One of Solomon Slepak’s closest friends was a man named Vassily Gorshkov, who had fought under him in the Lake Baikal region of Asia during the Civil War. He was a tall, strong man, with a deep scar across his head from a war wound. Life-loving, uneducated, always laughing. He often played with Volodya. Suddenly he disappeared, and was no longer talked of by the family.
One day in the mid-1950s there was a knock on the door to the apartment, and Volodya’s mother went to open it. In the doorway stood a white-haired man, bent, leaning heavily on a cane. He peered intently at Fanya Slepak.
“Dont you recognize me?”
“No.”
“I’m Vassily.” He seemed a broken old man.
“Vassily? Come in.”
He entered and stood a moment, gazing around. He asked quietly, “Are you receiving a pension for your husband? When was his reputation restored?”
“There is no pension. My husband is alive.”
“Sam is alive?” He looked bewildered.
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“He went out to buy bread.”
“When was he released?”
“He wasn’t arrested.”
“But how is that possible? The main accusation against me was my link to the Japanese spy Slepak. I was sure Sam was in the next cell.”
No one seemed to know why Solomon Slepak was not arrested in the purges of the thirties.
In August 1939 Soviet Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov and Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop signed the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in Moscow, stunning the world. Each party to the treaty was to remain neutral should the other be attacked by a third party.
The two countries also secretly carved out spheres of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. The eastern half of Poland would go to the Russians, as would Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia. Now Germans could travel to Moscow as tourists, saunter about on Soviet streets, take in the sights.
How explain to twelve-year-old Volodya this sudden peace with the hated fascist enemy?
Solomon Slepak told his son that the Germans had begun to change in the direction of socialism and were now good enough to live with in peace. He spoke with wholehearted earnestness, and his son believed him.
On June 22, 1941, the Slepak family woke late, their custom on a Sunday morning. They sat around the table, eating breakfast, and did not turn on the radio. The doorbell rang. It was Volodya’s cousin Israel Dag-man, his father’s nephew, in Moscow on a business trip. He was invited to have breakfast with the family, and Solomon asked him casually about his life, his plans. Israel Dagman said that the family was fine, but what kind of plans could he make after today’s events? What events? Solomon asked. Looking very surprised, Israel Dagman said that early in the morning German planes had begun to bomb Russian towns and cities, and German troops had crossed the frontier and were inside Russian territory. Solomon Slepak’s face darkened. He switched on the radio, and they sat listening to the news of the war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Believing the assurances that emanated day after day from the radio, Volodya was convinced that the war would be over in two or three weeks, with the Red Army victorious. But soon Leningrad was nearly entirely encircled by one German army, while a second was advancing on Moscow, and a third was swallowing up the Ukraine and the Crimea and approaching the Caucasus. And then, a few weeks after the start of the war, there came the startling announcement that the children of Moscow were to be evacuated.
On a sunny day in August, Volodya went with his sister, Rosa, and his parents to the railway station, which was crowded with children and parents. He and Rosa parted from their parents and boarded a special train for the students of the Krasnogvardeysky district of Moscow. To the children aboard the train it all felt like an outing, a trip to a summer camp for Young Pioneers; they would all be back in one, at most two, months. All the parents waving to their children from the station platform seemed oddly serious.
The train was soon out of Moscow. Many hours of travel went by until it arrived in the town of Shilovo in Ryazanskaya Province, where the children boarded trucks that distributed them among several nearby villages.
The truck that carried Volodya and his sister and other children, together with some parents and teachers from the Moscow school, took them to the small village of Iritzy, about fifty houses along the sides of a dirt road that was a ribbon of dust in dry days and mud in the rain. Behind every house was a little vegetable garden. Some of the children were placed in empty houses; others, with peasant families. A dining room was organized, as well as a medical aid station staffed by a Dr. Abram Bogorad and a nurse. There was no shortage of food. The children worked in the fields, gathering hay, harvesting.
In September they all moved to the larger village of Timoshkino, where there was a high school in which they attended classes. In October they began to hear artillery fire. The German Army was suddenly only a short distance away! Urgently the children were moved back to the town of Shilovo, which had a landing stage on the Oka River. They were quickly put on a boat.
More than three thousand people were on the boat, which normally carried no more than a few hundred. Younger children like Volodya were placed in the hold; older ones like Rosa slept on the open deck. Rosa had contracted malaria. There was little fresh water on board and no one could bathe, and soon there was an outbreak of lice. Twice a day the children were served hot tea; all the other food was cold. The boat took them down the Oka and then east along the Volga and northeast on the Kama. For most of the journey dense forests lined the riverbanks, broken at times by flat fields that extended to the distant horizons. Volodya kept wondering why the war wasn’t over yet, how the Germans had advanced so deep into Russia; the radio had spoken with such confidence about the power of the Red Army! The adults, when questioned by the children, explained that the attack had been very sudden, that all of Europe was helping the Germans.
As they approached the city of Gorky, there came word that a boat on the Oka River carrying parents of children evacuated to the Ryazanskaya Province had been bombed by the Germans and had sunk with all its passengers. Volodya and Rosa feared that their parents might have been on board.
After about ten days, they arrived in the town of Okhansk in the Ural Mountains. They climbed onto horse-drawn carts and rode for hours on dirt roads to Bolshaya Sosnova, a town of some three thousand houses located on the Sosnovka River and surrounded by wide fields and dense forests.
That was October 1941.
The distant artillery fire the children had heard in the village of Timoshkino had come from the German Army moving through the Russian heartland. The Germans had advanced more than 1,000 miles in three months. In Moscow, factories were being disassembled for evacuation to the east. The Soviet government left for the city of Kuibyshev, 525 miles to the east. Stalin chose to remain behind.
By October 20 forward elements of the German Army were five miles from Moscow. There was panic in the streets and looting of shops. Solomon Slepak was given a shovel and, together with hundreds of others, told to dig trenches. Near the end of the month, mud and rain stalled the German advance on the city.
As Solomon Slepak dug trenches, German chiefs of staff of all the major units in Russia gathered for a conference in Orsha, the city to which Solomon had fled from the home of his mother at the age of thirteen. With temperatures around minus four degrees Fahrenheit, they decided to resume the offensive against Moscow.
By the end of November combat units of the SS were within seven miles of the Kremlin. Leningrad remained under tight land siege, and eleven thousand Russians died there of hunger that November. A number of German tanks came close to the heart of Moscow; their crews could see the spires of the Kremlin. That was the farthest point of the German advance on the city. The temperature suddenly dropped to minus 25.6 degrees Fahrenheit.