Aleksandr Kirilovich Fisenko

I interviewed my grandpa, or my mothers father.  Aleksandr Kirilovich Fisenko was born August 30, 1930 somewhere in Russia in North Kavkaz. During the war he was around 11-13 years old so he did not have participate in the war himself although his father and brother both were drafted into the war. They took his father first and his brother sometime in February the years unknown. Grandpa just couldn’t remember when.  His brother Vasily, was not even 18 when they took him which I thought that was kind of scary. Once his father left, the Nazis came in and took everything that they had and told them to move. Grandpa along with his mother and sister moved to his aunt’s home. The move resulted in a change of school. The school during the war went out to the fields to pick some kind of medicine for the soldiers.

The whole time living were he was, nothing scary went on, luckily there were no war fronts in the area they lived in and no bombing nearby. Their town was one of the lucky towns that was safe. Grandpa lived on a small farm. They owned one cow and some chickens. However much milk the cow gave is how much they had and same with the chickens. Life was hard. Every day he had to walk 3 miles to school. During the war years Grandpa didn’t have much to do other than to milk his cow, go to school, and work during the summers. In the summer he would work on other farms and fields. Relationships? Um I don’t think he was in a relationship with anyone at the time since he married at 30 years of age. But if you mean relationships with his family members I think that there was a big change. Not seeing your dad or brother for over four years caused many changes.

When I asked him about Pearl Harbor his reaction was “I have nothing to say about it other than that it didn’t affect my life or people surrounding me.” And when asked about the atomic bombs, grandpa said he liked the idea of the A-Bomb. Dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he said was the right thing to do. When the bombs were dropped it was all over the papers where he lived.  And as far as he can remember what was written in the papers he took part of believing it. They wrote that if not for the bombs the war would have crept on for a much longer time resulting in a lot more humans dead.

He said “My most lasting memory of the war years was all of the cripples coming home.” Even though his father and brother came home uninjured grandpa said that the sight of men coming back with no leg or arm attached to them was a memory that stuck with him forever. All these cripples coming back couldn’t work and only asked for mercy. Friends, relatives, and family would help out their loved ones, but so many had no place to go. These folks ended up homeless and had to steal just to feed their throbbing stomachs. The need for food was more than we could imagine. In fact in 1947 Russia suffered a severe famine. In one night all of the bread in the stores was gone. Every week a truck would bring in a delivery of some bread and to buy a loaf you had to be out in front of the store as early as 2 o’clock in the morning. Men that could work worked. They worked for dirt cheap and on top of that the Government took a big chunk out of it to pay for the war. Workers would get sued by the owner for coming late to work or doing something wrong. In other words nothing too big. The weird thing is that the owner would never fire someone from his job but would sue him for 25% of his paycheck. The worst experience for him he said was seeing so many cripples. Wanting soo bad to help they there was no way that he could. Life was arduous and miserable for both him and most of the country.