Elena Viktorovna Petrenko was 72 years old, but she didn’t look a day over 83. She looked like everyone’s grandmother: white-haired, plump, and cheerful. If you were young and inexperienced, the temptation to underestimate her at your first meeting would be overwhelming.
I think the first words I ever heard her speak were, “I am coming to America in 1946, and I am becoming citizen in 1954. So I am longer American than any of you.” And she was a real American. She loved America and its mission to protect freedom in a way that people who have never been oppressed can never understand.
Her story came in bits and pieces over the year we spent together. So here, as far as I can work it out and remember it 30 years later, is her story.
Her family was from Krasnodar, although it was named Ekaterinodar when she was born a few years before the Revolution. She was the granddaughter (or great-granddaughter) of a man who had a problem. He had won the equivalent of a knighthood fighting in Russia’s wars of southern expansion. That was great, except that it disqualified him from marrying the woman he loved because she was a commoner. He realized that he couldn’t live without her, so he transferred the title of nobility to her. Then he went back to the wars and won another knighthood so that they could marry. He must have been quite a man, and she must have been quite a woman.
Of course, that’s where the trouble started. His outlandish act of love made the family some sort of minor nobility, which went over very badly with the Bolsheviks. They survived the Revolution okay, and didn’t even do too badly through the Red Terror (if only having a few family members murdered can be considered “not too badly”). However, during the ‘30s, Stalin’s NKVD (the sons of the Cheka and the fathers of the KGB) massacred her family. Not all at once, but by ones and twos - which was the way it was done. Her sister was executed for decorating a portrait of Stalin improperly. I never did understand the excuse for the execution of her mother. I just remember that Elena Viktorovna’s story about her mother’s arrest and imprisonment was my first clue to how fearless she was.
Her mother had been arrested and was being held by the NKVD, so Elena Viktorovna marched herself right down to NKVD headquarters in Krasnodar to see her. During the visit, she lit into the commander, demanding any kind of evidence of any wrongdoing. She harangued him until her mother said, “Elena, there is nothing you can do. You need to go home.” It takes a special kind of gumption to tell off the NKVD. In prison. Where a lot of your family was murdered. It was the last time she ever saw her mother.
During the war, the Krasnodar side of the family heard that the Kharkov side of the family had food. Since it was walk or die, they walked the 470 miles to Kharkov, and were strafed by the Luftwaffe en route. She said, “The bullets went pft! pft! pft! Right into the ground. It was just like in a movie.” As a result, they were in Kharkov when the Nazis entered the city. They had never been so happy to see anyone! Finally! Here were the Germans, who were going to free them from the repressive totalitarianism of Stalin! “We met the Germans with bread and salt,” she remembered. “And it was great until the SS showed up. Someone had killed a German soldier in the courtyard of an apartment block, so the Germans killed everyone who lived in the apartments. It became obvious that Hitler was just like Stalin; but at least Stalin spoke Russian, so we supported Stalin.”
Not that their support mattered one way or another, of course. They were tiny bits of refuse floating on a giant wave of history. It was in Kharkov that I lost the story of her family because she and her husband were put on separate trains and shipped to Germany to work as slave laborers in one of the war factories. She remembered being marched to work while the German schoolchildren screamed at them. “Russian pigs! Russian pigs!” She didn’t say much about what she did there. One assumes that she survived.
She and her husband lost contact with each other for the duration of the war, since being a slave means that no one cares where your family is or what happened to them. Somehow, they found each other after the war, and the only happy part of this tale is that they were both in the American zone. Since all prisoners of war were considered traitors by Stalin, that wouldn’t normally have stopped them from being deported back to the Soviet Union and imprisoned or executed for collaborating with the Nazis; but she was a medical doctor, and her husband was a scientist or an engineer, so they qualified to emigrate to the United States under a special program. They landed in Chicago for awhile, and eventually made their way to Anaheim, California. They owned a house and a small tract of land with orange groves on it, until it was bought by a guy named Disney because he had some daft idea to build an amusement park.
