(Translated from "Novi Vestnik" by Carl)
The story of Karaganda resident Valentina Grigor'evna Mikhno, who was born in a German concentration camp in 1945, is similar to a scene from a Soviet war film, but with a very touching ending. An ending which in a real life has yet to be. Still, Valentina hopes and waits for it. Through the television program Zhdi menya ("wait for me"), the Karaganda resident is searching for a female Soviet spy who was working right under the very noses of the Germans. She wants to meet her so that she could bow low before the person who helped a newborn girl survive German captivity..
Valentina's mother Maria died in 1996. But long ago in 1941 the still young 'Masha' worked as a telephone operator in her home town of Lubna in the Poltava district in the Ukraine.
"Mama was the first to find out that the war had begun," Valentina quietly says. "On the 22nd of June she was working on the telegraph and received a message for the district party committee. On that very day they took mama to the front. She didn't even get to say goodbye to her parents."
Maria met her future husband Grisha after a few months in Kuybyshev. A real-life field romance bloomed between the young lieutenant and the communications specialist. "By 1944 our soldiers had already pushed back the Germans," Valentina explains. "All this time my parents never separated. They served together. Father was the commander of an observation post, and was also a comunications specialist, while mama was already pregnant with me. They offered to send her home, but she refused: 'Why? Victory is close'. But on the 20th of August mama was captured by the Germans."
The most frightening day "In the unit where mama served there were three Marias: Mikhno, Lomakina, and Kulikova," Valentina says. "And two of them were captured, it happened below Riga at the battle for Koenigsberg."
From the book Sources of courage, by a soldier from Maria Mikhno's unit, Ivan Vyborniy, who included the comm specialist's narration of her capture:
... on 20 August 1944 tanks broke through in the Tukums region. I was on duty at the switchboard. Suddenly Lomakina ran in, pale, shaking from fear. 'Fascists!' she yelled. 'Run to the woods!' I was already worried. Something had fallen on the comms line and I wasn't getting any messages. When Lomakina ran in, we knew what was up. They cut the wires! It was already too late to run. What could we do? 'Into the hay!' someone yelled...
"Father yelled that," Valentina tells us. "Three army pals: mama, Lomakina, and Kulikova quickly changed into civilian clothes. They ate their party membership cards and buried the covers in the bomb shelter. And somehow made it to the haystacks. Kulikova climbed into the hay, but mama was undecided. She was afraid that the Germans would poke the hay with their bayonets and kill me. And so, together with Lomakina, they ran into the woods. Lomakina didn't desert the pregnant woman, so that's why I consider her my second mother. But they couldn't make it very far - a German grabbed her by the hair: 'Haende Hoch!'."
Maria Mikhno's recollections from the book Sources of Courage:
They began the interrogations. What units, they asked, where are they located. The interrogations continued on the second and third day. And so we lived: from the cell to interrogation, from interrogation back to the cell. The fascists tried everything to get us to talk, tortured us with thirst and hunger. They made us put on wooden shoes that had nails projecting inside, and run in a circle. They thought that it would make us more talkative. No dice! We made it through this torture.
On the walls of the torture cells in the Riga prison the girls - in their own blood - wrote to their soldiers. The text of one such appeal was later written down by a platoon leader and sent to the commander of the 51st Army:
Dear friends! The little Hitlers wanted to find out from us comms girls our unit designations. After torture they threw us all in here in this cold cell in the Riga concentration camp. Dear comrades. We live in the hope that you'll soon free us. But today was the most frighting day: they are sending us to Germany. Rescue us from German captivity! We believe that you'll come. We await you!
The detainees were taken at first to Danzig, later to Paderborn....
Born under a the barrel of a machinegun
"In Paderborn concentration camp all the prisoners without exception were forced to drag heavy stones and iron about," Valentina says. "Mama told how the prisoners - in order not to go to work - would make lumps on their legs by beating them with wooden spoons."
From Maria Mikhno's recollections in the book:
I was then readying to give birth, but somehow, I don't know how Masha Lomakina succeeded in doing this, they allowed me to be taken to a maternity hospital. There they laid me right on the floor, though it's true they put down some kind of sackcloth for a bed.
"Mama said that she gave birth to me right under the barrel of a German machinegun," recounts Valentina. "In front of her very eyes a fascist shot a woman and her newborn baby boy. A little boy - so that he wouldn't become a Soviet soldier, and his mother - so that she couldn't give birth to any more... When I showed up in this world, an air-raid started. Everyone who was in the maternity hospital ran away. They threw me on the floor, and mama laid next to me. Later Maria Lomakina, mother's friend came in and saw me, naked and blue from the cold, and she tore up her shirt, wrapped me in her overcoat and took me to the barracks. It was the 25th of January 1945... Maybe I was a white crow, because the Lord allowed me to survive.
"She'll live!"
After a few months the prisoners were freed by the Americans. The allies offered to let many of the prisoners stay and not return to the motherland.
"Our prisoners were afraid of Stalin's policies," explains Valentina. "His example, when he refused to exchange Paulus for his son, declaring that he was a traitor, that was proof. But mama decided to go home to the Ukraine. The homecoming was just like the cinema. Mama came home to her parents with me in her arms. Her father, my grandfather, was a strict man. Therefore mama told him right on the doorstep: 'Papa, I didn't whore around, I was married to Grisha on the front, but he's dead.' But grandpa says: 'Dont' worry, your Grisha is alive.' Mama dropped me from shock. It turned out that my father came to grandpa just before mother's homecoming. He told grandpa that he thought that Masha - grandpa's daughter - was pregnant by him, but Masha was dead. Father said this, and left. But mama was alive... This is how it is in life. On that day they took me to the doctor, I was very weak, and the doctor said that I wouldn't live. Mama came home and cried, but grandpa took me from mother's arms, sent her out of the hut and decided to treat me with folk remedies. What he did, I don't know, but he told mama later: 'She'll live!'. Well, later father came for mother and me and took us to live with his parents."
In 1961 Valentina Grigor'evna arrived in Karaganda and lived with an uncle on her mother's side while she worked as a letter carrier and finished 10th grade. She climbed the ladder to control auditor. She got married and had children who presented her and her husband with four grandchildren.
"Well, that's my life," Valentina sums up with a smile.
But the Soviet spy, the one you're looking for? Who is she?
Valentina Grigor'evna leans over to a book on the table. It opens immediately to the right place. She reads from her mother's recollections:
"Mama told me that this Asya worked in Soviet intelligence. Under the very noses of the Germans. Just before the end of the war she came up to mama and said that they'd found her out, and that she was on the run. And she took off. And that's all that I know about her. But I'd like to find Asya and bow before her and even kiss her feet. To give a her a human thanks... Don't misunderstand me."
Two years ago Valentina Grigor'evna wrote a letter to the television show Zhdi menya ("wait for me"). She is keeping contact with the Russian talk show through a friend from Vladivostok. The friend is a member of the counsel of the international union of former underage prisoners of fascism. In her last message to her Karagandan friend, she gave Valentina hope that she would really meet Asya. Apparantly the television people have found her and what happened to her. And then Valentina will know her not just by her name.
