9 - Sex/Gender Relations and Youth Experiences

Summary

Our daughters, sisters and brides languished in slavery…. Smolensk girls lived in constant trepidation. Every day, any one of them could be sent away…. No family in Smolensk survived the black nights of the occupation, which carried off daughters, sisters, nieces and close cousins.

—Rabochii put', October 8, 1943, 2

Fraternizing with “the Enemy”: Female-Male Interactions

In April 1942 there were 29,260 officially registered Soviet workers in Smolensk: 14,817 women, 6,361 men, 4,093 girls, and 3,989 boys. Apart from omitting all German residents (including estimates of up to 50,000 soldiers) and young children, these figures also exclude the official Soviet nonworking adult population—namely, the elderly, invalids, and mothers with small children. But based on these statistics, at least insofar as the majority of civilians of occupied Smolensk were concerned, there were twice as many women as men, clearly more teenagers than men, and roughly the same number of boys as girls. In other words, the civilian population (not including another 5,000–6,000 workers with jobs in the outskirts, such as in Krasny Bor, whose age and sex are unknown) was strongly female (2:1), with a relatively large juvenile population (two teenagers to every five adults).