Childhood. Autumn of the 56th

     Autumn 1956. GDR. The small village of Sperenberg is 30 km south of Berlin. My father, Konstantin Nikolaevich, is waiting for a replacement. A replacement is an officer who must come from the Union to the unit where my father serves and replace him. And we - father, mother and I - then we can go to the Union to take the place of the officer who arrived. The Union is how we called our country the USSR, from where we came to Germany. My father had already served in Germany for 6 years by this time.
At the beginning of the 50th, immediately after my birth, my father was sent from Leningrad to Nuremberg, famous for the trial of Nazi criminals. At that time, it was forbidden for officers to take their families to their place of service in Germany. My father said it was Beria's order. After Beria's arrest in 1953, my mother and I were allowed to go to my father in Germany. By this time, my father had been promoted and transferred to another unit. Now he was serving in the city of Bernburg.
And then, before his departure abroad in the spring of '50, my father was a newly minted young lieutenant who had just graduated from accelerated officer courses in Leningrad.
We arrived in Bernburg shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria in 1953. On the platform, as soon as we got off the train, my mother was amazed – there were a lot of German children who asked the newcomers for something to eat. Among the petitioners were adult Germans.
My father met us on a military open "Willis". We got into the car. There weren't many things. Mom couldn't take much. The road was long and it was necessary to look after me in addition to things. Soon we were in the military town of Bernburg. The town was located in a picturesque place on the banks of the wide and fast river Saale. She was visible behind the barrier. When we were walking around the house, we saw cars passing by the unit on the road, and quite often the Germans drove small wooden carts, which were harnessed to large dogs. We really liked these beautiful carts. I wanted to ride them so much.
I was three years old at the time, but I remember well the first impression of the new room where we began to live. The most striking impression was that there was a beautiful portrait of Stalin on the floor against the wall. And interestingly– I already knew who it was. Although my first three years of life I lived in my mother's native village near Gdov among dense forests and lakes. The village was called - Ozertsy. A very beautiful place.
But I will write about life in the countryside, and then in Germany later. Strange as it may seem, but I remember a lot about that time.
The house in Germany was probably formerly a barracks or a hotel. A long corridor, many doors on both sides. At the end of the corridor is a large kitchen, where each family had its own table. Here women cooked food on several stoves. The stoves were white, like modern gas stoves. The furnaces were heated with briquettes or coal. Then I was struck by the toilets with white toilets. I've never seen this before. In Leningrad and in the village I have not seen such a thing.
The next morning I went out for a walk on the street and my peer saw me here. I don't remember his name. We met and agreed to be friends. A new friend suggested a walk through the basements of the town's houses destroyed during the war. It was in the basement of such a house that I first saw machine-gun belts, piles of automatic cartridges. In general, we began to dream of finding some kind of weapon here. The present! And then these toy pistols, into which pistons were inserted and clicked with smoke when fired, are already tired. They searched for a long time, but found nothing.
In 1954, my father was transferred to a unit near the village of Sperenberg, where he commanded a company of a special airborne battalion. The battalion was part of the reserve command of the Group of Soviet Troops in Germany and reported directly to the commander of this group Grechko Andrey Antonovich.
Many people know what 1956 was famous for. A wave of prepared attempts to overthrow the socialism-oriented government swept through the countries of Eastern Europe. Poland, Hungary, Germany. Well, the Suez crisis in the fall of 1956 or the Anglo-Franco-Israeli war against Egypt for the Suez Canal and for the overthrow of Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of the United Arab Republic (Egypt).
I am already 6 years old. One autumn in October, my father came home after lunch from the unit in a greatcoat with a pistol in a holster. He told Mom that they were being transferred to martial law. He will live in the barracks with his soldiers. The situation is tense around. An insurrection begins in Hungary. The Germans are also stirring and are about to start an uprising. In Egypt, the war with the British and Israelis began. I remembered well then that the British had started the war, although I did not know who these Englishmen were. Then the father continued that it is possible that some of them will be sent to this war. Father and mother packed a small suitcase with things. They called it the "disturbing suitcase." With this suitcase, my father went to the barracks, and my mother and I were left alone in our room. Mom was crying quietly. It was very quiet in all the rooms of our family hostel, and probably the women were crying too. Well, we children huddled to their mothers.
At night, shots rang out outside the windows of the house from the side of the forest.
Our house is a long two-story building with long corridors and many doors, behind which were our rooms. Each had a stove the size of a wardrobe. The stoves were finished with tiles or white tiles. They were heated with compressed coal dust. It was called a briquette. However, at that time it was always warm in Germany - both in summer and in winter. In the three years of my life there, I saw snow only once. It fell out in the morning, and by the middle of the day it had melted. But let's return to the events of the autumn of 1956.
Everyone woke up and jumped out into the common corridor. Women and children crowded around the windows in the corridor. I remember some terrible tension in women. I could see it in their excited faces and quiet whispering. A faint electric light was burning in the corridor. The big windows were dark. Only the light falling from the windows illuminated the night forest near the windows. I remembered how in the dark some shadows rushed past the house among the trees towards the fence of the military camp. A moment later I saw flashes and the roar of automatic bursts. Soldiers ran past the windows in the dark. The women whispered that they had driven away some saboteurs. I decided that it must have been the Germans. The shooting receded and soon everything was quiet. Gradually, everyone began to go to their rooms to put the children to bed. Mom and I also went to our room on the second floor.
In the morning after breakfast we met with a friend Vitka. He was also 6 years old. We discussed the night incident. Who saw and heard what at night. Planes and helicopters flew over Sperenberg. They dropped leaflets to the Germans. They flashed in the sun in the blue sky, like flocks of white pigeons, often flapping their wings.
We agreed with Vitka after lunch to take a piece of bread with salt and go exploring outside our military camp. I had to see if there were any saboteurs behind the fence.
We met at the soldiers' mess. Behind it was a stone fence separating the military town from the German village. They quickly slipped past the kitchen stoves. The furnaces of the ovens of the soldiers' mess kitchen faced the street towards the fence. There could be a stoker soldier here. After our recent "terrorist attack" with the stoves with Vitka - we threw automatic cartridges found in the basements into the fire of the stoves, which started shooting in the stoves and pierced one of the kitchen boilers - now the stoker was almost constantly making sure that we did not smoke again. There was no stoker nearby, and we quickly made our way to the right place of the fence, covered with bushes and tall grass.
Here we had a hole made in the bottom of the fence and filled up with a large stone. The two of them rolled off a heavy stone, and Vitka looked through the hole into German territory. "Suddenly enemies are nearby." There were no "enemies" in sight, and we crawled out into the thick grass behind the fence.
A military helicopter was spinning in the sky again and sometimes our planes passed quickly. There was a road running parallel to the fence, and behind it there was a cornfield with corn that had not yet been harvested. We've been climbing there all summer and checking to see if the cobs appeared. I must say that the cobs were not ordinary yellow, but dark red. They were hard and tasteless. But in the high corn we liked to play hide-and-seek and war with the guys.
We were going to go to corn now. Suddenly, an open "Willis" jumped out of the corner (this is like our current UAZ), and a column of trucks followed him, the bodies of which were covered with awnings. We called these machines "Studabakers". These cars were powerful and beautiful. The adults said that these cars were American.
My partner and I fell into the grass by the fence and looked at the cars. We were "scouts". The cars raised such dust that neither the road nor the sky could be seen. The road was rural, dusty.
When the cars passed, we quickly ran across the road in clouds of dust and hid in the corn. The corn stalks were already dry and whitish. The cobs were ripe, but for some reason no one cleaned it, although it was the second half of October. It was warm.
We broke some dried corn stalks, laid them on the ground, and lay down on these stalks. The cobs were torn off, cleaned and tried to gnaw. Uselessly. The grains were as hard as pebbles. Then they took their slices of bread and salt out of their pockets and made themselves an afternoon snack.
Planes and helicopters were still flying over us. We never saw any Germans. And I wanted to see the night saboteurs. The sun was sinking towards evening, and everything was calm. They decided that the German saboteurs had been caught or they had run far away and our help was not needed. The road was also empty, and we returned to the town through a hole in the fence. It was a bit disappointing that we didn't see anything dangerous. In general, the reconnaissance failed.
A few days later, my father came to my mother and me. I had lunch and said that our tanks had taken to the streets in Berlin and other cities. Immediately everything calmed down. There were no more attempts at rebellion.