My name is Tatyana Ivanovna Belova. In my passport, it says I’m 94 years old, but in fact, my life stopped when I was 20 years old. Since then, I haven’t lived. I just exist; I live through this endless time that fate measured out for me. I was silent for 74 years. I didn’t tell my husband or children, not even the priest at confession.
In the Soviet Union, survival in German captivity was not a reason for pride, but a stigma of shame. We were considered traitors. “Why are you alive when others died? What did you pay for your life?” These questions were asked to me in cold NKVD offices immediately after the war. And I learned to remain silent.
Silence has become my second skin, my refuge, my prison. But now that my body has become as fragile as thin ice on a spring river, I understand that if I leave without saying a word, then untruth will win, and oblivion will conquer. And oblivion is the only thing that those who killed us actually achieved. Therefore, today I speak. I speak for myself, for Olya, for Vera, for Zinaida, and for all those women whose names disappeared into the icy water and into the silence of history.
Before the war, I was an ordinary girl from a village near Minsk. The village was called Krasny Bor, a small place with wooden houses, a well on the main street, and a church that the Bolsheviks turned into a warehouse. I dreamed of becoming a doctor, wearing a white coat, smelling of iodine and cleanliness. I had long blond hair and braids, which my mother was very proud of.
She braided them every morning before school and said: “Tanyusha, you are as beautiful as a birch tree.” And my father called my laughter a bell. He worked as a tractor driver on a collective farm, came home tired, covered in oil and dirt, but always smiled at me. I had a younger brother, Kolya. He was only 14 years old when the war began. He loved fishing in the river and dreamed of becoming a pilot.
I remember the summer of 1941, so clear as if it were yesterday. The smell of sun-warmed grass, dust on the country road, the taste of fresh milk from a clay pot. We didn’t know it was the last summer of our childhood. We didn’t know that soon the sky would become black with smoke, and the ground red with blood.
When on June 22, 1941, the radio announced the beginning of the war, my father was silent, got up from the table, and went to sign up for the militia. Mom cried, holding the edge of the table so as not to fall. But I didn’t cry. There were no tears in me, only cold, ringing hatred for those who came to ruin our lives.
The Germans arrived quickly. Our army was retreating. I saw columns of refugees on the roads, carts loaded with bundles, and children who cried from hunger. I saw our homes burn, and I saw how they hanged neighbors on the central square for hiding wounded Red Army soldiers. They hung them up slowly, not by breaking their necks, but by strangling them. And the German soldiers stood nearby and smoked, laughed, and photographed corpses as a keepsake.
I didn’t have time to evacuate. My parents are missing. I never found out what happened to them. My brother Kolya was taken by the Germans to work in Germany. He went missing. I was left completely alone.
I went into the forest to join the partisans. This happened in the fall of 1942. I was accepted into the squad thanks to the fact that I had completed nursing courses. I became a sister of mercy, although there was very little mercy in that forest. Guerrilla warfare is not a story about heroes. This is dirt, cold, hunger, and constant fear.
We lived in dugouts buried deep in the swampy soil. It was always damp inside and smelled of mold and tobacco smoke. I learned to bandage wounds with dirty rags, cut out bullets without anesthesia, shoot from a captured German Walther, and endure hunger that made my stomach stick to my spine. I learned not to cry when men died in my arms, whispering the names of their wives and children.
My close friend in the squad was Olya Smirnova. We were almost the same age. Olya was 22 years old. She was a strong woman with broad shoulders and strong arms. Before the war, she worked on a collective farm, milking cows and carrying sacks of grain. She had a rough face but kind gray eyes. Olya saved my life twice.
Once, she pulled me out from under fire when the Germans surrounded our group in the forest. Another time, she shared the last piece of bread with me when I was lying with a high fever and delirious. Olya left two children at home: Vanya and Mashenka. She talked about them constantly. “Tanyusha, do you think they remember me? Vanechka was only 5 years old when I left. Has he forgotten his mother’s voice?” I promised her that we would definitely return home, that the war would end soon. I was lying. I didn’t know that in a few months, I would watch her die in the icy water, and I wouldn’t be able to help her.
They took us in the winter of 1943 during the great German raid. It was an operation to clear the forests of partisans. The Germans surrounded a large area, rounded up the local residents, and began to comb every village, every ravine, every dugout. We were betrayed. Some of the villagers, whom the Germans tortured, pointed to our camp.
I remember that day down to the smallest detail. It was a frosty January dawn. We heard dogs barking, then sharp commands in German, which sounded like barking, like the growl of a beast. We tried to escape, but we were surrounded on all sides.
I remember a butt blow to the face. The world turned upside down. I fell into the snow. The taste of blood in my mouth, ringing in my ears, rough hands that twisted my hands behind my back, icy metal handcuffs on my wrists. We were not shot on the spot. The Germans needed labor force. Us, women partisans, were considered especially dangerous.
They stripped us naked right in the snow to check if there were any weapons or documents. I remember this shame that burned more intensely than the frost. German soldiers stood around and looked at us, laughed, and said something obscene in their own language. One of them spat in my face; the other hit me in the stomach with his boot so hard that I bent over and couldn’t breathe for a few minutes.
We were thrown old torn dresses and driven off on foot along the snowy road. We walked for several days. Those who fell from weakness were shot right on the road. I saw an old woman get shot because she couldn’t go any further. Her body was left lying in the snow. And no one had the right to even look back. We were brought to a railway station and driven into freight cars like cattle.
It was so crowded inside that the dead stood next to the alive, without being able to fall. In the carriage, there were no windows, no light, no air. Only a small grille under the ceiling through which weak light made its way. We traveled for four days without water, no food, in complete darkness. The car swung on the joints of the rails.
Clack, clack, clack, clack. This rhythm is ingrained into my brain. Until now, when I can’t fall asleep at night, I hear this knock. People died right there in the carriage from the cold, from illness, from despair. The smell of death was so thick that it seemed material, that you might suffocate.
Olya held my hand. She whispered a prayer, although she was a Komsomol member before the war and did not believe in God. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” Her voice trembled, but it was the only thing that kept me from going crazy. When the carriage doors finally opened, frosty Polish air hit my lungs like a knife. I inhaled and coughed.
There was light so bright that my eyes watered. Germans shouted: “Raus, schnell! Raus!” They beat us with batons, driving us out of the cars. Those who couldn’t walk on their own, they pulled down and thrown straight onto the platform. I saw prickly wire, watchtowers, and long wooden barracks. I realized we were in a camp, a place from which few people return alive.
We were lined up on the parade ground. It was a huge area trampled down to the hardness of stone, surrounded by barracks and barbed wire. There was an inscription above the gate in German. I didn’t understand what was written there, but I found out later. Arbeit Macht Frei. Work liberates. What a monstrous lie.
Labor did not release anyone here. He killed slowly, methodically, day after day. We were forced to strip naked right in the cold. I remember this shame that did not go away, even when you realize that human dignity has no meaning here. German guards and matrons, women in gray uniforms with stone faces, walked between us, looking at us as if we were a commodity on the market.
We were examined by a doctor, a German in a white coat, in glasses, with a neatly trimmed mustache. He looked intelligent, almost kindly, but his hands were cold as metal. He looked into our mouths, checked our teeth, felt our hands, checked if there were muscles able to work. He made notes in a notepad.
Some women he immediately sent to the left. I didn’t know then that it meant death. I found out later. They shaved my head. My brown braids, my mother’s pride, fell into the dirty snow. They took my name along with my hair, my personality, my story. I stopped being Tatyana Ivanovna Belova. I became number 4089. Just numbers on a piece of dirty cloth which were sewn to my chest.
We were given striped robes that were not warm at all. The fabric was thin and rough. It rubbed the skin until it bled. They gave us wooden clogs instead of shoes. My feet were freezing in them so that my fingers lost sensitivity and turned black from frostbite. We were taken to the barracks. A long wooden building without windows, only narrow gaps under the roof. Inside, there were bunks three stories high.
On each tier, 10 people were supposed to sleep, but they packed us in 15 or 20 at a time. We slept on our sides, huddled up to each other like sardines in a barrel, because otherwise, we simply wouldn’t fit. There was no blanket. There was only thin straw that pricked and smelled rotten. The first night I didn’t sleep; I lay and listened.
Someone was crying quietly, choking with tears; someone prayed in a whisper; someone was delirious in a fever, shouting out the names of relatives; and someone had already remained silent forever. In the morning, when we woke up at 4:00 AM, I saw that the woman lying next to me was dead. Her eyes were open, glassy, staring into space.
Her body was cold and hard. I tried to scream, but they hit me with a club on the back. “Shut up, carry the corpse to the gate.” Another woman and I took the dead body by the arms and legs and dragged it to the camp gate where the dead were stored. There were already dozens of bodies lying there. They were stacked like firewood.
Some were naked. Clothes were removed from the dead to give back to the alive. I realized then that a human life is worth nothing here—less than nothing. The camp worked as a well-oiled death machine. Everyone had their own role, their own function in this mechanism. We were woken up at 4:00 in the morning.
We lined up on the parade ground for roll call. It could last an hour, two, sometimes three hours. We stood motionless in the cold, in the rain, in the snow. If anyone moved, they beat them. If someone fainted, they kicked them with boots until they got up, or they shot them if they didn’t get up. After roll call, we were sent to work: someone to build roads, someone to the quarry, someone to the ammunition factory.
The work was hard and exhausting. We were fed gruel once a day, a thin soup of rotten vegetables and some kind of cereal. Sometimes there were worms swimming in the soup; we ate the worms too. The bread was a small piece, 150 grams, black, sticky, half made of sawdust. But we took care of every crumb.
The hunger was such that you thought about food every second. You saw yourself eating in your sleep. You woke up and cried because you understood that it was only a dream. But among all this hell, there was a special circle, a particularly scary place. It was called the Ice Barracks. It was a stone building on the very outskirts of the camp, separate from others.
They took women there who were too weak for hard work, but still quite alive, to be useful for science. The Germans conducted experiments there—medical experiments. They needed to find out how long a person can survive in icy water. This was important for the Luftwaffe, for German pilots who could fall into the cold northern sea.
But they didn’t want to risk their own pilots. For this, there was us: Soviet women, partisans, subhumans, rats from the East. “Russians are as hardy as rats,” SS Obersturmführer Klaus Weber, the officer in charge of these experiments, loved to repeat. His face was smooth and well-groomed. He shaved every day, smelled of expensive cologne, and wore polished, glittering boots.
He smiled when he gave orders. He was polite, almost kind, but his eyes were empty, like a dead fish. I was sent to the ice barracks a month after arriving at the camp. I’ve lost a lot of weight. My hands trembled from weakness. I could barely hold on to my legs. During morning roll call, the matron, a fat German woman with a face looking like a bulldog, pulled me out of the line along with 15 other women.
“You are no longer fit for work, but you serve the Reich differently.” We were taken to that barracks. Inside it was cold, dank. The stone walls were covered with mold, the floor was wet and slippery, and in the middle of the barracks, there were five huge cast-iron bathtubs. They were old, rusty, with peeling enamel.
Every morning they were filled with ice-cold water brought from the river, and dumped pieces of ice in there. The water was so cold that there was steam coming off it. Black, thick. It seemed alive, angry, waiting to be fed a human body. Next to the baths, there were tables with medical tools. Doctors worked there. Real doctors with diplomas, with education.
They wore white coats and sterile gloves. They were recording data in thick logs. They measured body temperature before and after diving. They recorded the time during which the human lost consciousness. They checked how long the heart continues to struggle in the icy water. They did all this calmly, methodically, with scientific interest.
They looked at us the way biologists look at laboratory rats. The first time I was forced to walk into that bathtub, I thought I was going to die instantly. We were stripped naked. Olya stood next to me, trembling all over. Her teeth were chattering so loudly that I heard the sound. We held hands. “Tanya, I’m afraid,” she whispered.
“Me too,” I answered. The kicker pushed me in the back. “Get in quickly.” I came up to the edge of the bath. The water was black. I saw pieces of ice floating on the surface like shards of a broken mirror. I lowered my leg. At that very moment, the pain pierced me from my feet to the top of my head. It was not just pain; it was shock, damage to every cell of the body.
I screamed and couldn’t help myself. Everyone shouted. The icy water burned my skin like boiling water. I sank into the water up to my waist, then up to the chest. My heart started beating madly, somewhere in the throat, as if a caught bird was desperately beating against a cage. And then it started to slow down. Breathing became superficial and intermittent.
I was suffocating, although there was enough air. My hands stopped obeying. I tried to move my fingers, but they didn’t move. My skin first became red, then purple, then gray. The doctors stood nearby. One of them timed on a stopwatch; another wrote something down in a notepad. A third came closer, leaned over me, shined a small flashlight in my eyes, checking the reaction of the pupils.
He talked to my colleague in German, in a calm, businesslike tone, as if discussing the weather. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the intonation. For them, I was not human. I was an object of research, material for an experiment. We had to sit in the water for 15 minutes. 15 minutes that lasted forever.
I looked at Olya in the next bath. Her lips turned blue, her eyes glazed over, looking into one point without blinking. She whispered the names of her children: “Vanechka, Mashenka, mom will come back, mom will definitely come back.” Her voice became quieter, weaker. Then her jaw tightened in a cramp, and she could no longer talk.
At the tenth minute, Olya lost consciousness. Her head fell back, hitting the cast iron edge of the bathtub with a dull sound. The doctor came over, checked the pulse in her neck, and shook his head indifferently. He nodded to two orderlies. They approached, rudely grabbed Olya by the hands, and pulled her out of the water. Her body was lifeless, gray, covered in goosebumps.
They threw her on the floor, in the corner of the barracks, like a wet rag. Water flowed from her hair, forming a puddle. I screamed. I called her name, but no one listened. When the 15 minutes were up, I was pulled out too. I couldn’t stand. My legs gave way. They threw me on the floor nearby Olya.
I was shaking so hard that I couldn’t control my body. Teeth pounded, muscles cramped. They gave me a thin rag, which they called a towel. I tried to dry myself, but my hands wouldn’t obey. I crawled up to Olya. I shook her by the shoulder. “Olya, Olya, wake up.” She didn’t answer. I put my ear to her chest. The heart didn’t beat.
Olya died. My friend who saved my life twice, who shared the last piece of bread with me, who dreamed of returning to her children. She died in this icy water for the sake of German science, so that SS officers could write down in your logs how many minutes a Soviet woman can last in water at a temperature of 2° Celsius.
I didn’t cry. Tears froze somewhere inside me. I just looked at her face, her closed eyes, her blue lips. And I swore to myself: “I will survive. I will live to tell the tale to Vanechka and Mashenka, who will never find out how their mother died. I will survive because someone has to remember.” After Olya’s death, something broke in me—or, on the contrary, it hardened, turned into stone. I stopped being afraid.
Fear requires hope, but I didn’t have it anymore. I went to these sessions in the ice barracks every day, sometimes twice a day. I was immersed in icy water, they spotted the time, recorded data, pulled me out half-dead and threw me to the floor. I was shaking, I lost consciousness, I came to my senses, and I realized that I was still alive.
Why? Why me? Why didn’t I lie in the corner with my heart stopped, like the other woman whose name I didn’t even know? There was one soldier among the guards, young, just a boy. He was probably about 19 years old, no more. Light hair, blue eyes, in which that dead emptiness had not yet frozen like the other Germans. I didn’t know his name.
Maybe Hans, maybe Fritz, maybe Peter. What’s the difference? He was the enemy. He wore an SS uniform. He served the death machine, but he looked at us differently. There was something in his gaze I haven’t seen in others: doubts, the shadow of humanity. He stood aside while we were driven into the baths.
He turned away when they pulled out dead bodies. He smoked looking out the window, as if trying not to see what was happening around. One day, when I sat in the bath, shaking so hard that the water around me swayed, this young soldier came closer. Obersturmführer Weber went out to smoke. The doctors were busy with another patient.
The soldier looked around. He quickly took out from the pocket of his overcoat a small piece of sugar and handed it to me. I looked at him, not understanding. Sugar? Here? Now? He looked back again and shoved the sugar into my mouth. I felt the sweetness on my tongue. A sweetness that I haven’t felt for more than a year.
Tears flowed down my cheeks, mixing with the ice water. He leaned over and whispered something in German. I didn’t know the language, but the intonation was understandable. “Sorry,” or “hold on,” or just “I’m sorry.” Then he quickly walked away and stood up to his place against the wall, lit a cigarette, as if nothing happened.
This sugar cube, dirty with tobacco crumbs, was the most precious gift that I ever received. He reminded me that somewhere, even here in this hell, maybe humanity exists. Weeks went by, maybe months. I lost count of time. The days merged into one endless torture: cold, hunger, pain. I’ve seen women die one after another.
I remembered their faces although I didn’t know their names. There was a young Ukrainian with huge brown eyes who died on the seventh dive. There was an elderly Belarusian woman who prayed before each session and died whispering a prayer. There was a pregnant woman; I didn’t know how she got into the camp in the first place. They forced her to enter the water, despite her belly. She screamed, she begged, she held on over the edge of the bath.
They tore off her hands and pushed her into the water. Three days later, she gave birth to a dead child right on the floor of the barracks. She herself was found dead the next morning. I saw it all. I was a witness, and I couldn’t do anything but survive. Survive and remember. In the spring of 1944, everything changed. We felt it.
The Germans became nervous and twitchy. We heard the distant roar of guns. The Red Army was advancing; the front was approaching. The Germans began to evacuate the camp, destroy traces of crimes, and burn documents. And they did a great selection. It was a May day, cold, gray. The sky was overcast. We were all lined up on the parade ground. All the women of the camp—those who still could stand on their feet, and those who were held by others because they themselves no longer could.
There were maybe 300 of us. Skeletons covered with skin, with shaved heads in dirty striped robes. We stood and waited; no one spoke. Only the wind rustled in the prickly wire. A tall SS officer appeared. I didn’t know his name. He was in a perfect uniform, in polished boots, with a cane in hand. The face was stony, cold, like a statue.
He walked slowly along the line, looking at us as if he was inspecting cattle before slaughter. Sometimes he stopped, bowed his head, squinted as if he was solving a difficult task. Then he pointed his cane to the left or right. Left to the gate, where there were trucks; to the right, back to the barracks. We didn’t know what these two sides meant, but instinct prompted: one is life, the other is death.
Just which one? Women who were sent to the left started crying, fell to their knees, and begged. One Pole with gray hair fell in front of the officer, grabbing his boots. “Bitte, bitte… I have children.” He didn’t even look; he waved his hand at her. Two guards grabbed her by the arms and dragged her to the trucks. She screamed.
Then one of the guards hit her with the butt of the gun on the back of the head. She fell silent. Her lifeless body was thrown into the back like a sack. When my turn came, I didn’t stand trembling. I looked straight ahead. I didn’t pray, I didn’t expect anything. The officer stopped in front of me.
He took a long time. He watched for too long. His gray eyes studied my face. My sunken cheeks, my thin arms, my trembling legs. I saw how he thinks, evaluates, decides: am I worth something or am I just trash that needs to be thrown away? My legs were shaking not from the cold, but from fear—deep, primitive fear of death, which lived in me no matter what.
I wanted to live. God, how I wanted to live. The officer raised his cane. Slowly. The world stopped. I stopped breathing. And here I saw him, that young soldier. He stood behind the officer, holding a folder with documents. Our eyes met. One moment. He made a barely noticeable movement with his head. Right.
Just a little bit, but I saw it. And the officer saw it too, although maybe he didn’t realize it. He lowered the cane and pointed to the right. Right. I didn’t understand right away. The guard pushed me in the shoulder. “Go.” I went right. My legs gave way, but I kept going. I looked back and I saw that soldier again. He looked at me.
He nodded slightly, simply nodded and turned away. We, those who were sent to the right, turned out to be about 50 people. The rest, more than 200 women, were driven to the trucks—high, covered trucks that looked like moving coffins. Women screaming, clinging to doors, begging. They were beaten, pushed, thrown into the back. One old woman grabbed the doorframe.
The guard crushed her fingers with the butt of his gun. She fell. She was thrown inside on top of the others. The doors slammed shut with a metallic clang. The sound that I still hear. The sound of closing graves. The trucks left. We have never seen these women again. Later, after the war, I found out they were taken to Ravensbrück, an extermination camp for women.
Most died there within 3 months. I stayed in the camp. We 50 returned to the barracks. But everything had changed. The experiments stopped. The Germans were too busy evacuating. We heard the roar of guns getting closer and closer. Every night the sky in the east was glowing orange. The Red Army was marching.
We knew this. And the Germans knew. They started to panic, burn documents, shoot witnesses, prepare for escape. In August 1944, chaos reached its peak. There were fewer security guards; the barracks were empty. One morning we woke up and no one came for roll call. The gate was open—just open.
Me and three other women ran out. We ran through the forest without looking back. We ran for 2 days without food, without water. We drank from puddles, ate grass, tree bark. We followed the sound of guns because the Red Army was there. There was freedom. When we got out on the road and saw a Soviet tank with a red star, I fell to my knees and cried.
For the first time in 2 years. A Red Army soldier, a young boy with a scar on his cheek, jumped off the armor, threw his overcoat over me, and extended a flask with water. “Hold on, little sister, you are at home. You’re safe.” I drank the water and it seemed sweeter than wine. I thought: “That’s it. It’s over, it’s all over, I’m free.”
How naive I was. We were not taken home. We were taken to an NKVD filtration camp, a special camp for those who had been in captivity or occupied territories. We were suspected of treason, betrayal of the motherland, and collaboration with the enemy. I was interrogated for 4 months each day.
The same question: “How have you survived?” The investigator, an NKVD lieutenant with eyes red from insomnia and fingers yellow from tobacco, yelled at me, hit the table with his fist. “They killed everyone, and you are alive. Why? What did you pay for your life? You slept with them, worked for the Gestapo, betrayed your own comrades?” I talked about the baths, about the ice, about the experiments, about Olya. He laughed.
“Are you making this up? The Germans wouldn’t waste their time on such nonsense. You just slept with the Nazis to survive.” He forced me to write explanatory notes, dozens of pages. Over and over again, every day the same. I wrote until my hand went numb. I wrote the truth, but no one needed the truth.
They needed guilt. They needed to show that all those who were captured are traitors. Otherwise, how to explain that Soviet people were captured by the millions? They didn’t shoot me, they didn’t put me in jail; I was lucky. They let me go, but with a “wolf’s ticket.” There was a mark in my documents. It closed all doors for me.
I was banned from living in big cities, banned from studying at the institute, banned from working for government enterprises. I returned to the village in burned Krasny Bor. There was no home. My parents were dead, my brother missing. I was completely alone. I lived with a distant aunt who took me out of pity. She was afraid of me.
She was afraid that I would bring trouble to her house, that they would come for me. She forbade me to tell anyone where I was. “Be silent, forget, otherwise we will all be arrested.” I was silent. I got married in 1947 to a tractor driver named Ivan. He was a good man, quiet, hard-working. He knew that I was in captivity but didn’t ask for details. We had three sons.
I raised them, fed them, taught them. But I never sang lullabies to them. My voice remained there, in the icy water. All my life I lived with caution. I was afraid of a knock on the door at night. I was afraid that they would come to me, arrest me, send me to Siberia. I haven’t watched films about the war. When the parades were shown on TV, speeches about heroes, I went to another room because my war was different.
There was no heroism in my war, no victories, no orders. There was only black icy water, the smell of death and fear. Fear of your own people. My husband died in 1985. Heart failure. The sons left. I stayed alone. And then the silence became unbearable. It suffocated me more than the ice water. I’ve been wearing this for 70 years inside.
For 70 years I kept the memory of pain, about those women whose names I didn’t know, but whose faces I still remember. In 2010, a historian came to me, a young man from Moscow. He collected evidence of the camps. He asked me to tell him. I refused for a long time, then I agreed, because I realized that if I die without saying anything, they will die with me. Olya, Zinaida, Vera, all those women.
And oblivion will win. And oblivion is what the killers wanted. I told my story in March 2010, exactly 66 years after I got to that camp. I was 86 years old. My hands were shaking, my voice lost its temper. But I told you; I told you about the baths, about the cold, about Olya’s death, and I cried.
For the first time in decades, strangely, I didn’t collapse; I felt freed. As if by telling, I lifted a burden from myself which I’ve been carrying all my life. I’m 94 now. I know I’ll die soon, but now I can leave in peace because my history is recorded. Olya’s voice, the voice of those women, is no longer silent. Did you hear him? You have found out the truth.
I’m thinking about that German soldier. Was he a kind person? No. He was part of the death machine. But the second you gave me sugar, a person woke up in him. And I think about the Soviet lieutenant who interrogated me—whether he was a villain. He sincerely believed that he was defending his homeland. War breaks everyone.
It erases the boundaries between good and evil. It makes executioners of heroes and heroes of victims. I told you this story so that you knew. War is not about parades and feats; it is cold, pain, death, and betrayal. And the worst thing is not to die. The scariest thing is to survive and be rejected by your own.
Remember Olya? Remember her children Vanya and Mashenka, who never found out how their mother died? Remember all those women who were turned into ice for mad science? My story is a drop in the ocean of tears, but this drop will no longer disappear without a trace. I said: “Now I can leave in peace.”
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