When my father disappeared in the evacuation in 1942, I began to have a depression, I didn’t want to live anymore. It was then that I began to take the artists of the Little Opera and Ballet Theatre with me on tour. They wanted to save me. On the third, in the terrible cold, they went to Orsk with a boy dragging behind his back the violin number eight.

We were six, I remember them all by name. There were Olga Nikolaevna Golovina, solist, Izya Rubanenko, pianist, accompanist, Boris Osipovich Geft, tenor, my guardian in the future, Kolya Sokolov and Svetlana Sheina – a couple from the ballet, adult people, honored artists. We entered a common car, I got a side shelf, which I also laid on, because we were driving at night. And immediately turned off the light in the car, and each of the adults began not to dress up, but, on the contrary, something extra to wear. Because the blankets were given us transparent.

I had nothing to wear, and the clothes I was wearing were shabby. I crashed under my blanket, and the train touched. I couldn’t warm up anyway and realized that I couldn’t warm up anymore, the car was getting colder. Night, darkness, like in some circle of hell, the dead father behind, the unknown ahead, I go somewhere no one needs. And I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to die in a dream today. He stopped resisting the cold.

I woke up in the dark because it was hot. The blanket became thick and heavy. I turned my fingers over it in the dark and found that I had only six blankets on me. Everyone who was driving with me, without speaking, hid me in the darkness with his own blanket.

Later, when I was deprived of my citizenship, I told my friends, who demanded that I be angry, that I had not yet paid for those blankets. Maybe I will never cry. Here are the five artists, my father and a bunch of other people who warm me up each in their own way – this is my country, and I owe it to it to this day.

Mstislav Rostropovich