The End of the War in Europe is announced in the city on a rainy day in May, when people dance and embrace in the streets. For the narrator, however, the announcement does not end separation or restore the life he has lost. The war’s conclusion brings a new administrative reality: he must leave the Red Army friends who have cared for him and wait to learn whether his family is alive. The celebration and the uncertainty begin together.

Wartime Conditions

The announcement follows years in which ordinary life was governed by competing threats. In the villages where the narrator had been stranded, the German occupation forces made sheltering a Jewish or Romani child dangerous for individuals and communities. Peasants also had to surrender much of their meager harvest to German troops and Partisans; refusal could bring punitive raids and leave settlements in ruins. The end of the war closes this period of occupation, but the narrator’s experience has been shaped by systems that repeatedly made safety conditional.

The danger was not confined to military encounters. The narrator had seen the locked trains carrying Jewish and Romani people toward death, while villagers watched them pass. These scenes form part of the world the May announcement is supposed to leave behind. They also make the distinction between the end of fighting and the end of its human consequences especially stark: the news changes the political situation, but it does not undo loss, fear, or the narrator’s displacement.

The Announcement and Its Immediate Meaning

The news reaches the city in spring. People respond with dancing, kissing, and embraces, while that same evening ambulances collect people injured in brawls at drinking parties. The public mood is therefore not presented as unbroken rejoicing. Celebration coexists with violence, and the streets register both relief and the disorder still carried into the peace.

For the narrator, the decisive consequence is separation from his regiment. Gavrila tells him that the war is over and that his country has been fully liberated from the Germans. Under the applicable regulations, lost children must be taken to special centers and kept there while officials determine whether their parents are alive. The rule turns liberation into a forced transition: the boy cannot simply remain with the people who have become his companions, even though their care is familiar and his future with them is uncertain.

Separation and the Promise of Care

The narrator takes several days to accept that he must leave Gavrila, Red Army sniper Mitka, and the other friends he has made in the regiment. Gavrila is firm that the regulations must be followed, but he is not indifferent to the child’s distress. The narrator sees that Gavrila is uneasy too, and understands that he and Red Army sniper Mitka have discussed his future and would have chosen another solution if one were available.

Gavrila offers a conditional promise: if no relatives claim the narrator within three months after the war’s end, he will take care of him and send him to a school where he can learn to speak again. Until then, he urges the boy to be brave, remember what he has learned, and read Pravda every day. The offer gives the separation a limit and a possible future, but it cannot remove the immediate uncertainty. The narrator must leave now without knowing whether his family will return or whether Gavrila’s promise will be needed.

Peace Without Return

The narrator later searches the newspapers for news and visits the orphanage hoping to find a letter from Gavrila or Red Army sniper Mitka; none comes. He learns that not all armies are due to return home and that Germany is to remain occupied, perhaps for years. The end of the war thus does not mean that his wartime friends can promptly come back to him. The promised reunion remains suspended by the continuing military settlement.

The city itself offers no simple refuge. People arrive in large numbers from across the country, hoping to find work and recover what they have lost, but many cannot secure either employment or living quarters. Crowded streets, competition for transport and places in restaurants, and short tempers make postwar life another struggle over limited space and resources. The narrator’s account sets the celebratory announcement against this unsettled aftermath: war has ended as a formal condition, while displacement, separation, and the habits of conflict persist.