Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [7]
During the spring of 1943, Valentin and Zoya were abducted by SS guards and herded onto a ‘children’s train’ for deportation to Germany. They were taken first to Gdansk, in Poland, where they worked in adjoining labour camps. ‘I had to do the washing for hundreds of Germans each week,’ Zoya says. ‘We lived as best we could, but they were the proprietors and we were the slaves. They could have done anything they liked to us – killed us, or let us live. We were worn down with fear all the time, and we looked like ragged Cinderellas, all skin and bone, with our elbows sticking out. We had no shoes, and occasionally found soldier’s boots that were too big for us . . . The Germans put us in ruined houses after they’d expelled the people already living in them.’ Zoya does not like to dwell on her experiences as a 15-year-old girl hauled away by enemies.
In the chaos of the Germans’ long retreat from Russia, the SS use of trains for prisoners was considered something of a luxury by the ordinary troops. The ‘children’s trains’ running through Poland were commandeered or otherwise diverted from their original course. Valentin and Zoya escaped their camps and spent two weeks hiding in the woods, waiting for Russian troops to rescue them. ‘When they actually came, we hoped they would let us go home,’ Zoya recalls, ‘but they said we must stay with the Russian army as volunteers.’ Zoya was sent to look after horses in a cavalry brigade and, by a bitter stroke of irony, followed them deep into Germany, where the children’s train was supposed to have taken her in the first place. By now, Valentin was considered old enough for front-line service. He quickly learned how to handle an anti-tank grenade launcher and other heavy weapons.
Meanwhile, Alexei and Anna Gagarin thought their two eldest children were dead. Alexei, never a very fit man, was ulcerated with grief and hunger, and was seriously injured when the Germans beat him up when he refused to work for them. He spent the rest of the war in a crude hospital, first as a patient, then as an orderly. Anna spent some time there too, with her left leg badly gashed after a German sergeant, ‘Bruno’, had flailed at her with a scythe. Yuri threw clods of earth in Bruno’s eyes to drive him away.
The Germans were driven out of Klushino at last on March 9, 1944. Alexei, limping but defiant, showed the incoming Russian forces where the fleeing Nazis had buried mines in the surrounding roads and dirt tracks. Anna recovered from her wound, and struggled to look after Boris and Yuri, although there was almost no food of any kind to be had. Only towards the end of 1945 did she discover that Valentin and Zoya were still alive. They came home at last, grown-up now.
Lydia Obukhova, a writer who came to know the Gagarins well during the 1960s, commented in 1978:
Valentin was still a boy, and Zoya was a young and charming lass, defenceless in the face of misfortunes that might befall her far from home. Her mother’s grief was boundless, but her husband said to her, ‘Remember, Boris and Yuri still need you.’ You’d have thought the war, the occupation, the fearful Germans billeted in the Gagarins’ home, would have mutilated for ever those children’s personalities, but their mother and father did everything to prevent this. They never showed even a trace of servility to the enemy. It follows that the children showed none either.2
After the war, the Gagarins moved to nearby Gzhatsk and built a simple new home, using the slats and beams from the wreckage of their old house as raw material. The original house had been very modest anyway, consisting only of a kitchen and two small adjoining rooms. ‘Of course life was hard after the war,’ Zoya explains. ‘Everything from Brest up to Moscow was completely destroyed, all the