At the tail end of the Great Patriotic War, two youths, Volodya Jakubowski Boris Tokarev and Valya Nataliya Bogunova, cross paths at a crowded refugee station in the summer of 1941, a brief encounter that quietly foreshadows the brutal road ahead as they struggle to grow up under siege and upheaval.
Valya’s mother, Lyubov Sokolova Lyubov Sokolova, dies in the bombing of the evacuation train near Mga station, along with her younger sister Lucy. The loss casts a heavy shadow over Valya’s world, pushing her into a long, unsettled search for safety and belonging.
After long wanderings through orphanages, the two girls are finally found by their aunt and sheltered in her house, where they begin to navigate a new kind of family life amid the war’s harsh realities.
Volodya’s life unfolds in a parallel strain of hardship and quiet resilience. His mother Nina Urgant Nina Urgant is divorced from his father Yuri Volkov Yuri Volkov, who has moved on with a new wife and a son, Oleg Nikolai Burlyaev. In evacuation, the mother tries to rebuild her personal life and grows close to a military captain Stanislav Chekan.
To avoid becoming a burden, Volodya takes a job at a defensive aircraft factory and moves into a hostel. There, he finds a steadfast friend in Romka Valeriy Nosik, a companionship that sustains him through the era’s pressures.
When the woman becomes pregnant, the captain ends the relationship, and the newborn baby is born into a world that already treats the mother with suspicion and stigma. The difficult social climate makes it hard for her to secure decent housing, leaving Volodya to shoulder even more responsibility and worry as he tries to protect and support those he loves.
In a bid to escape the chaos around him, Volodya travels to Leningrad to visit his father, hoping to obtain a summons to the city from which the blockade had only recently been lifted. His father initially refuses to help, revealing painful truths about his ex-wife’s infidelity, but Volodya’s persistence eventually pays off and he gains what he seeks.
The complex family dynamics deepen when the father objects to Volodya’s contact with Oleg; despite this tension, the two teenagers are ultimately introduced to one another and begin a cautious, transformative friendship that hints at the ways war can forge unlikely bonds and shape the paths of young lives.
This story tracks not just survival amid bombardments and displacement, but also the slow, stubborn process of growing up—learning responsibility, facing social judgments, and forging connections that might outlive the war’s worst days.
