Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [5]
At his side, the boy Yuri learned to tell the difference between pine and oak, maple and birch, just by the touch and smell of the wood. Even in the dark he could tell. His first experiences of materials, machinery and the technical possibilities of the world around him were bound up with wood shavings and the smooth feel of a good piece of carving; his early taste for precision, with his father’s chisels, planes and saws.
Everything changed in the summer of 1941, when German divisions attacked the Soviet Union along a 3,000-kilometre front, making rapid advances against the Red Army. After several weeks of stunned inertia, Stalin’s response was to order his divisions to pull back at each encounter, drawing the Germans so deep into Soviet territory that (like Napoleon before them) they were caught off-guard by the first Russian winter. The brief summer of Nazi success was followed, in essence, by a two-year retreat, with appalling casualties on both sides. The Smolensk region lay directly in the Nazis’ retreating path. Gzhatsk and all its outlying villages, including Klushino, were overrun and occupied.
At the end of October 1942, German artillery units began to fire on Klushino. ‘The front line was only six kilometres away, and shells were falling into our village every day,’ Valentin recalls. ‘The Germans must have thought the mill was a dangerous landmark, so they blew it up, along with the church. An hour later our own side launched an artillery attack in reply. It was all so pointless, because everybody must have had the same landmarks drawn on their maps.’
Soon after this barrage, four armoured German columns passed right through the village. There was a terrible battle in the surrounding woodlands, resulting in heavy casualties for both sides, but the Russian troops came off worst, with at least 250 dead or wounded. Two days after the fighting had subsided, the older Gagarin boys, Valentin and Yuri, sneaked into the woods to see what had happened. ‘We saw a Russian colonel, badly wounded but still breathing after lying where he fell for two days and nights,’ Valentin explains. ‘The German officers went to where he was lying, in a bush, and he pretended to be blind. Some high-ranking officers tried to ask him questions, and he replied that he couldn’t hear them very well, and asked them to lean down closer. So they came closer and bent right over him, and then he blew a grenade he’d hidden behind his back. No one survived.’
Valentin remembers Yuri’s rapid transformation after this from a grinning little imp to a serious-minded boy, going down into the cellar to find bread, potatoes, milk and vegetables, and distributing them to refugees from other districts who were trudging through the village to escape the Germans. ‘He smiled less frequently in those years, even though he was by nature a very happy child. I remember he seldom cried out at pain, or about all the terrible things around us. I think he only cried if his self-respect was hurt . . . Many of the traits of character that suited him in later years as a pilot and cosmonaut all developed around that time, during the war.’
Now the familiar tragedy of occupation came to Klushino: men in drab uniforms bashing down doors, dragging people away to be shot. If the need arose to preserve ammunition, they gouged at people with their bayonets or herded them into sheds and burned them alive, until the aggressors were broken in turn by their own misery, and ultimately by the cruel Russian winter and the unforgiving vastness of the landscape.
One particularly nasty piece of work, a red-haired Bavarian called ‘Albert’, collected the German vehicles’ flat batteries in order to replenish them with acid and purified water, and also fixed radios or other pieces of equipment for the big Panzer battle tanks. Albert took an immediate dislike to the Gagarin boys because of their use of broken glass. The village children did what they could,