In war, there was still a certain amount of danger, and therefore the consciousness that you are really in the hands of God sometimes reaches a very great extent. Along the way, you make all kinds of discoveries: that you are not so wonderful, that there are things much more important than you; about the fact that there are different layers in events. There is, say, a layer on which you live and you are afraid, or some other feelings overwhelm you, and there are two more layers in addition to this: above, above you, is the will of God, His vision of history, and below, how life flows, not noticing the events connected with your existence. I remember once I was lying on my stomach under fire, in the grass, and at first I was tight to the ground, because it was somehow uncomfortable, and then I got tired of huddling, and I began to look: the grass was green, the sky was blue, and two ants were crawling and dragging a straw, and it was so clear that here I was lying and afraid of shelling, and life was flowing, the grass was green, ants crawl, the fate of the whole world lasts, continues, as if man has nothing to do with it; And in fact, he has nothing to do with it, except that he spoils everything.

     Well, and then there are very simple things that suddenly become very important. You know, when it comes to life and death, some questions are completely removed, and under the sign of life and death, a new hierarchy of values appears: insignificant things acquire some significance because they are human, and some big things become indifferent because they are not human. For example, I was engaged in surgery, and I remember it was clear to me that to perform a complex operation is a technical question, and to deal with a patient is a human question, and that this moment is the most important and the most significant, because any good technician can do good technical work, but the human moment depends on the person, and not on the technique. There were, for example, the dying; The hospital had 850 beds, so there were quite a lot of seriously wounded, we were very close to the front; And then, as a rule, I spent the last nights with the dying, in whatever department they were. Other surgeons found out that I had such a strange thought, and that's why I was always warned. At this point, you are technically completely unnecessary; Well, you sit with a person – young, in his early twenties, he knows that he is dying, and there is no one to talk to. And not about life, not about death, about nothing like that, but about his farm, about his harvest, about the cow – about all sorts of such things. And this moment is becoming so significant, because there is such devastation that it is important. And so you sit, then the person falls asleep, and you sit, and occasionally he just feels: are you here or not? If you are here, you can continue to sleep, or you can die peacefully.

     Or small things; I remember one soldier, a German, who was taken prisoner, wounded in the arm, and the senior surgeon said: remove his finger (it was festering). And I remember the German said then: "I am a watchmaker." You see, a watchmaker who loses his index finger is already a finished watchmaker. Then I took him into circulation, worked on his finger for three weeks, and my boss laughed at me, said: "What nonsense, you could finish this whole thing in ten minutes, and you mess around for three weeks - for what? And I answered: yes, the war is going on, and therefore I play with his finger, because it is so significant, the war, the war itself, that his finger plays a colossal role, because the war will end, and he will return to his city with or without a finger...

     And this context of big events and very small things and their correlation played a big role for me – maybe it may seem strange or funny, but this is what I found then in life, and I found my scale in it too, because I have never been an outstanding surgeon and have never done major operations, but this was life. And it is precisely the deep life of mutual relationships.

     Then the war ended and the occupation began, I was in the French Resistance for three years, then back in the army, and then practiced medicine until 1948...

     And what did they do in the Resistance?

     He did nothing interesting; this is the most shameful thing in my life, one might say, that neither during the war nor during the Resistance did I ever do anything specifically interesting or specifically heroic. When I was demobilized, I decided to return to Paris and returned partly legally, and partly illegally. It is legal in the sense that I returned with the papers, and it is illegal because I wrote them myself. It was very funny. My mother and grandmother were evacuated to the Limoges region, and when I was demobilized, I was demobilized to the ACER camp in Pau – I had to go somewhere. I got there and began to look for my mother and grandmother, I knew that they were somewhere here, I got a letter that they had written to me three months before, it traveled to all the army authorities. And I found them in a small village; my mother was ill, my grandmother was not young, and I decided that we would return to Paris and see what we could do there. My first thought was to move to France Libre, but this proved impossible because by that time the Pyrenees were blockaded. Maybe someone more enterprising would have made it, but I didn't.

     We drove to a village near the demarcation line of the occupied zone, and I went to the mayor's office. At the time, I was wearing a full military uniform, except for a jacket that I had bought to hide as much military uniform as possible underneath, and I went to the mayor to explain that I needed a pass. He said to me: "You know, it's impossible, I'm afraid I'll be shot for it." No one was allowed to cross the demarcation line without a German pass. I persuaded him, persuaded him, and finally he said to me: "You know what we are going to do: I will put the papers here on the table that need to be filled out; Here is the seal of the mayor's office, you take it, put a seal - and steal the papers. If you are arrested, I will tell you that you stole them from me." And that's all I needed, I needed papers, and if they caught him, they wouldn't even ask him, they would still put him in jail. I filled out these papers and we drove through the line, it was also very funny. We traveled in different carriages – my mother, grandmother and I – not because of conspiracy, but simply there were no seats; And in my compartment there were four French old ladies who were trembling with fear because they were sure that the Germans would tear them to pieces, and a completely drunk French soldier who kept shouting that if a German appeared, he would boom-boom-boom him! "He'll kill you right away..." And the old ladies imagined: the German control would enter, the soldier would scream, and we would all be shot for it. Well, I drove with some apprehension, because, except for this jacket, I was wearing everything military, and the military were not allowed to enter - or rather, they were allowed, but they were immediately taken to prisoner-of-war camps. I decided that I had to stand up somehow so that the control would not see me below the shoulder; Therefore, I suggested to my companions, in view of the fact that I speak German, that they give me their passports, and I will talk to the control. And when the German officer came in, I jumped up, stood close to him, almost pressed myself against him so that he could not see anything but my jacket, gave him the papers, explained everything, he thanked me for it, asked me why I spoke German – well, a cultured man, I went to school, I chose German from all languages (which was true, and I chose it because I chose it). that he already knew him and therefore hoped that he would have to work less, but this is another matter...). And so we drove.

     And then we came to Paris and settled, and we knew an old French doctor, still a pre-war doctor, who was already a member of the French Medical Resistance, and he recruited me. It was that you were listed in the Resistance, and if someone from the Resistance was wounded, or needed medication, or needed to visit someone, you were sent to one of these doctors, not just anyone. There were cells prepared at the time of the liberation of Paris, to which each doctor was assigned in advance, so that when there was an uprising, everyone would know where to go. But I never got into my cell, because a year and a half or two years before the uprising I was recruited by the French "Passive Resistance", and I was engaged in minor surgery in the basement of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and so when the uprising began, I went there - there was much more work, there I was more needed. In addition, it was very important that there should be people there who could legitimately demand new supplies of medicines and new tools to transport them: they came to us from these cells, and we handed them government tools, otherwise it would have been impossible for them to receive them in such quantities. At one time, the French police put me in charge of an ambulance during the bombing, and this made it possible to transport people needed by the Resistance.

     А еще я работал в больнице Брокa , и немцы решили, что отделение, где я работал, будет служить отделением экспертизы, и к нам посылали людей, которых они хотели отправлять на принудительные работы в Германию. А немцы страшно боялись заразных болезней, поэтому мы выработали целую систему, чтобы, когда делались рентгеновские снимки, на них отпечатывались бы какие-нибудь туберкулезные признаки. Это было очень просто: мы их просто рисовали. Все, кто там работал, работали вместе, иначе было невозможно, – сестра милосердия, другая сестра милосердия, один врач, я, мы ставили “больного”, осматривали его на рентгене, рисовали на стекле то, что нужно было, потом ставили пленку и снимали, и получалось, что у него есть всё что нужно. Но это, конечно, длилось не так долго, нельзя было без конца это делать, нужно было уходить.

     Слишком много больных у вас оказывалось?

     То есть все, все, никого не пропускали; если не туберкулез, то что-нибудь другое, но мы никого не пропустили за год с лишним.

     За год с лишним одни калеки?!

     Да, одни калеки. Ну, объясняли, что, знаете, такое время: недоедание, молодежь некрепкая… Потом немцы всё же начали недоумевать, и тогда я принялся за другое: в русской гимназии преподавать – от одних калек к другим!