Palm Springs author from Russia shares WWII experience

Nina Markos and her family were living in Estonia when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Now 83, the Palm Springs resident was 9 years old when artillery blasts erupted in the distant skies on a peaceful summer day more than 74 years ago.

Just a year earlier, the Soviet Union had completed its military occupation of the formerly independent Republic of Estonia. The unwelcome annexation of the republic — now under communist rule — had been precipitated by the German-Soviet non-aggression pact signed by the two military powers on Aug. 23, 1939.

Known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the agreement was forged by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The pact contained a secret protocol that provided for the partition of Poland and the rest of eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. Estonia, along with the other Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, were among those placed in the Soviet sphere.

The German government broke the pact when it invaded the Soviet Union.

The family — Nina, 7-year-old sister Luisa, mother Raisa and her father Andrei, a captain in the Soviet Air Force — lived in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, where her father's military unit was stationed at the time.

"June 22, 1941, started out as a very pleasant Sunday morning," Nina said. "The day before had been wonderful. Mother took my sister Louisa and me to Kadriorg Park where we fed squirrels. So cute and charming ... all over the park, one could hear the voices of children and adults calling the squirrels, 'Mikki, mikki, mikki!' They quickly descended from the trees and sat fearlessly on the shoulders or arms of the visitors. We expected Sunday to be good, as well. Father had to return soon from night duty in his unit and we all planned to go to the beach."

Nina had just finished second grade. She received excellent final marks and received two gifts — all new school materials for the third grade and a fluffy, gray kitten that Nina and her sister named Murzik.

"I lovingly admired my new things, feasting my eyes upon the pictures in the newly-printed textbooks. More than once I repacked them in my new school portfolio — and how I enjoyed my silly, playful Murzik.

"My sister was nearby playing with her toys and with the kitten. Unexpectedly, we heard powerful peals of thunder from far away. The sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly, but the din continued. Soon father called from his military unit, 'Don't panic, Raisa, the war has begun. The Germans have attacked us!' he told my mother."

"'What Germans?'" she asked. "She thought he was talking about the maneuvers, which were to begin the following week.

"Father quickly replied, 'The real German troops have crossed the Soviet-Polish border. These are not maneuvers, Raisa. This is war!'"

When their mother started crying, the young girls followed suit.

"Very soon, the three of us were in floods of tears, even without knowing what the war meant for us or what was waiting for us in the near future."

"One week later, on June 29, we were forced to evacuate our home in Tallinn. There were no choices. The three of us had to leave, but father had to stay with his unit. We left all of our belongings behind, including our little Murzik. Father didn't allow us to take him, but he promised to look after him, since he had to stay in Tallinn. I decided to give him away to an Estonian family who were the caretakers of our apartment building. The children of the family, our playmates, gladly agreed to shelter our kitten. Because their family was Estonian, they did not have to evacuate.

"We received only two letters from my father while he was still in Tallinn. In both letters, he wrote that when he visited our apartment, Murzik was sleeping comfortably on the outside window sill, enjoying the still-pleasant summer sun. He probably missed us, too."

The three family members were soon shuttled onto a freight train along with thousands of military families, "Riding to nowhere, with no destination or a forwarding address — just eastward, as far as possible from the western border, away from the front line."

They traveled extremely light.

"We took two suitcases," she said.

Mother carried the suitcases and fashioned an over-the-shoulder carrying bag for each of the youngsters. Nina carried her school portfolio containing all of her books for her third grade year of school.

"Women with toddlers or small infants in their arms could only carry one suitcase each. There was no help, no appropriate services, no shelters with supporting medical staff, nothing at all to help us during our hasty, panicky escape from Tallinn. We rode on the freight train like cattle. The train had no bathrooms, no running water — none of the simple primitive amenities, whatsoever."

The Luftwaffe took aim at the train.

"When the Germans started to bomb us, they stopped the train and ... the people had the chance to leave — to run away. The majority left the train and hid in the forest."

When it appeared the skies had cleared of enemy aircraft, the travelers re-boarded and the train proceeded to a small station at Gavrilov Posad.

"We had to ask permission to enter Moscow," Nina said. "But Moscow was already closed. Our relatives in Moscow didn't have a phone so we couldn't call them. Other people who had relatives and connections — they received permission to enter Moscow."

The evacuees were put up at a school building that had been closed for the summer.

"We just put some hay on the floor, put towels (and blankets) over the hay. We walked to the river to wash up ... we were sweaty. That summer was unusually hot."

The family waited in Gavrilov Posad for seven days.

"We had to make a choice. Where to go? If we don't go to my mother's parents in Ukraine, then we have to go behind the Ural Mountains — and we didn't have the winter clothes, nothing. Just what we could carry in two suitcases."

Winter came early in that part of the world — sometimes as early as September, she said.

"Nobody thought the war would last very long — everybody thought the Russian Army would defeat the Germans very soon because they had, at the time, an agreement with the Germans — the non-aggression pact. They violated the pact.

"There was such a terrible panic because people didn't know what to do. They were not prepared. Russia wasn't prepared for war because they had the treaty with Ribbentrop.

"Estonia was invaded early on. It was very dangerous to stay in Estonia because the Estonians, they were against the Russians, traditionally. We would have been killed if we stayed in Estonia."

The small family pushed on to Nina's grandparents' home in southern Ukraine, where they would wait out the war — ironically, under German occupation.

In the past, Nina and her family spent many happy summers at her grandparents' home in the town of Dolguintsevo. This time, the visit would stretch on for years — under entirely different circumstances.

After enduring a long, cramped train ride — "We were packed like herrings in a barrel. We all slept in a sitting position, which made our limbs ache" — the family arrived at the big railroad station at Dolguintsevo in mid-July 1941.

Disembarking in the late afternoon, mother and daughters stood for a while on the platform, looking around. There were no buses or taxis in town, so they picked up their luggage and headed along a familiar street in the direction of Nina's grandparents' house — where they settled in for a much-longer-than-expected stay.

Like most people of the region, her grandparents owned a small patch of land where they cultivated a bounty of food from their vegetable gardens and orchards.

Nina helped her grandparents plant, harvest, marinate, salt, can and bottle myriad fruits and vegetables that were carefully preserved in barrels and placed neatly on cabinets in the family's cellar.

Life proceeded as normal as could be expected until the end of August 1941, when, to the shock of the unsuspecting townspeople, the Germans invaded and occupied the region.

The one saving grace was the fact the Germans allowed the townspeople to maintain their gardens, which allowed them to continue to provide for their own sustenance.

"When the Germans came ... they had no means to support the population, so they understood if they didn't give them the opportunity to make their own food, they would rebel. When they invaded, they didn't touch the civilian population unless they fought — and who would fight? The men were in the army and women and children and the old people — they couldn't do it, they couldn't fight. So they just were working in the fields.

"When the front moved forward, in the evening there were no lights — no lights on the street. There was no place to go. There were no more theaters, no parks. There were no stores — only the farmers market," where townspeople could sell or exchange produce, meat, eggs and other homegrown foods.

"Schools were closed during the German occupation. As my mother was a teacher, she organized some home schooling. Every day after the breakfast, we sat down for several hours and we were writing, reading, reciting poetry ... that's why I finished school on time when the time came."

During the occupation, the family was ordered to shelter supporting members of the German military, including a doctor who ended up saving Nina's grandfather's life by administering the infection-reducing drug streptocide after he was attacked and badly bitten by a dog.

In 1943, when German troops were defeated at Stalingrad, retreating soldiers looted the homes of the townspeople, including Nina's grandparents' home.

"In the winter of 1944, during the interval of two or three days between the retreat of the Germans and the arrival of the advancing Soviet troops, a period of anarchy and chaos flourished. The Germans had already left, but the Russian troops hadn't arrived yet, as the crucial battle had taken place 20 miles away from our town. We heard and watched the battle from a distance."

School eventually reopened and Nina, who was a sixth-grader in the spring of 1945, was the first in her family to hear the news that the war had ended. She ran straight home after a big school assembly — dedicated to "Victory Day" — on May 9, 1945.

The only contact Nina and her family had with her father were the two letters they received during the first months before the Germans invaded southern Ukraine. Once the war was over, letters and packages — the postal service was shut down during German occupation — arrived from her father on a regular basis.

"He was wounded several times and was in the hospital, and he only found us at the end when the war already finished. Because they collected no information (of) who is where, nobody knew where we were. He finally wrote a letter to my grandmother. That's how he knew that we all survived — he thought maybe we were killed."

It was more than a year after the end of the war when Nina's family was finally reunited with her father, whose military leave was delayed time and time again. In the meantime, his family waited with anticipation for the day they would move into military housing he had described in the letters— a large (for the time) 538-square-foot apartment with running water (cold, but at least they didn't have to pump it from a well), indoor bathroom and gas heating — in the town of Lvov in western Ukraine.

At long last, Nina's father arrived in Dolguintsevo on July 15, 1946, and 10 days later — after "three long and difficult years under German occupation and two years of post-occupation revival" — the family departed for their new home in Lvov.

After graduating from high school in 1949, Nina attended Lvov State University and six years later, graduated, magna cum laude from the department of foreign languages, equipped with the knowledge of English, Spanish and Latin. In 1966, Nina moved to Moscow, where she completed two years of post-graduate study in foreign languages. A linguist, she taught at Patrice Lumumba State University — in Moscow. It was during this time that Nina and husband Vladimir Markovich applied for a visa to Israel, with the intention of moving to the U.S.

"If you applied for a visa to leave, you have to leave the university, you have no right to work," she said.

Nina was fired from her job soon after they made their application. To earn some money, she taught private lessons in English and Spanish during the year-and-a-half it took for her visa to come through.

Her husband died before the couple's planned date of departure.

"He was killed in a car crash in Moscow when we already were ready to leave," she said, although she remains skeptical about the circumstances surrounding the crash.

Nina and her 25-year-old daughter arrived on American soil on Aug. 7, 1981.

The linguist eventually moved to Monterey, where she worked for 20 years at the Defense Language Institute teaching language courses to American military students.

She moved to the desert after retiring from the institute in 2003, and in 2014, published, "Nina's Story: Surviving the German Occupation," a book recounting her childhood experiences of war.

Denise Goolsby is The Desert Sun's storyteller columnist. She can be reached at Denise.Goolsby@DesertSun.com and on Twitter @DeniseGoolsby