She poured me a cup of scented tea and said:
“When the Germans approached Minsk, our neighbor came and shouted, ‘You have to leave, Bertha Aronovna! The Germans are about to enter the city! My mother, just breastfeeding the younger five-month-old Leo, said to her neighbor, “Where can I run with my four children? My husband and I have to wait for the trip. He will come, but we are not. Where will he then look for us?”
But I decided to leave anyway. The neighbor’s argument won: “Do you want him to come back from a business trip and catch you with the children in the form of dead bodies? After the war, he will find you anyway.”
Mom took the little Lion in her arms, and we all ran after her with a goat along the dusty road. There were a lot of people there: all fled from the Germans. German planes periodically bombed us, I remember someone screaming and asking women to remove white shirts from their heads: these shirts for planes were just like targets.
Then the road suddenly split. And no one knew where to run: to the right or to the left. My mother decided to run to the right and saved our lives: then we learned that everyone who ran to the left fell right into the feet of the Germans and was killed.
And here we run on that road. The girl grabbed her mother in a large button on her coat: her mother wore a coat with a huge carapace button on her stomach, despite the fact that there was a terrible heat on June 27, 1941. She said that Leo would have something to keep up with. And here’s the Lion holding my mom’s button, and we, Lena’s older twelve-year-old brother, three-year-old Clarochka, and I, all running along, grabbing my mom’s coat.
Soon my five-year-old girl got tired of her legs, I stopped and cried. And my mother cried, sat down, hugged me and whispered to my ear with dry lips: “We can’t stop, Slavochka, we can’t. I have to run through “I can’t.” And I scream and I do not even move from place to place.
Suddenly we see a truck. In the cockpit next to the driver sits some important lady in a fashionable hat and with a bright red mask. And in the body of the truck - furniture, such beautiful, expensive furniture. A lot of furniture, a whole mountain: the car is about to crash. The lady gently pointed to my mother in the window: “Let’s, say, clean up from the road, you can’t see if I have furniture!”
Mom was humbly started to go to the side and take us away, not to interfere, so the lady furniture to save, and the truck suddenly take and stop.
The driver jumped out of the cabin and let this furniture be thrown right on the road and cried out to my mother: "Woman, please, I will put you and your children in the body now!" And the lady from the cabin cries like, “What are you doing, shit? Yes, I'll tell my husband, he'll give you to court, he'll shoot you for violating the order!"
And the driver ran to her, grabbed her for the collar and said to her, "Stop yourself, shit, you don't understand that if I leave them here on this road, they will dream to me for the rest of my days! I’ll take them to a safe place, and then you can shoot me and hang me, you’re a bad creature!” The lady immediately stopped, and the driver threw us all and our mother into the body, and then a few more women with children, and we went.
We arrived safely to the tomb, he landed us and left with the lady of that. Then there was evacuation. Then Dad found us in the evacuation. And then the war ended, and my mother was burning that she didn't even ask the driver's name to find him after the war and thank him. I think, Oksanochka, the driver is not alive, like my mother, but suddenly he told this story to his children or grandchildren? So if you write about it on your internet, will your children or grandchildren suddenly read it? It is so important for me that they know that we still remember him and will never stop thanking him in our hearts... Write, Oksanochka, do not count for work. The Internet is so omnipotent, and suddenly...”
And indeed, I wrote here and publish this unthinking story here. Suddenly, by some space mail or other unconfessable ways of God, the driver or his loved ones will receive a message of thanks from the deceased now Berta Aronovna and Abraham Nahimovich and their four now alive children. More precisely, even five: the younger Mark was born after the war, after the husband of Bertha Aronovna, returning from the front, found her with the children in the evacuation healthy and unharmed.
Thank you, dear human being. “The salt of our land” is about such people. the salt of the earth.
Oksana Lexell, 2015