Blockade: “The Lord allowed me to rise again”
—Has the Mother of God shown a miracle in your life?
- Miracle?! I am not worthy... It was a miracle that I remained alive, the Lord and the Mother of God helped me. I was already in the morgue, and everyone thought that I had died. The blockade is a terrible time, this happened all around! One day my mother’s friend came. And on our chest of drawers were bread cards (for each one we were given 125 grams of bread). She took them. There is one card left for everyone. This knocked us down. Dad is dead. Mom couldn’t even get up, and he lay in the hallway for almost a week - everyone in the apartment died out, there was no one to take him out.
I, the eldest of the children, went for water and bread. Once, while the bread was being weighed, an adult man grabbed it through me, others began to pinch off a piece from him, and so they ate it all. And soldiers lived in our house. They saw that I was returning without bread and crying. And one of the basement beckons to me: “Why are you crying?” I answer: “They took the bread off my scale!” And he gave me a few pieces of his.
Then we were evacuated along the “road of life” across Lake Ladoga. In Orekhovo-Zuevo, my mother handed me and Ninochka, my younger sister, over to the doctors. They took me unconscious to the morgue. I only woke up in the hospital. And Ninochka remained there lying in mass graves.
- Who noticed that you were alive?
- Doctors, probably. Orderlies entered our train at each station, because the mortality rate began to be higher than in Leningrad. On the way to the train, local residents came, brought food, wanted to help, hungry people pounced on bread, and their bodies could not stand it. People were carried out of the carriages half-dead and checked.
The Lord gave me to “resurrect.” The frostbitten toes on my right leg were amputated. I spent three months in Orekhovo-Zuevo. And then one day the head physician came into our department: “Tomorrow morning we are discharging 40 people.” I cried: it’s unknown where they’ll take me! But I want to go to my mother, where she is, I don’t know. And here is the providence of God: in the evening the duty officer brought an envelope addressed to the head physician from her mother. In the letter she asked if such and such a girl was alive, and the return address was indicated: Krasnodar Territory, Tikhoretskaya (either a village, or a station).
The next day I was sent by train, entrusted to the conductor, to my mother. I passed my station. They brought me to Krasnodar and put me in a children's room, fed me, and put me to bed. In the morning they put me on the train again, and again I passed the station, can you imagine?
- How could a small child endure all this?!
- And like this. It’s already May, it’s warm outside, but I’m wearing all my winter clothes, it’s hot, my leg hurts, I’m limping. And now there was a third attempt, already successful. I was put into the carriage again and assigned to the conductor. Everyone came up to me and asked questions (they felt sorry for us Leningraders and brought us food). And then one woman reads my note with the address: “And I’m just going there! My sister lives there.” The conductor was so happy!
We got out of the carriage and rode a horse to the house of my fellow traveler’s sister. They gave me a snack and laid me out on the floor. I lay down completely exhausted and dozed off. I woke up from a noise, it seemed to me that something was falling on me. I open my eyes, my mother is in front of me. It turned out that my mother was settled next to that woman. That's how providential everything was! Such joy, such a meeting!
But the joy quickly ended - the Germans entered Tikhoretskaya. Many went to Germany, where they were promised an apartment and a pretty penny. Soon our partisans surrounded the village and entered not from the side from which the Germans were waiting, but from the other. The Germans retreated. But then a typhus epidemic began, during which my mother fell ill and died at the age of 35. Lidochka and I were left alone. Mom had 7 sisters. They were informed. First, we were brought to Valdai to one of the aunts. But there was a war going on, it was hard to support the two of us, so they sent me to an orphanage. True, I did not stay there long, and in 1944 I returned to Leningrad.
Pyukhtitsa
— How many sisters were there in Pyukhtitsa when you entered in 1949?
- About fifty. All are old. I was the youngest cell attendant with Mother Rafaila (and the eldest was her niece).
The sisters then did everything by hand: they mowed, harrowed, plowed, prepared firewood for the winter (for the kitchen, and the bakery, and the abbot’s room, and the temple, and the almshouse, and the cells). They returned from the forest with “covens” that they dragged on themselves. And sometimes they gave us a horse to carry firewood for government places, and then we could put our fur on the horse. You know how good it was!
The representatives commanded as they wished. One day they decided that we, I don’t remember how many cubic meters, but a lot, should prepare for the state. Can you imagine?! Spruce and pine trees were cut by hand. And then, I remember how a huge tree began to fall on me. The sisters ran away, shouting: “Valentina remained under the tree!” I was still Valentina, and just the next day I was supposed to be tonsured into a cassock, what a temptation! They run, I’m in the snow, I get up, thank God! They were afraid that I was being crushed.
I come home and there’s a car parked at the abbot’s, although we weren’t expecting anyone! And this was the governor, Father Pimen (the future Patriarch, a very talented person, a poet!). And mother’s niece says: “Valya, go quickly, Father Pimen has arrived, we need to serve dinner.” I ran out of the cold, flushed, entered the dining room, and approached for a blessing. He: “Why are you, Valentina, so pink?” And mother said: “Father Pimen, pray! We thank the Mother of God, we sawed wood for the official places. And the commissioner ordered so many more cubic meters to be handed over to the state.” Father Pimen was surprised: does the state have so many cubes?! After lunch, he says: “I’ll be gone for a while.” And he left for Tallinn. There he met with the commissioner and told him everything about the work the sisters were doing in Pyukhtitsa.
He returns: “Mother, bless all the sisters to stand at the Liturgy tomorrow. We must thank the Queen of Heaven.” The mass ended, everyone approached the miraculous icon, and he turned to us: “Sisters, thank the Queen of Heaven, all standards have been lifted from you!” We fell to our knees before the Mother of God.
