“She’s over there!” Ann says pointing in the direction of the fountain.
“Who?” I ask.
“The lady in the red dress,” she answers over her shoulder as she hurries forward, reaching into her tote bag for a bar of chocolate.
“Yea! She’s still alive,” I whisper to myself, always hopeful, but never sure that we will find her each year when we return to Gorky Park for the Victory Day celebration.
A patch of dyed reddish-brown hair, the hem of a flag-red dress and matching patent leather flats are the only parts that peek through the circle of people surrounding her. I hurry to join them. She hasn’t changed much, only slightly thinner in the face, but the same straight-backed posture, lift of the chin and firm handshake, all signifying that this is one tough lady. She’s wearing the same knee-length, long-sleeved, pointed collared dress she’s worn the previous four years we’ve seen her. Belted at the waist and buttoned up the front, it serves its purpose as the blank canvas to show off row after row after row of gold. Dazzling! Impressive! WOW! There must be at least 40 medals, half of which are round and range in size from U.S. quarters to half dollars, pinned in place by red and gold ribbons. Others are stars, dangling from pendants, broaches with starburst centers, wreaths, hammers and cycles, and a couple of pictures of stern-faced military men, all with indecipherable inscriptions (to me), in Cyrillic, heralding their significance.
Lyudmila is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, a title that strangely sounds loftier and less calculating than what non-Russians call it, World War II. With the end of the war now 65 years behind them, the number of veterans returning to Gorky Park, and other parks around Moscow each May 9th, is dwindling as age takes lives that the war spared. For one day every year, they are treated as heroes and heroines, not by the president, marching soldiers and blaring military music on Red Square, but by children and adults, quietly and thankfully, one red carnation and chocolate bar at a time.
Questioned about her medals, Lyudmila, points to one on the left side of her chest as she shakes her head and repeats in an increasingly vehement voice, “Nyet St. Petersburg! Leningrad, Leningrad!” Our friend, Andrei, translates as she continues her indignant narrative. “They gave her a medal with St. Petersburg written on it, but she didn’t want it. She insists that the city should still be Leningrad, not St. Petersburg. She was a nurse there during the 900-day siege.” When I venture to ask her to tell us something of that time, she says only, through Andrei’s translation, “no food, no food.” Approximately 650,000 people died.
Andrei nods and pulls out a picture of his father, Gennadi, who served on the Karelian front, close to Leningrad. During Andrei’s childhood, his father told him the story of when his platoon was given one loaf of bread per day for each eight people. The denser end pieces were the most prized, so the commander cut the loaf into eight pieces, held one piece from the middle of the loaf and one from the end behind his back, then asked the soldiers, “Who wants to choose first?” Andrei’s father said that when the Germans learned about the shortage of food on the front, they started teasing the Soviet soldiers, holding up loaves of bread from their trenches, yelling, ”Russian! Who wants to choose? In which hand do I have a piece of bread?”
On this sunny day filled with balloons, music, eating, drinking and laughter, stories of death, starvation and inhumanity have a Once Upon a Time quality, so incomprehensible in reality that they just couldn’t be true. The Truth confronts us, though, as we greet the men and women who lived them, whose children re-tell their experiences. And for those of us fortunate enough to hear, we must pass them on.
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