Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page A

They were assigned to dormitories according to age. Lenina was given a cot beside her sister's bed in the hospital dormitory, down the corridor from the others. The nurses and supervisors confiscated the Spanish children's shoes and dolls and took them for their own children. Lenina still dreams about the way the Spanish kids cried without their beloved toys, their last physical reminder of home. All night, they cried out 'Mamá'.
     
    As the shock of their arrest and imprisonment faded, Verkhne-Dneprovsk turned out to be a relatively happy place. They had food, and the teachers were kind. In her first days at the orphanage, Lyudmila tried to cool her burning fever by burying her legs in damp sand in a sandpit, Within weeks, her measles were cured, but it was discovered that she had caught tuberculosis of the bones, which spread rapidly due to her weakened immune system.
    Lenina came to see her little sister at the local hospital's infection ward every day after school. Lyudmila would stand on a chair and lean out of the window and wave and talk. One day when Lenina came to visit, she found Lyudmila red-eyed and silent. Her little Spanish friend Juan, 'Juanchik', who slept in the bed next to her had been taken away in the night, and no one would tell her where he had gone. The nurse told Lenina that Juan had died of tuberculosis. One by one, every one of the eighteen children who had been in the ward when Lyudmila was admitted died. My mother was the only child to survive.
    Lenina couldn't write to her relatives in Moscow because she couldn't remember their address; even if she had, there was little chance that they would risk saving the children of an enemy of the people. She did write to their aunt Feodosia in Simferopol, but she didn't come for them. Feodosia did, however, send news of her sister Martha. She had been sent to a place called Kazakhstan, Feodosia explained to her young niece, to a prison camp called KarLag. Her address was a post box number. Lenina would walk three miles each day from the orphanage to the local school, and in her free time scrubbed floors for her teachers in exchange for onions, small pieces of smoked pig-fat, sugar and apples. She would take the sugar and apples to Lyudmila in the hospital, but she saved the onions. When Lenina had collected ten onions, she made them into a small parcel. She addressed the brown paper package carefully to the numbered post box in Kazakhstan, did more chores to pay for the stamps, and posted it from the orphanage. Months later, she got a letter back from Martha. She thanked her daughter for the parcel, but told her she was a 'fool' not to have wrapped the onions individually in paper. As it was, they had arrived frozen and spoiled, Martha complained. Nevertheless, she asked after Lyudmila and wished her daughters well. She promised to be back to collect them soon. It was the last Lenina was to hear from her mother until after the war.
     
    My mother doesn't remember having any toys as a child, apart from a teddy bear she'd brought from Chernigov, which she lost in the children's prison. The doll in the photograph taken at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was a photographer's prop. Lenina remembers Lyudmila crying when she was told she couldn't keep it after the picture was taken.
    Lyudmila had a passion for drawing, but never, as she put it, 'had any talent'. Despite her illness, she learned to read very early and soon was passing the long, lonely days in hospital reading books from the orphanage library. Books, and the wonderful worlds the words contained, took the place of friends. It was during the many months of enforced idleness in hospital which punctuated her childhood that she learned to live a fantasy life, constructed in her own lively mind. The mysterious, brooding forests of Pushkin's stories, the magic carpet rides above the sleeping houses of Baghdad in the Arabian Nights, the fabulous monsters encountered by Sinbad the Sailor, and the high-stepping horsemen and