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By Root 449 0

smashing bottles and scattering the bright shards of glass along the roads and dirt tracks, then hiding in the hedges to watch the German supply trucks swerving out of control as their tyres burst. Albert became convinced that Boris was one of these child-saboteurs. He came across the boy playing with Yuri, and sat down on a nearby bench to watch them. After a while he offered Boris some chocolate, putting it on the ground so that when the boy reached for it, he could stamp on his fingers. ‘The skin came right off his fingers, so of course Boris cried out,’ says Valentin. ‘Then the Devil took him – we always called him the Devil – and hanged him by his scarf on the branch of an apple tree. Mother came and found the Devil taking pictures with his camera. It’s difficult to talk about . . .’ Anna scuffled with the German, and at one point he picked up his rifle. For a terrible moment it seemed as if he was ready to shoot, but by some miracle one of his superiors shouted to him to come away. Fortunately, the Devil’s work had been sloppy, and a child’s woollen scarf did not make a very effective noose. Once Albert was safely out of the way, Anna and Alexei released Boris from the apple tree.

Albert and his fellow soldiers had thrown the Gagarins out of their home, and the family had been forced to dig for themselves a crude shelter in the ground. Here they carried Boris’s limp body, and by sheer force of will and desperation they brought their throttled child back to life. ‘Boris stayed in the dug-out for a week, terrified to go out,’ says Valentin. He also remembers that Albert came across a rare Gagarin family luxury in the house, a wind-up gramophone, and played a particular record time and again, hoping to taunt the Gagarin family as they huddled in their rough shelter. ‘He would open the window of our house and play the military march “Red Army Advance” as loud as he could. Obviously he didn’t know what it was.’

In the days after the terrifying drama by the apple tree, Yuri began a ceaseless vigil, watching for the times when Albert would leave the house. Whenever it was safe, he crept over to the Germans’ precious pile of tank batteries and dropped handfuls of dry soil into the accumulator caps to ruin them, or muddled up the chemical replenishment stocks, pouring them willy-nilly into the wrong compartments. Albert and his companions would get back to find their batteries looking perfectly normal, and patrolling tank drivers would arrive in the mornings to pick them up. They would shake Albert’s hand, make their Nazi salutes and be on their way, but at evenfall they would return, furious that Albert had given them dead batteries. Most of the tank commanders were SS officers, so their displeasure was a very serious business for everyone, German and Russian alike. ‘They were very hard to pacify,’ Valentin recalls drily.

Humiliated by the anger of the SS officers, Albert went on the rampage, searching the village for Yuri, but he had to hunt on foot because his child-nemesis had shoved potatoes deep into the exhaust pipe of his military car, so that it would not start. The Devil stormed his way into all the dug-outs, threatening to shoot Yuri on sight. Perhaps the German commanders were impatient with Albert’s dead batteries by now, because they called him away from the district before he could finish the boy off once and for all.

Valentin was placed in a work detail by the Germans, along with eight other lads. ‘The rules were very simple. You started work at eight in the morning, and then you could die, or else you worked until they said to finish. Even if you were halfway through chopping a tree and it was about to fall on your head, you had to stop the instant they told you, or else you’d feel a stick or a rifle butt.’ As the Germans began to dig in for the winter, pretty much trying to survive, like the villagers, occasional confusions developed as to who was the enemy, who the aggressor. There was one particularly large communal dug-out, capable of supporting three or four hundred people, but whether this was a German