A bell without a teacher: a home front worker tells how she celebrated her Victory Day

How wonderful that the Great Patriotic War is in the past. The victory was brought closer not only by soldiers and officers, but also by people working in the rear. Thousands of women and children replaced their fathers and brothers in factories and fields. In incredibly difficult conditions, they built new enterprises and restored old ones, provided the front with necessary clothing, food and more... A home front worker told journalists from the Novgorod online newspaper about what that Victory Day was like for her.

Anna Mikhailovna Sharonova is a native of the Tver region. She met the war in her village when she was still a 10-year-old girl. However, the year of true mourning for her was 1937, when her father was repressed. Without holding back tears, our interlocutor recalls the events of that December:

“In the morning, my father took firewood to a school four kilometers from our village. In the afternoon, a dark man came to us – all in black, with a hood on his head – probably from the KGB. He followed my mother around all day, turned the whole house upside down, sorted through all the papers, even looked behind the icons. When dusk fell, my father came, this man got up from the bench and said: “Hands up.” They didn’t even let him undress. My father went, my brother threw himself at his feet, grabbed hold of him, wouldn’t let him go. And the man said to him: “Let go, he’ll come tomorrow.” But my father didn’t come back.”

He was taken to Bologoye, and then by horse to Kalinin, then to Arkhangelsk. In his letters to his family, he reported: "We work a lot and live in extremely cold barracks. During the night, the linen freezes to the body." After some time, Mikhail became very ill and died.

"I lived in fear even after rehabilitation, I kept everything "behind my teeth". At the technical school I said that my dad had simply died. But he really had died by that time. I suppressed a lot in myself, because everyone around me was saying: "enemy of the people". I always stood somewhere on the sidelines, I didn't say anything unnecessary. I thought it would be hard to get into the technical school too," the Novgorod resident recalls bitterly.

When her father was taken away, Anna's brother helped with the housework. But then he left too.

"The end of June. It was a sunny day, the haymaking was beginning, the men were sent to the fields. On that day, people from the military registration and enlistment office came to the villages and said that the war had begun. My brother Vasily was 18 years old then. I remember it as if it were yesterday – he was sitting by the stove, crying, saying that he would not return alive from such a massacre. And indeed, he went missing near Malaya Vishera in December of 1942. My brother was an accordion player, and my mother took care of his accordion for a long time," Anna Mikhailovna says.

Vasily worked as a postman. When he was called up for the army, Anna took over the duties of delivering letters. She was eagerly awaited in the villages. She sometimes read letters to elderly villagers and helped them write replies. Every day, the schoolgirl had to cover 20 kilometers: first from her village to the post office, and then go to other villages.

The men went to the front. Therefore, all the collective farm work fell on the shoulders of women. They worked the land, grew bread and vegetables. Anna Mikhailovna tells how it was:

"There were two old men and one horse left in the village. To cultivate the land, they took a metal plough, tied a rope to it, and the other end to a pole about four meters long. They put a more respectable woman in the middle, smaller girls on the sides, and another woman was at the plough itself. It turned out that they worked like a tractor. And my mother ploughed for me and my sister on the plow."

Our interlocutor remembers the victory day of May 1945 very well:

“I was in the 5th grade. That day the school bell rang, but the teacher was not there. Everyone was called out into the street. Everyone was crying – the teachers and the principal. Then they told us that there would be no classes that day – the war was over! We were told to go back to our villages – and children from seven villages went to this school – to inform people. We ran to the field where the women were ploughing, started shouting to them, but they did not hear. Then the boys cut some branches, we tied ties to them, started shouting and waving them to attract attention. The women dropped the plough and ran up to us. When they heard that the war was over, those whose relatives had died fell to the ground and cried. Others started dancing, realising that their children were alive. Then they went to other fields. In the evening, everyone gathered and celebrated. And it was a beautiful day.”

After finishing school, Anna and her classmates planned to go to a medical college in Vyshny Volochok. However, her friends went without her. Then the postmaster suggested that the girl try her luck in Leningrad. In addition, her sister lived in the Northern capital, and she worked as a hairdresser at the military communications school. Anna decided to take advantage of this and tried to enroll in various colleges, even passing the entrance exams to the Leningrad Aviation Institute of Instrument Engineering.

"I don't care where, as long as I get in. I only have one B in my school report card, and I passed my exams normally. The institute accepted me into a special group, but without a dormitory. I refused because I had nowhere to live, and went to the shoe technical school on Tsvetochnaya Street. There is a dormitory and classrooms under one roof. That's how I got there by chance," the Novgorod resident shares.

After training, Anna Mikhailovna was sent to work in Borovichi. She was appointed as a quality control master. In April 1951, the enterprise was relocated to Novgorod and Anna was transferred from control masters to technoruk (manager-technologist – author's note ).

"I worked at the Novgorod Prosthetic and Orthopedic Enterprise for thirty years. After the war, people rebuilt cities, villages, and towns, and I rebuilt people," says the home front worker.

In September, Anna Mikhailovna will celebrate her 95th birthday. Today, she is enjoying a well-deserved rest, laughing that she often listens to the radio "like an old man". She recently attended a concert dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, which was held in the kindergarten "Skazka". She has a daughter, Tatyana, and a grandson who currently lives in St. Petersburg and works as an electric train driver. Anna Mikhailovna plans to visit him in the near future.

"I am a home front worker. There are military medals, there is the "Veteran of Labor" and the Lenin medal. In our time, it was equal to the "Hero of Socialist Labor" star, so it is always attached above other badges. There is the "Excellent Social Security" medal," our interlocutor lists.

The rear was a support for the soldiers who fought on the front lines. Together with adults, children, including our heroine, worked selflessly on the path to victory. For them, the famous words became the main motto: "Everything for the front, everything for victory!" Thanks to their courage, patience and persistence, our people were able to stand firm. How wonderful that in our city there are heroes who contributed to the Great Victory and who can share their memories of those days with us.

Photo by Ludmila Stepiko