to my mother: "I'll go to school!" She wondered, “What school? All schools were burned and destroyed."
Before the start of the siege of the city, I was going to go to the 4th grade. Joy knew no bounds.
However, it was not so easy to reach the school in the basement: you had to overcome a deep ravine. But since we played in this ravine both in winter and in summer, I calmly set off on the road. As usual, I rolled into the ravine on the floors of my coat, but it was not easy to get out onto the opposite steep, snow-covered slope. I grabbed the chopped off branches of the bushes, by the bunches of wormwood, paddled the thick snow with my hands. When I got out on the slope and looked around, children were climbing up to the right and left of me. "Go to school too?" - I thought. And so it happened. As I later found out, some lived even further from the school than I did. And on their way they even crossed two ravines.
Going down to the basement, above which it was written: "School", I saw long tables and benches hammered out of boards. As it turned out, each table was assigned to one class. Instead of a board, a green door was nailed to the wall. The teacher, Polina Tikhonovna Burova, walked between the tables. She managed to give an assignment to one class and call someone from another to the board. The discord in the basement has become familiar to us.
Instead of notebooks, we were given thick office books and so-called "chemical pencils". If you wet the tip of the rod, then the letters came out bold, clear. And if you scold the rod with a knife and fill it with water, you get ink.
Polina Tikhonovna, tried to distract us from heavy thoughts, selected for us for dictations texts far from the theme of war. I remember her soft voice associated with the sound of the wind in the forest, the tart smell of steppe grasses, the shine of sand on the Volga island.
The sounds of explosions were constantly heard in our basement. It was the sappers who cleared the railroad from mines, which encircled the Mamayev Kurgan. “Soon trains will go along this road, builders will come to rebuild our city,” said the teacher.
None of the guys, hearing the explosions, was distracted from their studies. All the days of the war in Stalingrad we heard explosions, both more terrible and closer.
Even now, remembering our basement school, I never cease to be amazed. Not a single chimney had yet been smoked in the factories, not a single machine had been started up, and we, the children of factory workers, were already at school, writing letters and solving arithmetic problems.
Then from Irina, daughter of Polina Tikhonovna, we learned how they got to the city. During the fighting, they were evacuated to the Zavolzhskoe village. When they heard about the victory at Stalingrad, they decided to return to the city … They walked into a blizzard, fearing to get lost. The Volga was the only reference point. In passing farms they were allowed in by strangers. They gave food and a warm corner. Polina Tikhonovna and her daughter covered fifty kilometers.
On the right bank, through the snow haze, they saw the ruins of houses, broken buildings of factories. It was Stalingrad. We got to our village along the frozen Volga. Only charred stones remained in the place of their home. Until the evening we wandered along the paths. Suddenly a woman came out of the dugout. She saw and recognized Polina Tikhonovna - her daughter's teacher. The woman called them to the dugout. In the corner, huddled together, sat three thin, war-hunted children. The woman treated the guests with boiling water: there was no such thing as tea in that life.
The next day Polina Tikhonovna was drawn to her native school. Built before the war, white, brick, it was destroyed: there were battles.
Mother and daughter went to the center of the village - to the square in front of the metallurgical plant "Red October", which was the pride of the city. Here they produced steel for tanks, aircraft, artillery pieces. Now the powerful open-hearth pipes were collapsed, destroyed by the bombs of the shop hulls. On the square, they saw a man in a quilted sweatshirt and immediately recognized him. It was the secretary of the Krasnooktyabrsk District Party Committee, Kashintsev. He caught up with Polina Tikhonovna and, smiling, said to her: “It’s good that you are back. I am looking for teachers. We must open a school! If you agree, there is a good basement at the Lazur factory. Children stayed in the dugouts with their mothers. We must try to help them."
Polina Tikhonovna went to the Lazur plant. I found a basement - the only one that has survived here. There was a soldier's kitchen at the entrance. Here you can cook porridge for children.
The MPVO soldiers took out the broken machine guns and cartridges from the basement. Polina Tikhonovna wrote an ad, which she placed next to a grocery stall. Children were reaching for the basement. This is how our first school began in destroyed Stalingrad.
Later we learned that Polina Tikhonovna lived with her daughter in a soldier's dugout on the Volga slope. The entire coast was dug by such soldiers' dugouts. They gradually began to be occupied by the Stalingraders who returned to the city. Irina told us how they, helping each other, with difficulty crawled up the Volga slope - this is how Polina Tikhonovna got to the lesson. At night, in the dugout, they laid one coat on the floor, and covered with the other. Then they were presented with soldiers' blankets. But Polina Tikhonovna always came to us fit, with a strict haircut. I was most impressed by her white collar on a dark woolen dress.
Stalingraders at that time lived in the most difficult conditions. Here are the usual pictures of those days: a break in the wall is covered with soldiers' blankets - there are people there. The light of the smokehouse shines from the basement. Broken buses were used for housing. The footage has survived: construction girls with towels on their shoulders emerge from the fuselage of a shot down German plane, boots knocking on the German swastika on the wing. There were also such hostels in the destroyed city … Residents cooked food on bonfires. In each dwelling there were katyusha lamps. The projectile cartridge was squeezed from both sides. A strip of cloth was pushed into the slot, and some liquid that could burn was poured into the bottom. In this smoky circle of light, they cooked food, sewed clothes, and the children prepared for lessons.
Polina Tikhonovna told us: “Children, if you find books anywhere, bring them to school. Let them even be - burnt, cut by splinters. " In a niche in the basement wall, a shelf was nailed, on which a stack of books appeared. Well-known photojournalist Georgy Zelma, who came to us, captured this picture. Above the niche was written in large letters: "Library".
… Remembering those days, I am most surprised at how the desire to learn was glowing in the children. Nothing - neither maternal instruction, nor the strict words of the teacher, could force us to climb over deep ravines, crawl along their slopes, walk along paths among minefields in order to take our place in the basement school at a long table.
Survivors of bombing and shelling, constantly dreamed of eating their fill, dressed in patched rags, we wanted to learn.
Older children - it was the 4th grade, they remembered the lessons in the pre-war school. But first-graders, moistening the tips of pencils with saliva, wrote out their first letters and numbers. How and when did they manage to get this noble inoculation - you have to learn! Incomprehensible … The time, apparently, was like that.
When a radio appeared in the village, the loudspeaker was placed on a pole above the factory square. And early in the morning, over the ruined village was heard: "Get up, the country is huge!" It may seem strange, but it seemed to the children of the wartime that the words of this great song were addressed to them too.
Schools were also opened in other areas of the destroyed Stalingrad. Years later, I wrote down the story of Antonina Fedorovna Ulanova, who worked as the head of the public education department of the Traktorozavodsky district. She recalled: "In February 1943, a telegram came to the school where I worked after the evacuation:" Leave for Stalingrad. " I went on the road.
On the outskirts of the city, in a miraculously preserved wooden house, she found oblono workers. I received such a task: to get to the Traktorozavodsky district and determine on the spot in which building the children can be gathered to start their lessons. In the 1930s, fourteen excellent schools were built in our area. Now I walked among the ruins - not a single school remained. On the way I met the teacher Valentina Grigorievna Skobtseva. Together we began to look for a room, at least with strong walls. We entered the building of the former school, which was built opposite the tractor plant. We climbed the steps of the broken staircase to the second floor. We walked along the corridor. There were pieces of plaster around after the bombing. However, among this pile of stones and metal, we managed to find two rooms where the walls and ceilings remained intact. It was here, it seemed to us, that we have the right to bring children.
The school year began in March. They hung an announcement about the opening of the school on the broken columns of the tractor plant's checkpoints. I came to the planning meeting, which was conducted by the management of the plant. I spoke to the heads of the shops: "Help the school" …
And each workshop undertook to do something for the children. I remember how workers carried metal jugs for drinking water across the square. One of them read: "To children from blacksmiths."
From the press shop, metal sheets, polished to a high gloss, were brought to the school. They were put in place of the chalkboards. They turned out to be very easy to write. The MPVO fighters whitewashed the walls and ceilings in the classrooms. But the window panes were not found in the area. They opened a school with broken windows."
School classes in the Traktorozavodsky district were opened in mid-March 1943. “We were waiting for our students at the entrance,” said A. F. Ulanova. - I remember the first grader Gena Khorkov. He walked with a large canvas bag. The mother, apparently, put on the boy the warmest that she found - a quilted sweatshirt with cotton wool, which reached his toes. The jersey was tied with a rope so that it would not fall off the shoulders. But you had to see what joy the boy's eyes shone with. He went to study."
The first lesson was the same for everyone who came to school. Teacher V. G. Skobtseva called it a lesson in hope. She told the children that the city would be reborn. New quarters, palaces of culture, stadiums will be built.
The classroom windows were smashed. The children sat in winter clothes. In 1943, a cameraman captured this picture.
Subsequently, these shots were included in the film epic "The Unknown War": children, wrapped in headscarves, write letters in notebooks with chilled hands. The wind rushes through the broken windows and tugs at the pages.
The expression on the faces of the children is striking and the way with which concentrated attention they listen to the teacher.
Subsequently, over the years, I managed to find the students of this first school in the Traktorozavodsky district. L. P. Smirnova, a candidate of agricultural sciences, told me: “We knew in what difficult conditions our teachers live. Some in a tent, some in a dugout. One of the teachers lived under the stairwell of the school, fencing her corner with boards. But when the teachers came to class, we saw people of high culture in front of us. What did it mean for us then to study? It's like breathing. Then I myself became a teacher and realized that our teachers knew how to raise the lesson to spiritual communication with children. Despite all the hardships, they managed to instill in us a thirst for knowledge. Children not only studied school subjects. Looking at our teachers, we learned hard work, perseverance, optimism. " L. P. Smirnova also talked about how, studying among the ruins, they became interested in the theater. The program included "Woe from Wit" by A. S. Griboyedov. Children, under the guidance of teachers, staged this work at school. Sophia took the stage in a long skirt with lace, which was given to her by her grandmother. This skirt, like other things, was buried in the ground to preserve them during a fire. The girl, feeling herself in an elegant skirt up to her feet, pronounced Sophia's monologues. “We were drawn to creativity, - said L. P. Smirnov. "They wrote poems and poems."
Thousands of young volunteers arrived in Stalingrad at the call of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. On the spot, they studied construction. A. F. Ulanova said: “Our plant was a defense plant - it produced tanks. It was necessary to restore the shops. But some of the young builders were sent to repair schools. Piles of bricks, planks and a hand-held concrete mixer appeared near the foundation of our school. This is how the signs of a reviving life looked. Schools were among the first objects to be restored in Stalingrad."
On September 1, 1943, a meeting was held on the square in front of the tractor plant. It was attended by young builders, factory workers and students. The rally was dedicated to the opening of the first restored school in the area. Its walls were still in the woods, plasterers were working inside. But the students went straight from the rally to the classrooms and sat down at their desks.
In the basement at the Lazur plant, our teacher Polina Tikhonovna suggested to us in the summer of 1943: “Children! Let's collect bricks to rebuild our school. It is difficult to convey with what joy we rushed to fulfill this request of hers. Are we going to have a school?
We collected useful bricks from the ruins and piled them near our broken alma mater. It was built before the war, and then it seemed to us a palace among our wooden houses. In June 1943, bricklayers and fitters appeared here. Workers unloaded bricks and sacks of cement from barges. These were gifts to the destroyed Stalingrad. The restoration of our school has also begun.
In October 1943, we entered the first renovated classrooms. During the lessons, we heard the sound of hammers - restoration work continued in other rooms.
We, like our neighbors - the children of the Traktorozavodsky district, are also carried away by the theater. They did not dare to encroach on the classics. They themselves came up with a simple scene, which took place in Paris. Why we got it in our heads among the ruins, I don't know. None of us have even seen a photograph of Paris. But we prepared hard for the production. The plot was simple and naive. A German officer comes to a Parisian cafe and an underground waitress is to serve him poisoned coffee. There is also a group of underground workers in the cafe. They must rescue the waitress, as the voices of German soldiers are heard behind the wall. The day has come for our premiere. As a waitress, I was wearing a waffle towel instead of an apron. But where to get coffee? We took two bricks and rubbed them. Brick chips were poured into a glass of water.
"Officer", barely touching his lips to the glass, falls to the floor, depicting instant death. The "waitress" is quickly taken away.
I cannot convey what thunderous applause there was in the hall: after all, the war was still going on, and here on the stage, in front of everyone, an enemy officer was killed! This uncomplicated plot fell in love with the children, exhausted by the war.
Years passed, and when I first flew on a business trip to Paris, where I was supposed to meet with Princess Shakhovskaya, a member of the French Resistance, I recalled our naive play in the destroyed Stalingrad.
… And then, in the summer of 1943, at night I saw tanks going past our house from the tractor plant, on board each of them it was written in white paint: "The answer of Stalingrad." The factory conveyor has not yet been launched. Specialists assembled these tanks by removing parts from broken tanks. I wanted to write these words "The Answer of Stalingrad" in chalk on the wall of our restored school. But for some reason I was ashamed to do it, which I still regret.
