And this is my grandmother. Bottom left.
She made it all the way to Berlin and even signed her name on the Reichstag. And to her right is her comrade-in-arms—some very famous lady, apparently. Lidiya Spivak. They even made a film about her called *The Mistress of the Brandenburg Gate*. When I was a kid, I was always asking my grandmother how many Germans she had personally killed with a rifle. And I was terribly upset when she said not a single one. What the hell was the point of going to war if they didn’t even let you shoot at Germans? She was a military traffic controller. Her main memory of it: it was terrifying. They’d drop you somewhere in the woods at a crossroads and say, “Wait for the vehicles and send these ones left and those ones right.” So you sit there and wait. You have no idea whether the people coming out of the forest will be ours or the Germans. There’s booming and crashing everywhere, and after a while you can’t even tell which side of you the front line is on, or whether anyone is coming to pick you up at all. She was mobilized because she knew German—she was a teacher. She served as a traffic controller, but just yesterday I found a note in her Red Army service booklet saying that she had been awarded the badge “Excellent Cook.” While she was alive, every May 9 we used to go to Gorky Park (a famous park in Moscow)—to look for her fellow servicemen and women. It always really annoyed me that the old veterans were forever either crying or laughing or muttering some nonsense, and you could never get any normal, human stories out of them—about shooting at Germans with a rifle, or blowing up an enemy train, or taking a prisoner for interrogation.
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