The ship circumnavigated the world from Odessa to Vremerhaven |
| Fuck! The stone fell a meter away from the unsuspecting far-left German. The workers jumped up and threw their heads up in fear. We instinctively recoiled from the window... The bell rang. The physics teacher, an elderly gray-haired woman, could not hide her surprise: she had never seen us so quiet. And we waited with doom for the reckoning. The door opened without knocking, and the figure of director Pyotr Mikhailovich appeared in it. We respected and feared him. A former front-line scout, he was shell-shocked, had combat awards. In moments of anger, he could grab a cheeky kid by the collar and shake him properly. — You can complain to your parents! — Pyotr Mikhailovich was letting go of the frightened boy. But no one ever complained. Six Germans shyly squeezed into the classroom behind the director. "Our" bespectacled man and the five next to whom the stone fell. — I didn't think you were capable of bullying prisoners! Pyotr Mikhailovich barked, and the left half of his face twitched. The Germans looked at the class and the director from under their brows. — Who broke the glasses? Who threw the stone? A painful silence reigned. After a while, Volodya and Grisha came out from behind their desks. — Collect your belongings and get out of school! — the director ordered. Frowning, he watched as the guys packed books and notebooks into their military bags (we did not recognize briefcases). When the perpetrators left the classroom, Pyotr Mikhailovich once again angrily looked at all of us and slowly headed for the exit. The Germans followed him in silence. And then someone's timid childish voice said: — Inshuldigen zee, bitte! —Yes, yes," everyone said. — We didn't do it on purpose. Inshuldigen zee, bitte! — we shouted three times. The rest of the German words flew out of my head. Pyotr Mikhailovich lingered in the doorway, and the Germans smiled in bewilderment and began to prove something to him. —Nine," the director replied firmly, putting his palm to his twitching cheek. The lesson was disrupted. The old teacher blushed with excitement, but involuntarily smiled when we told her that we had dropped the stone out of love for physics — we were conducting a scientific experiment. Extinguishing her smile, she said: — Soon all prisoners of war will be released. What will they tell their children and grandchildren about the Russian captivity?... They were all spared their lives. None of them survived even a small fraction of what our prisoners experienced in Nazi concentration camps. Will they still have good feelings for us or will someone, without understanding anything, leave our country as an enemy as he was before - a lot depends on this, guys! Maybe someone, describing the "horrors" of captivity, will tell how Russian schoolchildren had fun and, with the knowledge of teachers, killed Germans by dropping cobblestones on them from the upper floors of the school. That's what rash actions and impermissible pranks can lead to! Don't forget, you're almost adults now... Our ship circumnavigated the globe from Odessa via the Suez Canal, the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (via the Panama Canal) to Vremerhaven. Most of the passengers were from Germany. Besides them, there were several Dutch people on board, one artist from Italy. Residents of the Netherlands spoke German fluently, the Italian spoke eight languages, including German, but fundamentally did not communicate with any passenger from Germany. — I am a member of the Italian Resistance. I don't want to talk to the former occupiers. From zero o'clock to four, I was on duty at the information bureau and shuddered with fright from every phone call. Voices were heard pleading, demanding, and most often unintelligible from the tube. With great difficulty, asking to be excused for incomprehensibility and asking again several times, it was possible to figure out that one asked to wake up at six twenty—five in the morning, the second complained of stuffiness in the cabin and demanded to take measures, the third called the doctor - his wife had a migraine, the fourth was interested in when the bar would open in the morning. The average age of tourists is about 70 years. But there were also those who were over eighty. The female half on board was represented by elderly Frau who lost their husbands during the war or buried them already in the post-war years. online gambling |
