I can still hear my daughter’s screams. Even now, after all these decades, they drown out my own.
The fascists descended on our city and took what little of value we still possessed after the Bolsheviks, including the life of my dear one. I can see them, as if it were only yesterday, cloaked in dusty field-gray uniforms and pushing a cannon into the center of the street until its gaping barrel pointed directly at the hospital where we had sought shelter. Surely they would not open fire on a hospital filled only with wounded and desperate women and children? But these were the same men whose rain of bombs killed tens of thousands and reduced our proud City of Stalin to little more than smoldering ruins.
The impact of the first shell collapsed my legs and, clutching Katerina in my arms, I struggled to breathe through the cloud of concrete dust enveloping us. My ears were ringing and I could not even hear my baby’s screams, I could only see her mouth stretched wide as she waved the bloody stump of her arm. Then her high-pitched shriek resonated through my body, the sound of my heart dying. I prayed for her to stop screaming until she did. Then I prayed for any sound at all to emanate from the limp bundle I cradled in my arms.
A scream tore its way up my throat, but I was denied even this final release as the building collapsed in a roar, crushing my angel and my body together under tons of concrete.
Death magnified, rather than eased, my rage until my screams burst forth shattering the bodies of the hated fascists and my weak countrymen who had allowed the Huns to ravage so much of my homeland.
None have survived my wrath. None shall.
