10 May 2018
Victory found Mama in a paper sack. I have already written that throughout the hard war years she had to work around the clock, being a teenager. But by the end of the war she was already of age.
In the four-storey building of the post office at Yaroslavsky Station in the city of Moscow during the war they worked 24 hours!!! hungry teenagers, women of all ages and rare men on whom, as they said then, a “reservation” had been placed. And at 4 in the morning on 9 May over all the loudspeakers and speakers this long-awaited word VICTORY was announced.
Yesterday Mama told me: “on all four floors there stood a terrible roar of sobbing! No one could laugh from joy, they only shouted and wept….” Oh, how exhausted they all were!!!
I remembered myself as a little girl. When I cried from my misfortunes, when I had to be treated with those hated mustard plasters, Mama always reminded me of the war: “And how about people in the war? In hunger, in cold, without light and heat? Yes, you feel bad now, you are ill, but you are not alone, I am with you, I support you, and you mustn’t whimper, you must fight for yourself!”