We lived in the most beautiful seven-story building in the Moskvoretsky district of Moscow on the seventh floor, in a communal apartment for four families. The house had an elevator, a gas water heater with warm water, a balcony and a bomb shelter under the house. There were five-story buildings around the house, behind the house there were private houses with gardens and livestock. And that is why from the balcony in the distance the stars of the Kremlin were visible.

June 10, 1941 I turned two years old, my brother was eight months old, I was an older sister, big, for life.

And on June 22, our life in Moscow changed dramatically. The war has begun. Dad, who served in the army as a sapper, was left with a special order in Moscow in a barracks position, worked at a factory without coming home. Due to the fear of losing the kids in the evacuation, my mother also stayed in Moscow. Kindergartens did not work. The hardships of the war fell on her.

    In Moscow, the bombing began. Black paper curtains appeared in the room on the window. In the evening, they tried not to light.

    Not far from our house was a laundry factory with a tall pipe. The enemy apparently believed that it was a plant named after Vladimir Ilyich, producing shells for Katyusha, and mercilessly bombed our area.

    On an air raid alert more than once a day we went down to the bomb shelter: my brother was in my mother's arms, and I was on foot. I still remember: 172 steps down, and after lights out 172 steps up. This is two years old! The elevator did not work during the war.

    The entrance to the bomb shelter was closed by a thick iron door with a huge lever, which the man had difficulty turning. It was very scary that they would not let us out of there, they would leave us in the dungeon.

    One of the bombs hit the house, which was facing end to end with our house across the street, and it blew another half of the five-story buildings in parallel with a shock wave. The end wall of the bombed house fell, and I saw squares of exposed rooms with wardrobes and upturned beds. For a two-year-old, it was such a shock that I refused to go to bed, screaming until she was moved to another wall from a terrible butt.

    After the elevator, the water was turned off; my mother and I took water in a column at the end of our house. She is with buckets, and I and the can went up to our seventh floor.

      When we went for water, I often saw women who, on stretched ropes, dragged huge gray scary sausages of air barrage balloons along our house.

      There was no heat either, the geyser was turned off, and along the corridor, huge pipes from the stoves in each room went down to the hood from the geyser along the ceiling.

      When the war began, mother was 32 years old. They brought her a manual sewing machine, and I always saw her inclined to sew camouflage robes, mittens that filled the entire floor of the room instead of toys. Once a week a truck came and took away the stitched. And sometimes my mother and I loaded these bales into our brother’s pram and walked for a long, long time from Roshchinskaya through Serpukhovka to Polyanka to take them.

      For groceries, adults from our apartment took turns driving far beyond Moscow, while we children became common children. We slept together, ate, walked, played. One night on such a trip, a mother was attacked by a hungry pack of dogs. Mom miraculously saved a passing car, blinding the dogs with bright headlights. Mom came home in tears, in a tattered winter coat and wearing a black robe on her coat.

      I cried all the time when she was leaving the city for food.

      We received bread on cards in a certain store, upholding in long lines with adults in any weather, trying for the whole apartment. Once, leaving me alone in the queue for a short while, they ordered me not to forget: “A kilo of five hundred white and two three hundred black”, apparently, for all the neighbors of our apartment. I remember these numbers so far.

      I think that this was already at the end of the war. And it lasted a long four years.

      Another recollection: in the spring of 1942 we were allocated a plant where dad worked, several beds for planting potatoes, and my mother and brother rode on the 3rd tram to the final stop "ZIS Village", and then walked for a long time to Zyuzino to our beds. Only when we moved to a new apartment on Perekopskaya Street in 1965, my mother said that it was here that we planted potatoes in the war.

        And the most vivid impression is VICTORY and VICTORY SALUTES!

        The whole apartment on the balcony - SALUTES! And which! Unceasing! Volleys, volleys, volleys! Lights, lights, lights! And the spotlights: they will either die in vertical racks, or they will be wrapped in a wild whirlwind, and portraits of Stalin and leaders in the sky, and Kremlin stars in the distance! Unforgettable! Hooray! Victory!

        Now I am 80 years old, I am a disabled person of the 2nd group: fears, malnutrition and childhood experiences left their mark, the memory of those years is still alive!

        God forbid anyone survive this again!

        Vishnyakova Vera Vasilievna. Moscow, 2020