Free Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan Page A

were large and cumbersome and they took nearly a day to make the trip across the lake. The Germans picked them off one by one. What the Germans did not get, the autumn storms pitched into the lake. When the lake froze, trucks would roll across the ice, trucks loaded with food. That hope kept us alive.

CHAPTER EIGHT
ALONE
    November 1941
    November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, had always been a big holiday in the Soviet Union. Stores were closed and there were parades and dancing. This year there was no celebration. Here and there a tattered red flag was put out, but most of the stores were already closed, and no one had the strength for parades or dancing.
    In our home the holiday had never been celebrated. Mama thought it should be a day of mourning. “It was the day they made the whole country a prison,” she said, “and made us all prisoners.”
    On this November 7 Mama was quiet when she came home from the hospital. “The hunger is hard on the older people,” she said. “They are so weakened, the least little cold or flu and they slip away. We have no heat in the hospital, and there is nothing to do but to pile heavy blankets on the patients, and with their thin bodies they almost smother. And Georgi, one of the doctors in the research laboratory said today that all the guinea pigs were gone.”
    She looked at me. We both knew where they had gone—into someone’s pot. There were no cats or dogs on the streets. There was no food to give to them, and if you could find a scrap for your beloved pet to keep him alive, you did not dare to let him out onto the streets, where he would look like a banquet to some starving person.
    Our apartment was always cold. There was little water for the luxury of washing. If you washed your hands, you saved the water for the next person. I felt dirty all the time. One morning I saw a womankneeling on the ice around a well, doing her washing in freezing water.
    The toilets didn’t flush, and if you didn’t empty the chamber pots at once, the pots froze and then you were in a pickle. And where to empty the pots? Thousands of pots were emptied on the streets, so walking was disgusting.
    Every morning I had to get up and take a pail to the well at the end of the street to get our water for the day. I waited in line to get to the well, which was no more than a hole in the ice with water bubbling up. The pail seemed heavier each morning, the walk back to the apartment longer. If water was spilled on the steps, you nearly broke your neck on the ice that formed. One morning I saw an elderly woman just ahead of me with her own pail. It seemed to be too much for her, and she set it down on the sidewalk and stood there for a moment. She was so thin, there was almost no body inside the tattered clothes. I started to go up to her, thinking to carry the pail at least a littledistance for her. Right there before my eyes she slipped to the ground.
    People were passing by, stepping around her. “Help me,” I said, for I was so weak that even her small weight was too much for me to lift. No one stopped. As I bent down over her, trying to move her away from the stream of people, I saw that she was dead. I had never seen a dead person, yet I knew. I was so frightened that some strength flowed into me, and I was able to pull her to the side of the walk.
    When I looked up, someone had taken her pail and was hurrying off with it. Like the others, I went to the well and stood in line to fill my pail. I walked back to the apartment, but all the time I was thinking of the woman. I had never touched a dead person. I knew from Mama’s work at the hospital that thousands were dying of starvation, but those deaths were only sad stories. Now I had touched death, and I was afraid that somehow it would cling to me and I would bring it back with me and give it to someone else. When Igot home I said nothing, but I washed my hands over and over until