STREAMING FLAGS
On Thursdays, under Buttnik’s supervision, we walked in a line to the railway bathhouse. The other guard could be any other watchman who was working that day at the orphanage.
The red-brick bathhouses, built back in the tsarist times, were not far from us. To reach them, all we had to do was walk down an old street lined with one- and two-story houses with wooden porches, and cross the railway tracks – and there were the bathhouses. On holidays this street, as was proper, was decorated with flags made of bright red cotton.
In 1947, on the eve of Victory Day, they arranged the usual bath for us. The May weather in that area that year was unusually hot and humid. The temperature in the bathhouse turned out to be cooler than outside.
After the wash, the orphanage platoon,
