How Papa dreamed of throwing us under a tank…He wanted us to hurry up and grow up so we could volunteer to fight in a war. He was incapable of imagining a world without war. He needed us to be heroes! And you can only become a hero at war. If one of us had lost our legs like that Alexey Maresyev of his, he would have only been happy. It would have meant that his life had not been in vain…Success! Everything had fallen into place! And he…I think he would have carried out the verdict with his own bare hands if I had broken my oath, if I had
