A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR I was born in 1938 in Saratov a city in Central Russia that lies on the bank of the great river Volga It is a typical Russian town old beautiful rather provincial green and cozy It has a university a few theaters a conservatory and a wonderful museum War entered my life early devastating this beautiful town The Nazis bombarded the streets at night and my mother grandmother or aunt often carried me into the under ground shelter as the sirens wailed warning of the attack I still remember the sound of those sirens I was young and did not understand why any of this was happening In the morning my friends and I would return to our games We played lopte the Russian version of baseball or Cossacks and robbers or went through the street collecting shrapnel from the bombs To us the heavy gleaming pieces of metal were beautiful We didn't really comprehend their terrible origin the deadly power that produces these shiny treasures until a boy on one of these hunts found a special treasure that flashed and exploded in his hands leaving him permanently permanently crippled I think this incident and the terrible postwar images of German prisoners of war digging roadside ditches and of simple Russian peasants returning home without arms and legs all this made a deep impression on me as a child But my conscious rejection of war and violence came later a result not only of small personal experiences but of my reading of the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky Remarque and Hemingway I have created this book because it seems to me that if children can understand the senselessness of war if they can see how easily one can be sucked into a cycle of violence they may become a force for peace in the future I also hope that adults who share the book with children will reexamine their own thoughts on the futility of war Nikolai Popov
