«Don’t scream, it’s for science» — 5 “examinations” conducted by German doctors on Soviet female prisoners.
This is the testimony of Alexandra Belova, recorded on audio in the winter of 1987 in Moscow. She remained silent for 46 years about the events that occurred at the sorting center in Smolensk during the occupation in 1941.
My name is Alexandra Belova. Today I’m 70 years old, and I’m sitting in my little Moscow apartment, listening to a blizzard howling through the window. It is 1987.
For 46 years, I kept this silence. For 46 years, I woke up in the middle of the night, smelling bleach and fear on my skin, but could not pronounce a word. My children, my grandchildren—they see just a quiet old lady in me who loves to knit and looks out the window for a long time. They don’t know that Alexandra died in 1941 in Smolensk, and the one who survived is just a shadow assembled from fragments.
I decided to speak now because time is running out, but the truth is the only thing I have left. If I take this to my grave, those women who stood next to me in that gray building will disappear forever. And I promised them. I promised to remember every name. Every look, every scar. This old tape recorder is my only witness.
I press the record button and my hands tremble, not from old age, but from the fact that I am returning there again, to that damn autumn. Before the war, I was completely different. I was 23 years old. I had just completed nursing courses and believed that life was an endless road to a bright future. I remember our old yard in Smolensk, the smell of linden trees in June, and the way Mom baked bread on Saturdays.
That fresh smell of bread. If only I knew then that it was the most beautiful thing I was destined to feel, I would have inhaled it until my lungs hurt. I was in love. I dreamed of a wedding, a white dress. In mid-June 1941, my friends and I laughed, discussing new shoes. We were so naive, so protected by our ignorance.
My reality was limited by textbooks on anatomy and duty in the hospital. The war seemed something distant, something out of a book. But when the sky over the city was suddenly blackened by planes and the ground under our legs began to moan, the world that I knew fell apart in a matter of seconds. Our hospital turned into hell in one day.
I saw the first wounds, the first blood that didn’t look like the one in textbooks. It was hot, sticky, and smelled like iron. And then they came. The first contact with what I call real horror happened in October 1941. Smolensk was already on fire. I remember this gray, dank dawn when the sound of German boots on the paving stones became a reality.
It wasn’t just noise; it was the rhythm of death. We were gathered right at the entrance to the hospital. Soldiers in machine-gray uniforms. Their faces seemed to me to be carved out of stone. There was nothing human in them. One of them, very young, hit a woman with a rifle butt just because she walked too slowly. This sound—the cracking of bones and her muffled groan—became the first signal that there were no more rules.
They drove us through the city. I saw my house, or rather, what was left of it: burnt walls and the cherry tree my father planted on my birthday. It was black with soot. At that moment, I felt this for the first time—a strange cold inside that has not left me since. It was a realization that I no longer existed as a personality, as Alexandra.
I became a unit, a body that needed to be moved from point A to point B. They led us to a huge, three-story building on the outskirts of the city. Before the war, it was a school or some kind of administrative institution, but now it looked like a monster’s mouth. The windows were boarded up, and there were machine-gun towers at the entrance.
Exactly there, I met them—other women whose destinies intertwined with mine into one bloody knot. Inside, it smelled of sour sweat, old blood, and something chemical that stung my nose. We were pushed into a long corridor with tiled walls. I remember how my feet slipped on the wet floor. There, I saw Natalya Sokolova.
She stood at the wall, clutching a thin shawl to her chest. She was about 31 years old. She was a teacher in a rural school in Smolensk. She had such kind eyes, in which deep bewilderment was now frozen, as if she was trying to find a logical explanation for what was happening and could not find it. Standing next to her was a very young girl, Irina Volkova. She was only 19.
She was a seamstress on a collective farm. Her hands, pricked by needles, trembled slightly. There was also Katerina Danilova, an older woman about forty-two years old, who used to work as a cook. She looked at us all with a kind of stern, maternal pity. And Vera Kaminskaya, a student and secretary. She was 27.
We didn’t know each other’s names yet. We were just a bunch of scared women. But the minute the doors slammed shut behind us, we became sisters in misfortune. We stood in this corridor for hours. They didn’t give us water and didn’t allow us to sit down. If someone tried to get down on the floor, a guard appeared immediately with a German Shepherd. Barking dogs and screams in a harsh, foreign language became the background of our new life.
The system was built with German accuracy. It wasn’t just a camp; it was a sorting center where we were disassembled like spare parts. Our every action was regulated. Rise at 5:00 AM, ice water from which the skin became crusty, and this endless, maddening fear of inspections.
We were divided into groups. Everyone was assigned a number. I became number 412. They erased our names. Natalya Sokolova tried to protest. She spoke in their language, tried to call to their reason, to say that we were civilians. But the officer, whose face I remember down to the smallest details—thin lips and ice-blue eyes—just hit her in the face with a riding crop.
He wasn’t angry; he just removed obstacles. That’s when we understood: we are not people to them. We are biological material. Katerina Danilova tried to support us. In those rare moments when the guards turned away, she whispered to us: “Girls, hold on to your thoughts. Don’t let them take what you have in your head.” She shared her tiny piece of bread that smelled like sawdust because the girl was fading before our eyes.
This gesture, a crumb of bread passed from hand to hand at gunpoint, was the most heroic deed I have ever seen. The hierarchy in this center was brutal. There were guards from among collaborators who were sometimes worse than the Germans because they knew our weak points. And there were the doctors.
Oh, these people in white coats over their uniforms. They walked along the corridors with clipboards. Their steps sounded quieter than the steps of soldiers but caused more horror. When they appeared, such silence reigned in the corridor that you could hear our beating hearts. They started taking us to procedures that they called “hygiene control.”
In fact, it was methodical humiliation. We were forced to undress naked in cold rooms under bright spotlights. A group of ten women was lined up, and they walked around us, measuring the distance between the eyes, the shape of the ears, and the volume of the skull with calipers. I remember the coldness of the metal on my temple.
I remember how Vera Kaminskaya closed her eyes and quietly prayed, and the matron laughed and pulled her hair, forcing her to look forward. They were looking for signs of inferiority in us or, on the contrary, some special suitability, which we did not understand then. Every day brought new rules.
You couldn’t look the guards in the eyes. It was impossible to talk in the barracks. You couldn’t cry. Crying was punished especially cruelly—deprivation of water for a day. We quickly learned to cry without making a sound. Only tears rolled down my cheeks, mixing with dirt. Irina Volkova, the youngest of us, one day couldn’t stand it.
She started calling for her mom. It was at night in our cramped cell where we slept on bare boards, huddled close to each other so as not to freeze. Her scream cut through the silence. Two people burst into the cell. They pulled her out into the corridor by the legs. We heard her screams and then the sounds of blows.
We lay there, holding our breath. Katerina Danilova tightly squeezed my hand. Her palm was rough and hot. When Irina was thrown back an hour later, she was unrecognizable. But the worst thing was not the bruises, but her look. She looked right through us. That night I realized that they are not destroying only our bodies; they burn our souls, leaving emptiness inside.
Control was absolute. Even our physiological needs were subject to their schedule. This was part of the dehumanization plan. When you can’t even control your body, you stop feeling like a human being. But in the midst of this darkness, there were moments that did not let us go completely crazy. Natalya Sokolova read poetry to us from memory—Pushkin. Almost in a whisper at night.
Her voice was like a thin thread connecting us with the old world. She read: “I remember a wonderful moment…” And in this stinking, cold cell, a light appeared for a moment. We closed our eyes and imagined gardens, spring, and human speech in which there were no orders. These minutes of solidarity were our uprising. We shared tiny snippets of news, which Vera managed to overhear when she was taken away to clean the offices in the administrative wing.
She said that “ours” are somewhere nearby, that the front moves. These rumors were our only food, but then the inspections started. This was the official part of their system. We were called according to the list. First, the examination was general: height, weight, teeth. The second was disease testing. The third: assessment of physical endurance.
The fourth is what they called “racial cleanliness.” We went through them one by one, and each time we became fewer and fewer. Those who didn’t pass, they took to another wing, and we never saw them again. We knew that something final was happening. We saw a little smoke from the chimneys of the extensions in the yard.
This smoke had a strange sweetish smell that ate into clothes and hair. Katerina Danilova once said, crossing herself: “It’s not wood that’s burning, Sashenka. This is our hope burning.” We tried not to think about it. We clung to every passing hour. We learned to be happy that today we weren’t called.
But we knew that the list continued. And the most terrible phrase in our vocabulary became “The Fifth Inspection.” Nobody knew what it was, but those who left for it did not return even to that other wing. The Fifth Inspection was talked about in whispers, as if it were a death sentence carried out while still alive.
My name, Alexandra Belova, sounded more and more often in their lists for checks. I was young, healthy, and had a medical education; for some reason, it aroused their special interest. The doctors looked at my hands and forced me to demonstrate the flexibility of my fingers. They discussed me in their own language, as if I was not a person, but a thoroughbred horse.
One of them, a doctor with dry, almost transparent hands, once touched my neck with his cold fingers and said something to the others, to which they nodded approvingly. At that moment I felt an icy sweat run down my back. I realized that I was chosen for something special, for something that goes beyond the framework of simple slave labor.
Natalya Sokolova, seeing my face after that examination, just hugged me. We both knew the circle was narrowing. Every day the walls of this center became increasingly closer, and the air got heavier. We lived waiting for the end, waiting for that moment when this machine crushes us finally.
And this moment was approaching with every stroke of the clock on the main tower of this damn building. I remember every sound of that autumn. The rustle of fallen leaves in the yard, which we were ordered to collect with our hands until the last leaf. The grinding of keys in the lock. Vera’s heavy breathing, which had turned into a severe cough.
We all understood that illness is also a sentence. We tried to treat her as best we could, with warm words and prayers. Katerina gave her her only warm jacket, remaining in one thin shirt with her number. We warmed each other with our bodies, trying to preserve that spark of life which was still glowing within us.
But the cold outside was nothing compared to the cold that came from the people in white coats. They were getting ready. We felt it by how the security changed, how the orderlies scurried around the corridors. Something big had to happen. And then one evening, when the sun set behind the black forests of the Smolensk region, the door of our cell opened wider than usual.
An officer stood at the door with a long list in his hand. His voice sounded like the blow of a whip. He called five names. Among them was Natalya, among them was Katerina, and among them was me. We should have prepared for that same Fifth Inspection. At that moment, I looked at my hands and realized that they no longer belonged to me.
My whole world shrunk to this corridor, to this smell of bleach and the icy calm in the eyes of the man who crossed our lives from the list of the living. That corridor, through which we were led to the medical block, seemed endless. I remember every seam on the tiles, every crack in the ceiling. We walked barefoot, and the cold of the concrete penetrated right into our bones.
Natalya Sokolova walked ahead of me. Her shoulders, once straight, were now hopelessly slumped. We understood that there would be no return to previous inspections. It was another part of the building. Even the air here was different. It was saturated with the smell of ether, iodine, and a kind of sweetish, sickening rot.
There were five of us. Me, Natalya, Katerina, Vera, and little Irina. We tried to stay close to each other, touching elbows to feel that we were still alive, that we were still here. We were brought to the room they called Waiting Room Number Three. It was a large room with bright surgical lamps that burned even during the day, blinding us and depriving us of a sense of time.
The third inspection started there: the endurance test. This was the first of those events that forever burned out the ability in me to trust humanity. An officer in a white coat, whom the others called Dr. Hans, ordered us to undress. Again, this humiliation, to which it is impossible to get used. We were forced to stand on one leg for two hours at gunpoint.
If someone fell, they were beaten with a whip. I saw how blood flowed down Irina Volkova’s legs from the blows, but she didn’t make a sound, only her lips silently whispered a prayer. At that moment I realized that they test not our bodies, but our will. They wanted to see when we would stop being human and become broken animals.
Katerina Danilova, our cook, our support, began to fail first. She was 42 years old and her heart could not withstand this stress. I saw her turn pale as sweat rolled down her face. I tried to whisper to cheer her up. “Hold on, Katya, just a little more.” But she just shook her head. At that moment, Dr. Hans approached her.
He didn’t beat her; he just looked into her eyes with his empty, analytical gaze. He took her hand and began to measure her pulse, while simultaneously recording something in his notebook. “Too slow,” he said in broken Russian. That evening Katerina was taken away. She turned at the threshold, and there was no fear in her eyes, just endless fatigue.
She knew something we didn’t know. We never saw her again. That night in our cell, it became unbearably spacious. The four of us hid in a corner, and Natalya began to read poems. But her voice broke at the first quatrain. We just sat in the dark, listening to water dripping somewhere behind the wall.
We spent 15 days in this mode, between waiting and violence. Then came the fourth inspection. This was 23 days after our arrival. We were brought to an office filled with strange devices. Vera Kaminskaya was there. She had always been the strongest of us, the most collected. She was chosen to study the reaction to external stimuli.
I remember how they tied her to a chair. They used electrical discharges. This was not an execution, no; it was scientific research. They wanted to know how much pain the human brain can withstand before a blackout occurs. I stood in line outside the door and heard it all.
First there were screams, then wheezing, and then there was silence, which was scarier than any sound. When Vera was carried out on a stretcher, her eyes were open, but there was no faith in them. It was an empty shell. She was breathing, but her soul was erased. Natalya Sokolova screamed for the first time that day.
She rushed at the guard, biting his hands, tearing out pieces of meat. She was beaten half to death, right in front of our eyes. I stood and watched my friend’s blood flood the gray tiles, and I could do nothing. My hands, my nurse’s hands, were powerless. It was my personal hell: to see suffering and have no opportunity to help.
Those days I started to lose track of time. Day and night merged into one gray fog. Hunger became a constant companion. It gnawed on the stomach from within, making it impossible to think about anything other than food. But even hunger retreated before the horror of what they did with Irina. Irina Volkova was only 19 years old. She was so fragile, so transparent.
Dr. Hans decided she was the perfect object for studying tissue regeneration. They made cuts on her arms and legs, and then used various chemical compositions to see how quickly the wounds would heal. I remember this smell. A mixture of iodine and burnt flesh. Irina didn’t cry anymore. She just sat on the floor, looking at one point, and her hands constantly made movements as if she was sewing something.
She sewed her own invisible clothes for the funerals that our life had become. The system of dehumanization worked flawlessly. We were forced to clean toilets with our hands; we were forced to eat from troughs. They wanted us to forget that we once had houses, families, names. But precisely in these moments, small miracles happened.
One day Natalya, who had barely recovered from the beatings, found a piece of pencil somewhere. She started drawing tiny flowers on our cell wall. These flowers were barely noticeable, but for us, they were a whole world. We looked at them for hours, remembering the summer of forty-one. These small gestures of solidarity were our only weapon.
We shared our last drops of water. We wiped each other’s faces with dirty rags. We were no longer just women. We were a collective organism trying to survive in the womb of a monster. On the thirty-fifth day of our stay in the center, a strange revival began in the corridors. We heard the officers talking in raised voices.
The phrase “Fifth Inspection” began to sound constantly. We understood that the finale was approaching. There were three of us left: me, Natalya, and Irina. Vera died two days earlier, having simply stopped breathing in her sleep. She was the first of us to find peace, and, I honestly admit, I envied her.
The Fifth Inspection began at 4:00 AM. We were woken up not with screams, but with ice water from hoses. We were kicked out into the yard, where there was a thick fog. There we were separated. Irina was carried away in one direction, Natalya in another. I was left alone under the supervision of two soldiers. An hour later I was brought into a room that used to be an assembly hall, but now everything was rebuilt. It was an operating theater.
In the center stood a table, illuminated by powerful lamps. People were sitting around the table in uniform, with notepads and pencils. They looked like spectators in a theater. Only instead of a play, they suggested human agony. They laid me on the table. I didn’t resist. I had no strength left to resist. I looked at the ceiling and saw a small leak stain there.
I concentrated on this spot, trying to imagine that it was a cloud floating over Smolensk. Dr. Hans came up to me. This time he wasn’t alone. A senior officer was with him, a man with a face disfigured by a scar. Hans began to explain something to him, pointing at my internal organs as if I were an anatomical map. They started the procedure without anesthesia.
It was their main condition. The patient must be conscious to record the pain threshold. Pain. There are no words in human language to describe what I felt in the first second. It was as if a red-hot crowbar had been inserted into me and slowly turned. I screamed until I lost my voice. And when the voice disappeared, I began to wheeze.
I saw my hands tied with belts. I saw my nails digging into the skin of my palms, bleeding. But the worst thing was not the physical pain. The worst thing was to see their faces. They looked at me with curiosity, how children look at crushed insects. They weren’t sadists in the usual sense of the word.
They were scientists for whom I stopped being human. At some moment, I saw Natalya. She was brought to the same hall for her to watch. This was part of the experiment: psychological impact on a witness. She stood in the corner, held by two guards, and I saw her bite her lips so as not to scream along with me. Her eyes.
I’ll never forget this look. There was as much pain in it as no human heart can bear. She looked at me, and in this look was a request for forgiveness for the fact that she couldn’t help me. The procedure took forever. I was losing consciousness and coming to my senses from the sharp smell of salts they brought to my nose to continue.
They explored the boundaries of human endurance. They cut, sewed, and cut again. At some point, I stopped feeling my body. I became just a clot of pain floating somewhere underneath the ceiling. I saw myself from the outside: an emaciated woman on an iron table, surrounded by monsters in white coats. And that’s when I made my decision.
I decided that I would not give them the satisfaction of seeing my fear. I closed my eyes and I started to remember. I remembered my mother, the smell of bread, the cherry tree in our garden. I went inside myself, to the only place they couldn’t reach with their scalpels. When everything ended, I was thrown back into the cell. I was alone.
Natalya was not there. Irina was not there. I lay on bare boards, and the blood soaked my only shirt. I didn’t know how much time passed: an hour or a day. I just lay there and looked at those little flowers that Natalya drew on the wall. They started to fade, to become moldy. I understood that this was the end. We were destroyed physically, mentally, biologically.
We had become shadows.
But on the forty-second day, something changed. The silence that usually reigned in the center gave way to chaos. We heard explosions in the distance. First deaf, then more and more distinct. Security started running around the corridors; screams were heard in German. I was lying in my cell, too weak to even lift my head. The door opened and I saw Natalya.
She was alive, but her hair had turned completely white. She was 31 years old, but a hundred-year-old woman was looking at me. She came up to me and knelt down and just pressed my head to her breast. We didn’t talk; there was no need for words. We listened to the cannonade, which was approaching. Ours were close, but it no longer mattered to us in the way it could have a month ago.
We were free, but this freedom was bitter like wormwood. We survived, but the cost of this life was such that the word “life” itself seemed an insult to those who stayed there in the operating rooms and cellars with sweetish smoke. Irina never returned. The last time I saw her was when she was taken to Block B.
She was 19 years old. She wanted to be a seamstress; she wanted to sew beautiful dresses for brides. Instead, she became a line in Dr. Hans’s report about the rate of tissue necrosis. This thought still burns me inside. Every night I see her face, her punctured fingers, and I feel guilty. Guilty for the fact that I’m breathing and she’s not.
Guilt for what I remember, but the world wants to forget. Those days at the end of 1941 became a watershed for me. The world is divided into “before” and “after.” And “after” was filled with silence, which cannot be filled with anything. We waited for liberation as people wait for death, with indifference and fatigue. We saw how the Germans burned documents, how they tried to hide the traces of their crimes, but they didn’t understand the main thing. The main trace is us.
We, surviving stumps of people with marks on our souls. We were their worst evidence, and they knew it. Fear appeared in their eyes. The same fear which they instilled in us for 40 days. And this fear was the best medicine for my wounded soul in those last hours before the walls of this hell came crashing down.
I remember how on that last evening before the Fifth Inspection, the air in the chamber was so thick that it seemed it could be cut with a knife. The three of us sat: me, Natalya, and little Irina. Vera and Katerina had already gone into that darkness from where no one returns, and their absence was felt like a physical wound, like a draft which cannot be appeased.
We no longer cried. We had no water left in our organisms for tears. Natalya Sokolova, who was only 31 years old at the time but who looked 60, took me by the hand. Her fingers were cold and dry as parchment. She whispered that if we get separated tomorrow, I have to remember one thing: they can take our life, but they can’t take away what we were before this hell.
She made me repeat the names of my parents for the hundredth time, the name of my street, the smell of lindens in June. This was our last attempt to cling to the shores of humanity before we were finally carried away into the abyss. At 4:30 AM the door opened with such a roar that my heart seemed to stop. We were not called by name.
The officer just pointed a finger: “You, you, and you.” We were led along the dark corridors of the medical block. I saw how the shadows from our exhausted bodies were dancing on the walls, looking like skeletons. We were taken to the operating room, where the light of the lamps was so bright that it hurt my eyes.
This was the Fifth Inspection, the peak of their system, the moment when science turned into pure, distilled evil. Dr. Hans was waiting for us. He was wearing a clean apron and calmly wiped some metal tool. At that moment I realized that for him, we were nothing more than pages in notebooks to be filled in with data about pain and death.
Irina Volkova, our nineteen-year-old seamstress, was laid on the table first. I saw how she trembled finely, and this trembling of her body still haunts me in nightmares. Hans began the procedure. It wasn’t a routine examination. They injected drugs directly into the bone marrow to study the speed of the nervous system’s reaction.
I stood 2 meters away and saw it all. I saw her face contort into such a grimace that human facial expressions cannot create. She didn’t scream. She made a strange whistling sound, as if all the air was leaving her. I tried to rush to her, but the guard hit me in the stomach with a rifle butt. I fell on my knees, gasping for breath, and saw how Natalya closed her eyes and began to read aloud the prayer that she hid all these weeks. The guard laughed.
For them, our prayers were just background noise to their great experiment. When the turn reached me, I no longer felt my body. It was a strange state of alienation. I saw how they tied me with leather straps to cold metal. Dr. Hans leaned towards me, and I smelled his expensive tobacco. He looked into my eyes and said in perfect Russian: “This is for the sake of progress, Alexandra, you should be proud.”
At this moment I realized that this is the worst thing—when evil considers itself progress. The pain came suddenly, like a lightning strike. They made cuts without anesthesia, recording the blood clotting time during extreme temperatures. I felt the steel cutting my skin, how the cold air touched my internal tissues.
It was pain which goes beyond physics. It tore apart my very consciousness. In some moment I saw the ceiling, which suddenly became transparent, and I saw the sky above Smolensk, thousands of stars, and I flew to it. I died at that moment. That Alexandra, who loved to dance and dreamed about children, just stopped existing.
All that remained was the shell, which recorded every movement of the scalpel. The Fifth Inspection lasted 3 hours and 45 minutes. For me, it was three eternities. When I was thrown back into the cell, I couldn’t move. I was lying in my own blood, and every breath was like a sip of broken glass.
Natalya was not there. Irina was not there. I was alone in this concrete box, and my only companions were the smell of bleach and burning. That’s when I realized that this was it. The finale. They took my friends, they took my health, they took my future. But in this absolute emptiness, suddenly something new was born. It wasn’t hope.
No, it was icy, crystal-clear hatred and a desire to survive against all odds, just so that one day someone found out about Dr. Hans and his progress. It was the forty-second day of our confinement. It was September 24, 1943. The city around the building groaned from the explosions. We had heard the cannonade for several days now, but that morning it became deafening.
The walls shook; dust fell from the ceiling. I lay on the floor without the strength to get up and looked at the door. Suddenly the noise inside the building changed. Screams in German became panicky. I heard the sound of broken glass and the stomp of hundreds of feet. And then silence. Long, ringing silence.
And suddenly a voice—loud, hoarse, native. “Is anyone alive here?” I tried to scream, but only a wheeze came out of my throat. I started scraping my nails along the floor. The door of my camera flew off its hinges. In the opening, there was a soldier standing. He was covered in soot. His greatcoat was torn. But on his ushanka, I saw a red star.
He looked at me, and his face twitched. He turned away for a second, and then quickly came up and picked me up. I weighed 32 kg then. He carried me like a child, and I felt the warmth of his body through coarse fabric of his greatcoat. When we reached the street, I closed my eyes. The autumn sun seemed unbearably bright to me.
I saw the ruins of Smolensk. I saw tanks with the inscription “For the Motherland.” And I realized it had ended. But there was no joy. It was only huge black ashes where my soul used to be. I was brought to a field hospital. The doctors cried when they examined us. There were only seven of us left—women from the 120 that were brought to that center at the beginning of the occupation.
Natalya was found in the basement of the medical block. She was alive, but she didn’t recognize me. She looked through me and was constantly adjusting her imaginary shawl on her shoulders. Her mind couldn’t handle the Fifth Inspection. We never found Irina. Soldiers said there were stoves in the backyard which smoked until the last minute.
I know that in that smoke was my little seamstress, and her unborn children, and her unstitched dresses. The process of returning to life was long and painful. First, I hardly spoke for 2 years. I lived in a silence that was only broken by my own screams at night. I returned to destroyed Smolensk and found a job in an archive because I couldn’t see living people in medical gowns.
I married Alexey in 1948. He was a war invalid who lost his leg under Stalingrad. We were two fragments of a great disaster that tried to prop up each other so as not to fall. He never asked me about the scars on my back and stomach. He just stroked my hands in the evenings when I began to tremble without visible reason.
We lived together for 40 years, and this silence of understanding was the most valuable thing I had. I gave birth to two children, a son and a daughter. But even when I held them in my arms, I felt the cold of those iron tables. I looked at their small fingers and saw Irina’s punctured hands. My motherhood was imbued with fear.
I constantly checked if they were breathing. I couldn’t leave them for a minute. I raised them in peace and quiet, but I never told them the truth. I didn’t want their world to be poisoned by that poison which I drank. But now that Alexei is gone, and my children have become parents themselves, I understand that my silence is becoming a crime against memory.
If I don’t tell you, then Dr. Hans will win. He will win if his crime remains nameless. Today in 1987, I look out the window onto Moscow streets. The world seems so durable, so eternal. People are in a hurry on business, laughing, arguing about trifles. They don’t know that underneath that thin crust of civilization, the same darkness always seethes, which broke out in ’41.
My hands shake when I change the cassette in the tape recorder, but my voice should be hard. I’m not writing this down for history textbooks, but for every person who believes that it does not concern him. This applies to everyone. Every time we close our eyes to injustice, every time we put progress above humanity, we are building the walls of that same gray building in Smolensk.
I often remember those flowers which Natalya painted on our cell wall. They were ugly, crooked, but there was more life in them than in all their medical treatises. These flowers taught me the main thing: the human spirit is impossible to destroy completely. Flesh can be cut, bones can be broken, you can erase memory, but somewhere in the very depths there remains a spark that refuses to go out.
I only survived thanks to this spark. And now that I am finishing my story, I feel like this spark becomes a flame. I am no longer number 413. I am Alexandra Belova, daughter of Ivan and Maria, sister of the dead, mother of the living.
My body is worn out, my heart is tired of fighting against the flow of memory, but I’m leaving with a light soul. I told you about Katerina, who shared bread; about Vera, who kept silent; about Natalya, who read poetry in hell. About Irina, who became smoke, but remained in my heart. I give them back their names. I give them back their right to exist in this world. Death is not the end when there are those who remember.
And I believe that someday in the future, people will learn to hear each other’s pain before it turns into catastrophe. The meaning of my survival was in this testimony. Now that the tape ends, I feel strangely relieved. It’s as if I had dropped a huge, cold stone that I carried for 46 years. I turn off the light in the room.
Outside the window, snow is coming down, as white and pure as the one that fell on the ruins of Smolensk on the day of my release. But now this snow doesn’t seem cold to me; it seems like a shroud to me, which finally covers all the wounds of the land. Humanity deserves forgiveness, but only if it finds the strength within itself to remember.
Remember, this is all I ask. Remember us not for the sake of pity, but for the sake of your own future. Destroy the person in you? No, it wasn’t worth it. This is the hardest job in the world, but it is the only one that matters. My voice fades, but my words remain here in this little box. I press the stop button. That’s it, it’s over.
I am free. Now I am really free.
It is estimated that more than 2 million Soviet women were deported for forced work and to concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. Thousands of them were subjected to inhumane medical experiments in sorting centers and death laboratories. Preserving the memory of this evidence is an act of resistance against silence and a tribute to the courage of those who survived in indescribable conditions.
If you watched to the end, write in the comments from which city or country you are watching us, and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next evidence. This story is a fictional work inspired by the real suffering of Soviet women during World War II.
