Sacrificing Childhood

Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War

Julie K. deGraffenried

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700620029, 9780700620029
• eBook ISBN: 9780700620388
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Winner: Guittard Book Award for Historical Scholarship

During the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, from 1941 to 1945, as many as 24 million of its citizens died. 14 million were children ages fourteen or younger. And for those who survived, the suffering was far from over. The prewar Stalinist vision of a “happy childhood” nurtured by a paternal, loving state had given way, out of necessity. What replaced it—the dictate that children be prepared to sacrifice everything, including childhood itself—created a generation all too familiar with deprivation, violence, and death. The experience of these children, and the role of the state in shaping their narrative, are the subject of this book, which fills in a critical but neglected chapter in the Soviet story and in the history of World War II.

In Sacrificing Childhood, Julie deGraffenried chronicles the lives of the Soviet wartime children and the uses to which they were put—not just as combatants or workers in factories and collective farms, but also as fodder for propaganda, their plight a proof of the enemy’s depredations. Not all Soviet children lived through the war in the same way; but in the circumstances of a child in occupied Belarus or in the Leningrad blockade, a young deportee in Siberia or evacuee in Uzbekistan, deGraffenried finds common threads that distinguish the child’s experience of war from the adult’s. The state’s expectations, however, were the same for all children, as we see here in children’s mass media and literature and the communications of party organizations and institutions, most notably the Young Pioneers, whose relentless wartime activities made them ideal for the purposes of propaganda.

The first in-depth study of where Soviet children fit into the history of the war, Sacrificing Childhood also offers an unprecedented view of the state’s changing expectations for its children, and how this figured in the nature and direction of post-war Soviet society.

1 The Children’s War

Death was everywhere. . . . It must be coming back for me.

Elena Fedorovna Kozhina, Through the
Burning Steppe, quoting herself at age ten

During the liberation of Ukraine in the late summer offensive of 1943, war correspondent Vasilii Grossman attached himself to the Seventy-Fifth Guards Rifle Division, keeping notes of his observations. He wrote:

On a windy and overcast morning, we met a boy on the edge of the village of Tarasevichi, by the Dnepr. He looked about thirteen to fourteen years old. The boy was extremely thin, his sallow skin was tight on his cheekbones, large bumps protruded on his skull. His lips were dirty, pale, like a dead man’s who had fallen face flat on the ground. His eyes were looking in a tired way, there was neither joy nor sadness in them. They are so frightening, these old, tired, lifeless eyes of children.

“Where is your father?”

“Killed,” he answered.

“And mother?”

“She died.”

“Have you got brothers or sisters?”

“A sister. They took her to Germany.”

“Have you got any relatives?”

“No, they were all burned in a partisan village.”

And he walked into a potato field, his feet bare and black from the mud, straightening the rags of his torn shirt.¹

Like fresh army recruits for whom combat is essentially unlike training and drill, the Axis onslaught was fundamentally dissimilar from anything for which Soviet children had been prepared in the prewar period. No slogan, no song, no film, no book could adequately express how life in the Soviet Union was going to change after June 1941.

What was the Great Patriotic War like for the children who lived it? Clearly, no one description can capture the variety of children’s experiences dictated by geography, social position or connections, and sheer luck. Regardless of the war’s immediacy, however, no Soviet child lived a life untouched by it. What was unique about the way children experienced this war? Fear, anxiety, deprivation, death, loss—these events and emotions were shared by children, youth, and adults alike. Yet Grossman’s perceptive description of a lone child in Ukraine suggests that children lived these trials differently than other segments of the Soviet population because of their age and position in society. Undoubtedly, the enemy inflicted unspeakable horrors on some Soviet children. But the state, when faced with the crisis that began on June 22, 1941, made choices that extended suffering to children far beyond the territory occupied by the Axis.

* * *

The Physical Effects of War on Children

Children suffered atrocities, injury, and abuse at the hands of their enemies. Aside from isolated cases, age does not appear to have been a factor in sparing them from ill treatment or death. The denial of sufficient food by the Germans in occupied territory and the inability of the Soviet state to provide an adequate food supply—particularly in urban areas in the rear—meant that hunger was a common characteristic of life among children across the Soviet Union. Youth, adults, and the elderly lacked sufficient sustenance, too, but they had more opportunities to supplement their diet than children had. In addition, a starvation diet and poor nutrition in the developmental stages of life had long-lasting consequences for children of war.

For the first two to three years of the war, the Germans occupied approximately 900,000 square miles (1,440,000 sq. km) of heavily populated portions of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Belarus, eastern Poland, the Baltics, and western Russia, from south of Stavropol in the Caucasus to Leningrad in the north. Only about one-fifth of the civilian population was evacuated before the Germans arrived, leaving about 85 million people under the brutal policies of the Nazis. Soviets living in occupied territory faced what one British observer described as “a deliberate policy of extermination . . . devoid of the slightest trace of human feeling.”² Eschewing positive engagement of the population in favor of terror and exploitation, the Nazis burned hundreds of villages, executed suspected Jews and communists, and showed little regard for those who remained alive, all in an attempt to intimidate and pacify. Children living under the Nazis witnessed and endured atrocities as the “inferior races” in occupied territories were tortured, beaten, shot, hung, buried alive, drowned, and burned.³

Children were certainly not spared as mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, pursued and brutally decimated Jewish communities in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.⁴ By the autumn of 1941 the mobile killing squads who had previously targeted male Jews of draft age for execution turned to the annihilation of Jewish women, children, and the elderly on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.⁵ Whereas Jewish communities in western and central Europe were rounded up and transported to concentration (or extermination) camps, large-scale public shootings were far more typical on the Eastern Front.⁶ Children were among the more than 30,000 victims massacred at Babi Yar outside Kiev on September 29–30, 1941, and at subsequent mass killings at Rovno, Krivoi Rog, and Dnepropetrovsk. Thirteen-year-old Jacob Lipszyc witnessed the slaughter of thousands of Jews in Mir (Belarus), including that of his mother, brother, and sister, as commandos positioned at each corner of a town square opened fire on a crowd of people rounded up for just such a purpose.⁷ Witnesses of the Jewish massacre at Klintsy testified that an SS special unit buried children alive in a pit while also “hurling babies up over the trench and shooting them in the air.”⁸

Near the end of 1941, remaining Jews—a large proportion of which were women and children—were rounded up and placed in ghettos, particularly in areas under German civil administration in western Ukraine and western Belarus. A majority of these people were killed during the “Second Wave” actions of 1942 and 1943, when the ghettos were liquidated. Though implemented by the Nazis, these later actions were by and large carried out by local police units, many of whom volunteered to ferret out and turn in Jews in hiding.⁹ In Radomyshl adult Jews were shot to death by SS Einsatzgruppen, but Ukrainian police stepped in to shoot their children.¹⁰ The rest of that community, fearing German reprisal or inspired by anti-Semitic feeling, ostracized the few remaining Jews, despite witnessing the beatings, starvation, and death of former neighbors.¹¹ In at least four Ukrainian towns, Jewish children living in children’s homes were handed over to the Nazis by their adult caretakers or children’s homes directors.¹² Imagine the feelings of confusion and betrayal that children must have felt, driven to torture and death by adults whom they had known all their lives.

By late 1942, when partisan activity began to disrupt German military operations, children could be targeted for abuse or death for alleged (or real) aid to the elusive resistance. Children escaping Jewish ghettos or mass killings in Belarus or Poland often ran into the surrounding forests, meeting up with partisan groups who might (or might not) accept them.¹³ Hoping to gain food and community, some children joined or aided partisan bands, serving as couriers, stealing weapons, or damaging Nazi supplies.¹⁴ As German antipartisan campaigns escalated, children could be executed, tortured, or punished for aiding partisan actions or for refusing to give information.¹⁵ Even ignorance could not save some from death. Elena Kozhina remembers a young boy:

He had been buried without a coffin, but the loose earth had been brushed off his face . . . [which was] totally calm as if he were merely sleeping, sleeping like a child. All the more horrible was this child’s sleep when Mama saw his mutilated hands: his fingernails had been torn off. The locals told Mama that the Germans tortured him before they shot him—he was suspected of helping some underground guerrillas. Was he helping? Everybody shrugged their shoulders. He didn’t say anything under torture (maybe because he had nothing to say), so the Germans grew angry, and shot him.¹⁶

Life in occupied territory had to be carefully negotiated by children. Curfews were strictly enforced by occupation troops. Communication with other villages or regions was almost nonexistent. Young people had to act warily around the occupation troops. Arbitrarily, Axis troops might shoot or beat children, force them to run errands, demand sexual favors, or give out bags of candy.¹⁷ Girls in occupied villages attempted to avoid notice by wearing shapeless rags and smearing ash on their faces.¹⁸

Older children could be sent to Germany as workers, as fourteen-year-old Olga Selezniova was. In a May 1942 letter she wrote, “It would be better to die than to be here. . . . We were sold . . . as if we were slaves.”¹⁹ To prepare “a new generation of obedient and docile slave labor,” tens of thousands of children were sent to labor camps, the majority ending up at Lóđź-Konstanynów, making straw shoes, repairing uniforms, and working in the kitchen.²⁰ At least 5,000 children, primarily from Belarus, lived at Majdanek, working and giving blood, while others handled corpses or housekeeping tasks at Auschwitz and Dachau. As late as 1944, some 50,000 children ages ten to fourteen were seized and taken to Germany as ostarbeiter.²¹ Vasilii Grossman witnessed thousands of these deported Soviet children walking home as the German Reich crumbled, recounting, “We saw eight hundred Soviet children walking eastwards on the road, the column stretching for many kilometers. Some soldiers and officers were standing by the road, peering into their faces intently and silently. They were fathers looking for their children.”²² Tragically, liberation did not necessarily end their suffering, and not all soldiers behaved paternally. Grossman noted regretfully that Soviet girls returning home were molested and raped by Red Army men, one girl weeping to him, “He was an old man, older than my father.”²³

Those who remained lived in conditions not much better than those taken to Germany. Many found themselves homeless, living in makeshift lean-tos or in underground holes. Kozhina lived with her mother and another family in the ruins of a dilapidated barn for two years on the Kuban steppe.²⁴ Many children lived in attics, gardens, abandoned buildings, or forests.²⁵ People improvised clothing and foot coverings, scrounging from the deceased or nearby birch trees. Despite the rich agricultural land in occupied territory, many Soviets endured constant hunger because the Nazis commandeered food supplies to feed their own troops and animals. The price of food skyrocketed: in occupied Kharkov, for example, a cabbage cost 60–80 rubles, ten potatoes cost 70–80 rubles, a kilogram of butter cost 1,200 rubles, and a pud of grain cost more than 2,000 rubles.²⁶

Shifting front lines compounded the hardships for those in the western Soviet Union. Children were seized to serve as human shields for Germans. Nikolai Mahutov recalls that at the age of six, he and hundreds of other children were “forced to drag logs with long ropes along roads ahead of the Germans, in order to detonate any mines.”²⁷ Even “friendly fire” could cost children their lives, as enemy positions were shelled by the Soviets.²⁸ Caught between Hitler’s advance and the Soviets’ scorched-earth policy for the first few years, then the Germans’ destructive retreat and the Red Army’s pursuit in the final years of war, civilians could be swept up in the noise, confusion, and devastation of artillery attacks, air raids, tank battle...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Children’s War
• Chapter 2. Mobilizing the Young: War Work for Soviet Children
• Chapter 3. Defining the Heroic: Values for Soviet Children at War
• Chapter 4. The Art of Conflict: Images of Children and for Children at War
• Chapter 5. The “Happy Childhood” Resumed? or, The Return of the Ëlka 
• Conclusion: Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover