This is the testimony of Alexandra Belova, recorded on audio in the winter of 1987 in Moscow. She remained silent for 46 years about the events that took place at the sorting center in Smolensk during the occupation in 1941 . My name is Alexandra Belova. Today I am 70 years old, and I am sitting in my small Moscow apartment, listening to the blizzard of 1987 howling outside the window .
At 46, I kept this coldness inside me. At 46, I would wake up in the middle of the night smelling bleach and fear on my skin, but unable to speak . My children, my grandchildren, they see me as just a quiet old lady who loves to knit and looks out the window for a long time. They don’t know that that Alexandra died in 1941 in Smolensk, and the one who survived is just a shadow, assembled from fragments.
I decided to speak up now because time is running out and the truth is all I have left. If I take this to my grave, those women who stood next to me in that grey building will be gone forever. And I promised them. I promised to remember every name. Every look, every scar. This old tape recorder is my only witness.
I press the record button, and my hands shake not from old age, but from the fact that I am returning there again, to that damned autumn. Before the war I was completely different. I was 23 years old. I had just completed my nursing training and believed that life was an endless road to a bright future. I remember our old courtyard in Smolensk, the smell of linden trees in June and how my mother baked bread on Saturdays.
That smell of fresh bread. If I had known then that this was the most beautiful thing I was destined to feel, I would have inhaled it until my lungs hurt. I was in love. I dreamed of a wedding, of a white dress. In mid-June 1941, my friends and I were laughing while discussing new shoes. We were so naive, so protected by our ignorance.
My reality was limited to anatomy textbooks and hospital shifts. The war seemed like something distant, something out of a book. But when the sky above the city suddenly turned black from planes and the ground beneath my feet began to groan, the world I knew crumbled in a matter of seconds. Our hospital turned into hell in one day.
I saw the first wounds, the first blood, which was not like the one in the textbooks. She was hot, sticky, and smelled of iron. And then they came. The first contact with what I call real horror occurred in October 1941. Smolensk was already on fire. I remember that grey, chilly dawn when the sound of German boots on the cobblestones became reality.
It wasn’t just noise, it was the rhythm of death. We were gathered right at the entrance to the hospital. Soldiers in machine-gray uniforms. Their faces seemed to me to be carved from stone. There was nothing human about them. One of them, a very young man, hit a woman with the butt of her rifle because she was simply walking too slowly.
This sound, the crack of bone and its dull groan, became the first sign that there were no more rules. They drove us through the city. I saw my house, or rather, what was left of it. charred walls and the cherry tree my father planted on the day I was born. It was black with soot. At that moment, for the first time, I felt this strange cold inside that has not gone away to this day.
It was the realization that I no longer existed as a person, as Alexandra. I became a unit, a body that needed to be moved from point A to point B. We were led to a huge three-story building on the outskirts of the city. Before the war there was a school or some kind of administrative institution there, but now it looked like the mouth of a monster.
The windows were boarded up, and there were machine gun towers at the entrance. It was there that I met them, other women whose destinies were intertwined with mine in one bloody knot. Inside, there was a smell of sour sweat, old blood, and something chemical that made my nose sting. We were pushed into a long corridor with tiled walls.
I remember my feet slipping on the wet floor. There I saw Natalia Sokolova. She stood against the wall, clutching a thin shawl to her chest. She was about 31 years old. She was a teacher in a rural school near Smolensk. She had such kind eyes, in which now such deep bewilderment was frozen, as if she was trying to find a logical explanation for what was happening and could not find one.
Next to her stood a very young girl, Irina Volkova. She was only 19. She was a seamstress on a collective farm. Her hands, pricked by needles, trembled slightly. There was also Katerina Danilova, an older woman, about forty-two years old, who had previously worked as a cook. She looked at us all with some kind of stern maternal pity.
And Vera Kaminskaya, student, secretary. She was 27. We didn’t know each other’s names yet . We were just a crowd of scared women. But the moment the doors slammed behind us, we became sisters in misfortune. We stood in this corridor for hours. They didn’t give us water and didn’t allow us to sit down. If someone tried to get down on the floor, a guard with a German shepherd would immediately appear.
The barking of dogs and shouts in a foreign, harsh language became the background of our new life. The system was built with German precision. It wasn’t just a camp, it was a sorting center where we were taken apart like spare parts. Every action we took was regulated. Getting up at 5:00 a.m., freezing water that left your skin crusty, and that endless, maddening fear of examinations.
We were divided into groups. Each was assigned a number. I became number 412. They erased our names. Natalia Sokolova tried to protest. She spoke their language, tried to appeal to their reason, to say that we are civilians. But the officer, whose face I remember in minute detail, his thin lips and icy blue eyes, simply hit her in the face with a riding crop.
He wasn’t angry, he was just removing obstacles. It was then that we realized that we are not people to them, we are biological material. Katerina Danilova tried to support us. In those rare moments when the guards turned away, she would whisper to us: “Girls, hold on to your thoughts. Don’t let them take away what’s in your head.” She shared with Irina her tiny piece of bread, which smelled of sawdust, because the girl was melting before our eyes.
That gesture, a crumb of bread passed from hand to hand at gunpoint, was the most heroic act I have ever seen. The hierarchy in this center was brutal. There were guards, there were female supervisors from among the collaborators, who were sometimes more terrible than the Germans, because they knew our weak points. And there were doctors.
Oh, those people in white coats over their uniforms. They walked down the corridors with tablets. Their steps were quieter than those of the soldiers, but they were more terrifying. When they appeared, the corridor became so silent that you could hear our hearts beating. They started taking us to procedures that they called hygiene control.
In fact, it was a methodical humiliation. We were forced to strip naked in cold rooms under bright spotlights. A group of ten women were lined up and walked around us, measuring the distance between our eyes, the shape of our ears, and the volume of our skulls with a compass. I remember the cold metal on my temple.
I remember Vera Kaminskaya closing her eyes and quietly praying, and the warden laughing and pulling her hair, forcing her to look forward. They looked for signs of inferiority in us or, on the contrary, some special suitability that we did not understand at the time. Every day brought new rules.
You couldn’t look the guards in the eyes, you couldn’t talk in the barracks, you couldn’t cry. Crying was punished especially cruelly, with deprivation of water for a day. We quickly learned to cry silently. Only tears rolled down my cheeks, mixing with the dirt. Irina Volkova, the youngest of us, one day couldn’t take it anymore.
She started calling for her mother. It was at night in our cramped cell, where we slept on bare boards, huddled close to each other to keep warm. Her scream cut through the silence. Two people burst into the cell. They dragged her out into the corridor by her legs. We heard her screams and then the sounds of blows.
We lay there holding our breath. Ekaterina Danilova squeezed my hand tightly. Her palm was rough and hot. When Irina was thrown back an hour later, she was unrecognizable. But the worst thing was not the bruises, but her look. She looked through us. That night I realized that they destroy not only our bodies, they burn out our souls, leaving an emptiness inside.
Control was absolute. Even our physiological needs were subject to their schedule. It was part of the dehumanization plan. When you can’t even control your body, you stop feeling human. But in the midst of this darkness there were moments that kept us from going completely crazy. Natalia Sokolova recited Pushkin’s poems to us from memory . Almost in a whisper at night.
Her voice was like a thin thread connecting us to the old world. She read: “I remember a wonderful moment. And in this stinking cold cell, light would appear for a moment . We would close our eyes and imagine gardens, spring, human speech that had no orders. These moments of solidarity were our rebellion. We shared tiny scraps of news that Vera managed to overhear when she was taken away to clean the offices in the administrative wing.
She said that our people were somewhere nearby, that the front was moving. These rumors were our only food, but then the inspections began. This was the official part of their system. We were called from a list. The first inspection was general: height, weight, teeth. The second – checking for diseases.
The third – an assessment of physical endurance. The fourth – what they called racial purity. We went through them one after another, and each time there were fewer and fewer of us. Those who did not pass were taken to another wing, and we never saw them again. We knew what was happening behind the wall something final. We saw smoke from the chimneys of a small outbuilding in the courtyard.
This smoke had a strange sweetish smell that clung to clothes and hair. Katerina Danilova once said, crossing herself: “It’s not the wood burning, Sashenka, it’s our hope that’s burning.” We tried not to think about it. We clung to every hour. We learned to be glad that we were n’t called today. But we knew the list went on.
And the most terrible word in our lexicon became the fifth examination. No one knew what it was, but those who went for it never returned, even to that other wing. The fifth examination was spoken of in whispers, like a death sentence carried out while you were still alive. My name, Alexandra Belova, was increasingly mentioned on their lists for examination.
I was young, healthy, and had a medical education, which for some reason aroused their particular interest. The doctors looked at my hands, made me demonstrate the flexibility of my fingers. They discussed me in their language, as if I were not a person, but a thoroughbred horse. One of them, a doctor with dry, almost transparent hands, once touched my neck with his cold fingers and said something to the others, to which they nodded approvingly.
At that moment, I felt an icy sweat run down my back. I understood that I had been chosen for something special, for something that went beyond simple slave labor. Natalya Sokolova, seeing my face after that examination, simply hugged me. We both knew the circle was narrowing. With each passing day, the walls of this center became tighter and the air heavier.
We lived in anticipation of menopause, in anticipation of the moment when this machine would crush us completely. And that moment approached with every strike of the clock on the main tower of this damned building. I remember every sound of that autumn. The rustle of fallen leaves in the courtyard, which we were ordered to collect by hand until the last leaf.
The grinding of keys in the lock, Vera’s heavy breathing, who A strong cough began. We all understood that illness was also a death sentence. We tried to treat it as best we could, with warm words and prayers. Katerina gave her her only warm sweater, remaining in only a thin shirt with her number. We warmed each other with our bodies, trying to preserve the spark of life that still flickered within us.
But the cold outside was nothing compared to the cold emanating from the people in white coats. They were getting ready. We felt it because of the way the guards changed, how the orderlies bustled in the corridors. Something was about to happen, something big. And then one evening, as the sun was setting behind the black forests of Smolensk, the door of our cell swung open wider than usual.
An officer stood in the doorway with a long list in his hands. His voice sounded like the crack of a whip. He named five names. Among them was Natalya, among them was Katerina, and among them was me. We had to get ready. to that very fifth examination. At that moment, I looked at my hands and realized they no longer belonged to me.
My whole world shrank to this corridor, to the smell of bleach and the icy calm in the eyes of the man who was crossing our lives off the list of the living. That corridor, along which we were led to the medical block, seemed endless. I remember every seam in the tiles, every crack in the ceiling. We walked barefoot, and the cold of the concrete seemed to penetrate into our very bones.
Natalya Sokolova walked ahead of me. Her shoulders, once straight, were now hopelessly slumped. We understood that there would be no return to the previous examinations. This was a different part of the building. Even the air was different here. It was saturated with the smell of ether, iodine and some kind of sweetish, nauseating rot.
There were five of us: me, Natalya, Katerina, Vera and little Irina. We tried to stay close to each other, touching elbows to feel that we were still alive, that we were still here. We were led into a hall they called waiting room number three. It was a large room with bright surgical lights that burned even during the day, blinding and depriving one of the sense of time.
There began the third examination, a test of endurance. It was the first of those events that forever burned into me the ability to trust humanity. An officer in a white coat, whom the others called Doctor Hans, ordered us to undress. Again this humiliation, which is impossible to get used to. We were forced to stand on one leg for two hours under the sights of machine guns.
If someone fell, they were beaten with a whip. I saw how blood flowed down Irina Volkova’s legs from the blows, but she did not make a sound, only her lips silently whispered a prayer. At that moment I realized that they were not testing our bodies, but our will. They wanted to see when we ceased to be human and turned into broken animals.
Katerina Daniuva, our cook, our support, was the first to give in . She was 42 years old, and her heart couldn’t handle the strain. I saw her turn pale, sweat pouring down her face. I tried to whisper encouragement to her. Hang in there, Katya, just a little longer. But she just shook her head. At some point, Dr. Hans approached her.
He didn’t hit her, he just looked into her eyes with his empty, analytical gaze. He took her hand and began taking her pulse, writing something down in his notebook. “Too slow,” he said in broken Russian. That evening, Katerina was taken away. She turned around at the threshold, and there was no fear in her eyes, only endless fatigue.
She knew what we didn’t. We never saw her again. That night, our cell became unbearably spacious. The four of us huddled in a corner, and Natalya began reciting poetry. But her voice broke. at the very first quatrain. We just sat in the dark, listening to water dripping somewhere behind the wall.
We spent 15 days in this mode, between expectation and violence. Then came the fourth examination. It was 23 days after our arrival. We were taken to an office filled with strange machines. Vera Kaminskaya was there. She was always the strongest of us, the most collected. She was chosen to study her reaction to external stimuli.
I remember how they tied her to a chair. They used electric shocks. It wasn’t an execution, no, it was a scientific study. They wanted to know how much pain the human brain can withstand before losing consciousness. I stood in line outside the door and heard everything. First there were screams, then wheezing, and then there was silence, which was more terrible than any sounds.
When Vera was carried out on a stretcher, her eyes were open, but there was no faith in them. She was an empty shell. She was breathing, but her soul was erased. Natalya Sokolova screamed for the first time that day . She lunged at the guard, biting his hands, tearing out chunks of flesh. She was beaten half to death, right before our eyes.
I stood and watched my friend’s blood soak the gray tiles, and I could do nothing. My hands, the nurse’s hands, were powerless. It was my personal hell, seeing suffering and not being able to help. In those days, I began to lose track of time. Day and night merged into one gray fog. Hunger became a constant companion.
It gnawed at my stomach from the inside, depriving me of the ability to think about anything but food. But even hunger retreated before the horror of what they were doing to Irina. Irina Volkova was only 19 years old. She was so fragile, so transparent. Dr. Hans decided that she was the perfect subject for studying tissue regeneration.
They made incisions on her arms and legs, and then applied various chemical compounds to see how quickly the wounds would heal. I remember this the smell. A mixture of iodine and burnt flesh. Irina wasn’t crying anymore. She just sat on the floor, staring at one point, her hands constantly moving, as if she were sewing something.
She was sewing her invisible clothes for the funeral that our lives had become. The system of dehumanization worked flawlessly. We were forced to clean toilets with our hands, we were forced to eat from troughs. They wanted us to forget that we once had homes, families, names. But it was in these moments that small miracles happened.
One day, Natalia, barely recovered from the beatings, found a scrap of pencil somewhere. She began drawing tiny flowers on the wall of our cell. These flowers were barely noticeable, but for us, they were an entire world. We stared at them for hours, remembering the summer of ’41. These small gestures of solidarity were our only weapon.
We shared our last drops of water. We wiped each other’s faces with dirty rags. We were no longer just women. We were a collective organism, trying to survive in the belly of a monster. On the thirty-fifth day of our stay at the center, a strange movement began in the corridors . We heard the officers talking in raised voices.
The word “fifth inspection” began to sound constantly. We understood that the end was approaching. There were three of us left: me, Natalya, and Irina. Vera had died two days earlier, simply stopping breathing in her sleep. She was the first of us to find peace, and, frankly, I envied her. The fifth. The inspection began at 4:00 a.m.
We were awakened not by screams, but by ice-cold water from hoses. We were driven out into the courtyard, where a thick fog had already settled. There we were separated. Irina was carried in one direction, Natalya in the other. I was left alone under the supervision of two soldiers.
An hour later, I was brought into a room that had previously been an assembly hall, but now everything had been rebuilt. It was an operating theater. In the center stood a table, lit by powerful lamps. Around the table sat people in uniforms, with notepads and pencils. They looked like spectators in a real theater.
Only instead of a play, they were offered human agony. They laid me down on the table. I didn’t resist. I had no strength left to resist. I looked at the ceiling and saw a small spot from the leak there. I concentrated on this spot, trying to imagine that it was a cloud floating over Smolensk. Doctor Hans approached me. This time he was not alone.
With him was a senior officer, a man with a face disfigured by a scar. Hans began to explain something to him, pointing to my internal organs, as if I were an anatomical chart. They began the procedure without anesthesia. This was their main condition. The patient must be conscious to record the pain threshold. Pain.
There are no words in human language to describe what I felt in the first second. It was as if someone inserted a red-hot crowbar into me and began to slowly turn it. I screamed until I lost my voice. And when my voice disappeared, I started wheezing. I saw my hands tied with belts. I saw my nails digging into the skin of my palms until they bled.
But the worst thing was n’t the physical pain. The worst thing was seeing their faces. They looked at me with curiosity, like children look at a crushed insect. They weren’t sadists in the usual sense of the word. They were scientists, for whom I ceased to be human. At some point, I saw Natalia. She was brought into the same room to watch.
It was part of the experiment. Psychological influence on a witness. She stood in the corner, held back by two guards, and I saw her biting her lips to keep from screaming with me. Her eyes. I will never forget that look. It contained so much pain that no human heart can bear . She looked at me, and in that look there was a request for forgiveness for the fact that she could not help me in any way.
The procedure lasted forever. I I would lose consciousness and come to from the pungent smell of shatyr, which they held to my nose to continue. They were testing the limits of human endurance. They cut, stitched, and cut again. At some point, I stopped feeling my body. I became just a lump of pain, hovering somewhere near the ceiling.
I saw myself from the outside, an emaciated woman on an iron table, surrounded by monsters in white coats. And that’s when I made a decision. I decided that I would not give them the satisfaction of seeing my fear. I closed my eyes and began to remember. I remembered my mother, the smell of bread, the cherry tree in our garden.
I went inside myself, to the only place where they couldn’t reach with their scalpels. When it was all over, they threw me back into the cell. I was alone. Natalya was gone, Irina was gone. I lay on bare boards, and blood soaked my only shirt. I didn’t know how much time had passed: an hour or a day. I just I lay and looked at the little flowers that Natalia had drawn on the wall.
They began to fade, become covered in mold. I understood that this was the end. We were destroyed physically, mentally, biologically. We became shadows. But on the forty-second day, something changed. The silence that usually reigned in the center was replaced by chaos. We heard explosions in the distance.
At first muffled, then more and more distinct. Guards began running along the corridors, shouts in German were heard. I lay in my cell, too weak to even raise my head. The door opened, and I saw Natalia. She was alive, but her hair had turned completely white. She was 31 years old, but she looked at me like a hundred-year-old woman. She came to me, knelt down and simply pressed my head to her chest.
We didn’t speak, there was no need for words. We listened to the cananada that was approaching. Ours were close, but for us it was no longer had the meaning it might have had a month ago. We were free, but this freedom was bitter as wormwood. We survived, but the price of this life was such that the very word life seemed an insult to those who remained there, in the operating rooms and basements with sweetish smoke.
Irina never returned. The last time I saw her was when she was being taken to Block B. She was 19 years old. She wanted to be a seamstress, wanted to sew beautiful dresses for brides. Instead, she became a line in Dr. Gans’s report on the rate of tissue necrosis. This thought still burns me inside. Every night I see her face, her punctured fingers, and I feel guilty.
Guilt that I breathe and she doesn’t. Guilt that I remember, and the world wants to forget. Those days at the end of 1941 became a watershed for me . The world was divided into before and after. And the after was filled with a silence that cannot be filled with anything. We waited Liberation, as if awaiting death, with indifference and weariness.
We saw the Germans burning documents, trying to hide the traces of their crimes, but they didn’t understand the main trace. The main trace was us. We, the surviving stumps of people with brands on our souls. We were their most terrible testimony, and they knew it. Fear appeared in their eyes. The same fear they instilled in us for 40 days.
And this fear was the best medicine for my wounded soul in those last hours before the walls of this hell collapsed. I remember how, on that last evening before the fifth inspection, the air in the cell became so thick it seemed you could cut it with a knife. The three of us were sitting there: me, Natalya, and little Irina.
Vera and Ekaterina had already gone into that darkness from which no one returns, and their absence felt like a physical wound, like a draft that could not be stopped. We no longer cried. There was no water left in our bodies for tears. Natalya Sokolova, who was only 31 then but looked 60, took my hand.
Her fingers were cold and dry as parchment. She whispered that if they separated us tomorrow, I must remember one thing: they can take our lives, but they cannot take away who we were before this hell. She made me repeat for the hundredth time the names of my parents, the name of my street, the smell of linden trees in June.
It was our last attempt to cling to the shore of humanity before we were finally carried away into the abyss. At 4:30 a.m., the door swung open with such a bang that my heart seemed to stop. They didn’t call us by name. The officer simply pointed his finger: “You, you, and you.” We were led through the dark corridors of the medical block.
I saw the shadows of our emaciated bodies dancing on the walls, like skeletons. We were brought to the operating room, where the lamps were so bright that it was hard to see. It hurt. This was the fifth examination, the pinnacle of their system, the moment when science turned into pure, distilled evil. Dr.
Hans was waiting for us. He was wearing a clean apron and calmly wiping some metal instrument. At that moment, I realized that for him, we were nothing more than pages in a notebook to be filled with data on pain and death. Irina Volkova, our nineteen-year-old seamstress, was laid on the table first. I saw her tremble slightly, and this tremor of her body still haunts me in nightmares.
Hans began the procedure. This was not a regular examination. They injected drugs directly into the bone marrow to study the reaction speed of the nervous system. I stood 2 meters away and saw everything. I saw her face distorted into a grimace that human facial expressions cannot create. She did not scream.
She made a strange whistling sound, as if all the air was leaving her. I tried I rushed towards her, but the guard hit me in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. I fell to my knees, gasping for breath, and saw Natalia close her eyes and begin to recite the prayer she had been hiding all these weeks. The guard laughed.
For them, our prayers were just background noise in their grand experiment. When it was my turn, I no longer felt my body. It was a strange state of alienation. I saw myself being tied with leather straps to cold metal. Dr. Hans leaned towards me, and I smelled his expensive tobacco. He looked me in the eyes and said in perfect Russian: “It’s for progress, Alexandra, you should be proud.
” In that moment, I realized that this is the most terrible thing, when evil considers itself progress. The pain came suddenly, like a lightning strike. They made incisions without anesthesia, recording the clotting time of blood at extreme temperatures. I felt the steel cutting my skin, the cold air touching my internal tissues.
It was pain that goes beyond physics. It tore apart my very consciousness. At some point, I saw the ceiling, which suddenly became transparent, and I saw the sky above Smolensk, thousands of stars, and I flew towards them. I died at that moment. The Alexandra who loved to dance and dreamed of children simply ceased to exist.
Only a shell remained that recorded every movement of the scalpel. Fifth. The examination lasted 3 hours and 45 minutes. For me, these were three eternities. When they threw me back into the cell, I couldn’t move. I lay in my own blood, and every breath was like a sip of broken glass. Natalia was gone, Irina was gone.
I was alone in this concrete box, and my only companion was the smell of bleach and Harry. That’s when I realized that this was the end. They took my friends, they took my health, they took my future. But in this absolute emptiness, something new was suddenly born. It wasn’t hope. No, it was icy crystal clear hatred and the desire to survive against all odds, just so that one day someone would know about it about the writer Hans and his progress.
The forty-second day of our imprisonment began. It was September 24, 1943. The city around the building groaned from the explosions. We had been hearing the cannonade for several days, but that morning it became deafening. The walls shook and dust fell from the ceiling. I lay on the floor, struggling to get up, and looked at the door.
Suddenly the noise inside the building changed. The shouts in German became panicked. I heard the sound of breaking glass and the stamping of hundreds of feet. And then silence. A long, ringing silence. And suddenly the voice is loud, hoarse, familiar. Is anyone alive here? I tried to scream, but only a wheeze came out of my throat.
I started to scratch the floor with my nails. The door to my cell was blown off its hinges. There was a soldier standing in the doorway . He was covered in hood. His overcoat was torn. But I saw a red star on the earflaps. He looked at me and his face twitched. He turned away for a second, then quickly came over and picked me up in his arms.
I weighed 32 kg then. He carried me like a child, and I felt the warmth of his body through the rough fabric of Shieneli. When we went outside, I closed my eyes. The light of the autumn sun seemed unbearably bright to me. I saw the ruins of Smolensk. I saw tanks with the inscription “For the Motherland”.
And I realized it was all over . But there was no joy. There was only a huge black ashes where my soul used to be. I was taken to a field hospital. The doctors cried when they examined us. There are only seven of us women left out of the 120 who were brought to that center at the beginning of the occupation. Natalia was found in the basement of the medical unit.
She was alive, but she didn’t recognize me. She looked through me and kept adjusting the imaginary shawl on her shoulders. Her mind couldn’t withstand the fifth examination. We never found Irina. The soldiers said there were stoves in the backyard that smoked until the last minute. I know that in that smoke were my little seamstress, and her unborn children, and her unsewn dresses.
The process of returning to life was long and painful. For the first 2 years I hardly spoke. I lived in silence, broken only by my own screams at night. I returned to ruined Smolensk and found work in the archives because I couldn’t stand the sight of living people in medical gowns. I married Alexey in 1948. He was a war invalid, having lost his leg at Stalingrad.
We were two fragments of a great catastrophe, trying to support each other so as not to fall. He never asked me about the scars on my back and stomach. He would just stroke my hands in the evenings when I started shaking for no apparent reason. We lived together for 40 years, and this silence of understanding was the most valuable thing I had.
I gave birth to two children, a son and a daughter. But even when I held them in my arms, I felt the cold of those iron tables. I looked at their little fingers and saw Irina’s punctured hands. My motherhood was steeped in fear. I kept checking to see if they were breathing. I couldn’t leave them for a minute.
I raised them in peace and quiet, but I never told them the truth. I didn’t want their world to be poisoned by the poison I drank. But now that Alexei is gone, and my children have become parents themselves, I understand that my silence is becoming a crime against memory. If I don’t tell, Dr. Hans will win. He will win if his crime remains nameless.
Today in 1987 I look out the window at the streets of Moscow. The world seems so solid, so eternal. People are rushing about their business, laughing, arguing about trifles. They don’t know that beneath this thin crust of civilization the same darkness that burst forth in 1941 is always seething. My hands shake as I change the tape in the tape recorder, but my voice must be firm.
I am writing this down not for history in textbooks, but for every person who thinks that this does not concern him. This concerns everyone. Every time we turn a blind eye to injustice, every time we put progress above humanity, we build the walls of that same gray building in Smolensk. I often remember the flowers that Natalia painted on the wall of our cell.
They were ugly, crooked, but there was more life in them. than in all their medical treatises. These flowers taught me the most important thing. The human spirit cannot be completely destroyed. You can cut flesh, you can break bones, you can erase memories, but somewhere deep down there remains a spark that refuses to go out.
I survived only because of this spark. And now, as I finish my story, I feel this caviar becoming a flame. I am no longer number 413. I am Alexandra Belova, daughter of Ivan and Maria, sister of the dead, mother of the living. My body is worn out, my heart is tired of beating against the current of memory, but I leave with a light soul.
I told about Katerina, who shared bread, about Vera, who kept silent, about Natalia, who read poetry in hell. About Irina, who became smoke, but remained in my heart. I give them back their names. I give them back their right to exist in this world. Death is not the end when there are those who remember.
And I believe that someday in the future people will learn to hear each other’s pain before it turns into a catastrophe. The meaning of my survival was in this testimony. Now that the tape is ending, I feel a strange sense of relief. It was as if I had thrown off a huge cold stone from my shoulders that I had been carrying for 46 years.
I turn off the light in the room. It’s snowing outside, as white and pure as the snow that fell on the ruins of Smolensk on the day of my liberation. But now this snow does not seem cold to me, it seems to me like a shroud that finally covers all the wounds of the earth. Humanity deserves forgiveness, but only if it finds the strength to remember.
Remember, that’s all I ask. Remember us not out of pity, but for the sake of your own future. Build the human within you, no matter what it takes . It’s the hardest job in the world, but it’s the only one that matters. My voice fades, but my words remain here, in this little box. I press the stop button. That’s it, the end.
I’m free. Now I am truly free. It is estimated that more than 2 million Soviet women were deported to forced labor and concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. Thousands of them were subjected to inhumane medical experiments in sorting centers and death laboratories. Keeping these testimonies alive is an act of resistance to silence and a tribute to the courage of those who survived indescribable conditions.
If you watched to the end, please let us know in the comments what city or country you’re watching from, and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next testimonies. This story is a work of fiction inspired by the real suffering of Soviet women during World War II.
