Happy life Colonel Shemyakin
Veteran of the Great Patriotic War, holder of 8 orders, Pyotr Shemyakin went through the entire war. The retired colonel has a tenacious, bright memory like a young man: he remembers the numbers of all the battalions and regiments where he fought, the names of all the settlements where he fought and served. Pyotr Nikolaevich unfolds a panorama of military and peaceful life sparingly, almost without details, giving dry assessments of events. His memories, which are almost all woven from listings of cities, towns, stations where his units fought, would be enough for an impressive brochure. We tried to extract from them the painful details of the war years. Petr Shemyakin comes from a village of 50 households in the Vologda region. Of the 12 Shemyakin children, seven survived. But the Shemyakins’ troubles did not end there. The family was “grabbed” by consumption, and claimed the lives of five more children. Peter and his older sister Maria remained with his mother. And in 1935 my father died. He worked as a tinsmith, and when he was covering the roof of the district hospital, he could not resist and fell down.
Real Vologda oil
Since the family had health problems, his mother wanted Petya to enter a medical college. But against his mother’s will, the son graduated from a meat and dairy technical school in Vologda and came to work in his area. He got a job as a technologist in the district plant administration, where he monitored the technology for preparing butter (the same famous one from Vologda) and other dairy products at the district dairies.
“By the way, the secret of Vologda butter is not in some special technology for its production, but in the amazing grass and meadow flowers that Vologda cows eat,” Colonel Pyotr Nikolaevich says today.
Memories of service in tank forces
On the eve of the war, in October 1940, Pyotr Shemyakin was drafted into the army, into the tank forces near Pskov. Recruits who arrived in freight cars in Pskov were greeted by a brass band, then settled in barracks, and army life began: a young soldier’s course, drill training, studying the regulations, etc. And after this, Private Shemyakin was appointed to the crew of the T-7 high-speed tank as a gunner.
The war found Pyotr Nikolaevich in the service. The entire regiment was loaded onto trains and sent to Karelia. The tankers received their baptism of fire in the area of Alakurti station. Then ours did not allow the advancing Germans and Finns into the station and were able to push them back to the border. The tankers “handed over” the battle line to the rifle units, and they themselves headed to Petrozavodsk, where they were marching.
Here it was more difficult to fight with tanks: if near Alakurti there was a free clearing where the tanks had room to turn around, then near Petrzavodsk it was possible to operate only along the roads: there were stones, forests, and swamps all around. The Germans will bypass our units and cut them off. Our people are preparing roads, cutting down forests, bypassing the Nazis, and retreating.
“There were two big troubles in Karelia: fascist “cuckoos” and sabotage groups,” recalls Shemyakin. — “Cuckoos” are machine gunners. They were tied to trees: they literally “mowed down” our fighters. And the Germans sent sabotage groups to the location of our troops, and they “cut out” our troops there. This happened with our medical battalion, after which these bastards also violated the bodies of the wounded and nurses.
After the battles in Karelia, out of a battalion of 30 tanks, only one remained. Pyotr Shemyakin's tank also hit a mine. “It wasn’t scary,” recalls Pyotr Nikolaevich. “It only shook a little, but the crew was not injured, not even shell-shocked.”
A counteroffensive began in 1942
During the war there were moments not only of heavy fighting, but also of rest. All tankers of the regiment who survived were taken to Belomorsk at the beginning of 1942, where the soldiers were able to relax. There was an operetta theater in Belomorsk, and the soldiers visited it with pleasure: “Silva”, “Maritsa”, “La Bayadère”... Front-line soldiers went to some operettas twice or even more. The performances began at 14.00, then there were dances, and the artists who had just played for the fighters danced with them.
And at the end of March, as part of a tank brigade of 70 “vehicles”, Pyotr Shemyakin, already the commander of the T-34 tank, ended up near Kharkov. Our fresh units launched a counterattack and pushed the enemy back 15-20 km.
“But then the Germans concentrated an attack tank group in this direction and gave us a blow,” recalls Pyotr Nikolaevich.
It took a long time to retreat, and the veteran sometimes still dreams about this retreat. The troops left their native land along with the people who were evacuating. Old people, women, children who did not want to remain under the Nazis left them with their simple belongings. On horses, oxen, bicycles, and some simply dragged their belongings on themselves. The Germans did not spare either servicemen or civilians: they bombed and shot from airplanes. It was especially difficult when crossing rivers.
“There were always a lot of people gathered at the crossings, and the fascist monsters launched raids on them: they threw bombs and sprayed them with machine guns. People scattered. There is a roar all around, screams of horror and pain, many wounded and killed - a terrible thing,” shares Pyotr Nikolaevich.
Lieutenant of tank forces
Then there was the rear again, from where Pyotr Shemyakin’s tank brigade was transferred across the Don to meet the enemy. At first we attacked, but Hitler sent Guderian’s huge army to break through, and our tankers had to repel 5-6 counterattacks per day. I had to go back to Don. Of the 70 tanks of the brigade, three remained, including the KV (Klim Voroshilov) of Pyotr Shemyakin. But these tanks did not last long: in one of the battles, Pyotr Nikolaevich’s combat vehicle was also knocked out. The driver's foot was torn off, and the radio operator-machine gunner was slightly wounded. The tankers climbed out through the landing hatch and pulled out the wounded. Shemyakin was the last to leave. There was only one shell left in the tank, the crew captain fired it at the Nazis, engaged first gear and pointed his empty tank towards the Nazis.
Along the ravine bank of the Don, together with the wounded, Pyotr Shemyakin’s crew retreated to the river. But you can’t swim across the Don with the wounded. They found a wooden sled on the shore, tore off its metal runners, loaded the wounded onto the sled, and, settling down on the side, sailed across the Don to their own.
For these battles, Pyotr Shemyakin was awarded the rank of senior lieutenant and awarded the first military order - the Order of the Red Star.
Five junior officers of the tank brigade, who had not received military education at one time, including Pyotr Shemyakin, were sent to the city for retraining courses in March 1942. Here the cadets studied military equipment, including German. All the teachers went through the front, many were wounded and walked with sticks.
Pyotr Nikolaevich lived at the Automobile Plant at that time, and here he met his future wife, walking along the Striginsky forest.
What a ridiculous death
Pyotr Shemyakin has both the capture of Zhitomir (at that time he was already the commander of a tank platoon) and the Vistula-Oder operation. By the way, he participated in the latter as an assistant to the chief of staff of the regiment for intelligence.
Pyotr Nikolaevich led the reconnaissance platoon, but this did not save him from participating in battles. Together with the scouts, he crossed by boat to the other side of the Vistula, and held the bridgehead from which the Germans wanted to kick them out.
The memoirs of a cavalry regiment commander date back to this period. In general, Pyotr Shemyakin has memories of the cavalrymen as dandies who loved to walk and drink. In the occupied territory there was a train with technical alcohol. To prevent Russian people from getting poisoned, the command ordered these tanks to be shot. But the cavalrymen scooped alcohol from the puddles and drank. The cook gave the regiment commander a drink of this industrial alcohol. Shortly before the tragic dinner, the cavalryman called Shemyakin and invited him to dine with him. Pyotr Nikolaevich apologized and refused, citing the fact that he had already eaten.
And after a while the chief of staff called, asking for an armored personnel carrier: the regimental commander was blind and needed to be sent to the infirmary. Professional doctors were also unable to leave the front-line soldier: he died in the hospital.
Soldier in war and peacetime
Pyotr Nikolaevich ended the war in Prague, but after the front he connected his life with the army. He finished his military career as a regional military commissar in Karaganda with the rank of colonel. And after demobilization he went to his wife’s homeland, Gorky.
“I don’t complain about life,” says the former front-line soldier. – I have three children, six grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren. Two grandchildren from the eldest daughter - Nastya and Timur - are candidates of biological sciences. By the way, Timur now works at an institute in America. And one of the granddaughters is a 4th year student at the Medical Academy. I hope she will be able to fulfill my mother’s dream of having a doctor in the family.
VIDEO: Great Patriotic War 1941! Color shots!
Savarovskaya Svetlana Sergeevna
Responsible secretary-operator
Council of Veterans of the South Medvedkovo District
I, Savarovskaya Svetlana Sergeevna (maiden name Shchemeleva) was born
Grandfather and father worked on the railroad. Mom, Ekaterina Ermolaevna Novikova (born in 1920), worked as an instructor in the district party committee from the age of 16, later graduated from party courses and rose to the position of second secretary of the district committee. Further, with the creation of the Economic Councils, she was transferred to the city of Omsk to the district party committee to a leadership position. In connection with the liquidation of the Economic Council, she was transferred there to the position of head of the department for working with the population on complaints.
Grandma didn't work because... in 1941, in addition to our family, two mother sisters came to our room with children the same age: I was one year old, my cousin was 6 months old, my sister was 1.5 years old. We lived in such conditions for several years. But as far as I remember, they lived together. Two of my aunts got jobs, and my grandmother worked with us. And now I just don’t understand how she managed it while also having a farm (a cow, chickens, a wild boar and two sheep)! When we grew up, we were assigned to kindergarten ik. I still remember my grandfather well; he was an atheist, a communist. Grandfather was very kind, he woke up very early, but I just don’t know whether he went to bed, apparently that’s why he lived so short, only 51 years. He made hay himself and planted potatoes.
I remember my childhood years with rapture, I still remember kindergarten, I remember my teacher. She read a lot of books to us, and we walked around her like goslings (I can’t remember that anyone didn’t like to listen to her read books).
Our school was two-story, wooden, it was stove heating, but I don’t remember us freezing. There was discipline, everyone came to school in the same uniform (the quality of the material was different for everyone), but they all had collars. This somehow taught them to be neat and clean, the schoolchildren themselves were on rotating duty, in the morning they checked the cleanliness of their hands, the presence of a white collar and cuffs on the sleeves of girls, and the presence of a white collar for boys was mandatory. There were clubs at school: dance, gymnastics, theater, and choral singing. Much attention was paid to physical education. When I was already retired, I took my grandson’s skis to a physical education lesson, and that’s when I especially remembered the post-war years of 1949. How is it that this school managed to allocate a special room for well-groomed skis, which stood in pairs along the walls and there was enough for everyone. We were taught to be in order, the lesson was completed: you need to wipe them off and put them in the cell where you took them. And that's great!
I also remember fondly that from the 8th grade we were taken to a large plant named after Baranov twice a week. This plant was evacuated from Zaporozhye during the war. The factory was a giant, they taught us how to operate machines there, both girls and boys. We went with great pleasure. There were practically no lectures on working on them, but the training of the machine operators themselves, that is, practice, taught them a lot.
At the end of ten years, the question became where to go. It so happened that since 1951, my mother raised the two of us alone. Brother Volodya was in third grade, and I understood that I needed to help. After school I went to this plant and they hired me as a controller in a laboratory testing precision instruments. I liked the work, it was responsible, they checked calibers, staples, calipers and many precision measuring instruments on microscopes. They put their mark and “paraffinels” (in liquid hot paraffin) on each product. I still remember the smell of paraffin. At the same time, I immediately entered the evening department of the aviation technical school at the same plant. I finished it and received my diploma in Leningrad. I really liked the work, but time takes its toll. Two years later, she married a graduate of the Vilnius Radio Engineering Military School, Yuri Semenovich Savarovsky, born in 1937. We had known each other for a long time: I was still at school, and he studied at the Vilnius Military School.
He himself is from Omsk and came every year for the holidays. The garrison where he was sent to serve after college was at that moment relocated to the village of Toksovo, a suburb of Leningrad, where I went with him. In 1961, our daughter Irina was born. We lived in the Vyborg district of Leningrad for almost 11 years. I graduated from the Polytechnic Institute, and Yura graduated from the Academy of Communications. It was convenient, just close to us. After graduating from the Academy in 1971, my husband was sent to Moscow, where we live to this day.
At the end of his military service, due to health reasons, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, the husband was demobilized from the army. They say that if a person has talent, then he is talented in everything. And indeed it is! After graduating from school, college, and academy with only excellent grades, my husband found himself in creativity.
Yuri Semenovich is a member of the Russian Writers' Union. Unfortunately, he died in April 2018, leaving behind unforgettable masterpieces: paintings, published 13 books of poetry.
In Leningrad, I worked at a factory as a workshop foreman. Upon arrival in Moscow, she worked at the Electrochemical Plant as a senior site foreman, senior engineer of the All-Union Industrial Association of the Ministry of Chemical Engineering. She was awarded many certificates of honor and the Veteran of Labor medal.
Daughter Irina Yuryevna graduated from the Plekhanov Moscow Institute in 1961. She is currently retired. There is a grandson, Stanislav Petrovich, born in 1985, and a great-granddaughter, who is 2 years and 8 months old.
Work in public organization veterans of war, labor, law enforcement. She began her activities as a member of the active staff of primary organization No. 1. In 2012, she was elected to the position of chairman of the primary organization PO No. 1, due to her knowledge of working on a computer, at the request of the chairman of the district Veterans Council G.S. Vishnevsky. transferred as executive secretary-operator to the regional Veterans Council, where I work to this day. She was awarded with diplomas from the head of the district administration, the chairman of the RSV, the chairman of the North-Eastern Administrative District, the head of the municipality of the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo district, and the chairman of the Moscow City Duma.
Gordasevich Galina Alekseevna
Chairman of the medical commission of the Council of Veterans of the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo district.
When the war began, I was visiting my father’s relatives in Ukraine in the small town of Shostka. The front was approaching quickly. Alarms began day and night. When the alarm sounded, we had to run and hide in the cellar. Now the horizon is painted crimson and a constant hum can be heard. Close ringing explosions are heard. They blow up enterprises so they don't fall to the enemy. But we can’t evacuate: there is no transport. The state of anxiety is transmitted from adults to children. Finally, permission was given to board open freight cars filled to the brim with grain.
The journey to Moscow was long and difficult: bombed roadways, shelling by German pilots returning at low level to the base, locomotive sparks burning holes in clothes, lack of shelter from the piercing wind and rain, problems with water and food.
When it became clear that our cars had been running along the ring railway around Moscow for several days, we left our temporary housing, with difficulty making our way to Moscow, we found my father, who was mobilized to prepare for the evacuation of the defense plant. He sends us to catch up with my mother, younger sisters and brother, who, according to the order of the city leadership, have already been evacuated.
The meeting with my mother took place in the village of Verkhnie Kichi in the Republic of Bashkiria. Adults were recruited to work on the collective farm. I, along with other children, collected ears of corn. There was no Russian language school nearby.
In the late autumn of 1942, we moved to our father, who was in the city of Kirov, where the plant had been evacuated. There was a school in the factory village. They accepted me straight into second grade.
The classes took place in a one-story wooden building, similar to a barracks, apparently recently built, since there was no vegetation around, not even a fence and just a landscaped yard. I remember the red clay that stuck to my shoes and made them heavy. In winter the heating was poor. It was cold, or maybe chilly from hunger. As the evacuees kept arriving, the city could no longer cope with rationed supplies, and famine began. I wanted to eat all the time. It was easier in the summer. Together with other guys, you could go to an old cemetery, where you could find some edible plants. Oxalis, horsetail, young spruce shoots, just picking needles or linden leaves. In the summer you could pick up a mug of medicinal chamomile, take it to the hospital, and in return you would receive a portion of gray porridge sweetened with sugar. Mom and other women went to the nearest village to exchange things for something edible.
The main food was polished oats, which had to be cooked for a long time in order for both the first and the second to be learned. If you were lucky, the menu included “vochnotiki,” a cutlet-like dish made from frozen potatoes.
During lessons we often sat in outerwear, because the heating was bad. There weren't enough textbooks. We studied in turns or in groups. Notebooks were sewn from newspapers or written with quills; ink was carried in sippy inkwells.
In 1944, they returned to Moscow with their parents. It was not so hungry in Moscow. Grocery cards were given regularly. We lived in a factory barracks until 1956, since our pre-war living space, despite the reservation, was occupied by other people.
I really liked the Moscow school. It was a typical building, made of gray brick. Four floors with wide windows. Spacious and bright. The classrooms were cleaned themselves, on duty according to the schedule. The teachers treated us kindly. The teacher leading the first lesson always began with a story about front-line news; it was already joyful. The army advanced victoriously to the west. On big map In the history classroom there were more and more red flags that marked the liberated cities. At the first big break, sweet tea and a bun were brought to class. There were also not enough textbooks, and several people still studied one book, but we did not quarrel, we helped each other, the more successful students helped the lagging ones. On the desks there were the same sippy cups, but they wrote in real notebooks. There were 40 people in the class. We worked in three shifts.
You had to wear a uniform to class; our school had one. of blue color. A dark blue dress was accompanied by a black apron and dark ribbons; on holidays, a white apron and white ribbons. Even when visiting the boys' school for joint evenings, one had to wear this festive uniform.
There were pioneer and Komsomol organizations at the school. The reception there was solemn and festive. Extracurricular educational work was carried out through these organizations. Komsomol members worked as detachment pioneer leaders and organized games with children during breaks. High school students were supposed to walk in circles in pairs during recess. This order was monitored by the teachers on duty.
I was an active pioneer and an active Komsomol member. Amateur theaters were very popular. For some reason I got male roles.
The most favorite entertainment was a trip by a large courtyard group to the fireworks in honor of the liberation of the city in the center on Manezhnaya Square, where huge spotlights were installed, and somewhere very close a cannon was firing, the cartridges from which were collected as souvenirs. In between salvos, the beams of searchlights pierced the sky, now rising vertically, now circling, now crossing, illuminating state flag and portraits of V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin. The festive crowd shouted “Hurray!”, sang songs, it was fun and joyful in the noisy crowd.
And now the most joyful day has come - Victory Day. Together with everyone else, I also rejoiced at this national holiday. There was a festive event at school, they sang their favorite military songs, read poems about the exploits of our soldiers.
In 1948, after finishing seven classes, having received an incomplete secondary education at that time, I entered the Moscow Pedagogical School, since I had to quickly get a profession and help parents raise their younger children.
She began her working career in her 3rd year, going to work in summer pioneer camps as a pioneer leader.
In 1952, after graduating from pedagogical school, she was assigned to work as a senior pioneer leader at boys' school No. 438 in the Stalin district of Moscow.
After working as an assigned worker for three years, she switched to working as a primary school teacher at school No. 447 and continued to study at the evening department of the Moscow Institute of Pedagogical Education. Since September 1957, after graduating from the institute, she worked in a secondary school as a teacher of Russian language and literature. Until September 1966 at school No. 440 in the Pervomaisky district. Due to illness, in September 1966 she was transferred to work as a methodologist in the Pervomaisky Regional Educational Institution.
Due to a change of residence, she was transferred to school No. 234 in the Kirovsky district, now in the Northern Medvedkovo district.
I loved my job. She strove to use the latest forms and methods, ensuring that each student knew the program material. At the same time as classroom teacher She paid a lot of attention to the general development of her students, organized visits to museums, theaters, exhibitions, trips to places of military glory, and to memorable places in the Moscow region. She was the initiator of various school initiatives. Thus, in the courtyard of school No. 440 in the Pervomaisky district, there is still an obelisk in memory of students who died in battles for their homeland, which was installed at my suggestion and active participation.
My professional activities have been repeatedly awarded with certificates from authorities public education different levels. In April 1984 she was awarded the Veteran of Labor medal. In July 1985, he was awarded the title “Excellence in Public Education of the RSFSR.” In 1997 she received the medal of the 850th anniversary of Moscow.
Along with teaching, she actively participated in social work. From 1948 to 1959 she was a member of the Komsomol, was the permanent secretary of the Komsomol school organization, and from September 1960 until the dissolution of the party she was a member of the CPSU.
In September 1991, I started working as a teacher at a boarding school for blind children, where I worked until August 2006.
Total work experience 53 years.
Since August 2006, she has been involved in the work of the Veterans Council. For the first six months she was an active member of primary organization No. 3, then she was invited to the district Council to the position of chairman of the social welfare commission. Currently I head the medical commission. Since June 2012 I have had the “Honorary Veteran of Moscow” memorial badge.
Dubnov Vitaly Ivanovich
Chairman of primary organization No. 2
Council of Veterans of the South Medvedkovo District
I, Vitaly Ivanovich Dubnov, was born on October 5, 1940 in the city of Lesozavodsk, Primorsky Territory. After the USSR victory over Japan and the liberation of Southern Sakhalin, he moved with his family to Sakhalin, where his father was sent to head the construction of a dry dock for ship repairs in the city of Nevelsk.
In the city of Nevelsk he graduated from high school and in 1958 entered Tomsk State University at the Faculty of Physics.
After graduating from university in 1964, he was sent to work as an engineer at a defense industry enterprise in Moscow. In 1992, he was appointed Chief Engineer at one of the enterprises of the Energia scientific production association in Moscow.
During his work in the defense industry, he was awarded state and government awards: by Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR he was awarded the medal “For Labor Distinction”; by Order of the Minister he was awarded the title “Best Test Manager of the Ministry”.
In 1994 he completed courses under the Government Russian Federation on the privatization of enterprises. Participated in the work of federal privatization funds as a manager of shares of OJSC TsNIIS.
During the period of work from 2010 to 2015, he worked in the position General Director one of the enterprises of the Transstroy corporation. He retired on July 1, 2015. Veteran of labour.
Currently I serve in a public organization, the District Council of Veterans, I am the Chairman of the primary organization No. 2 of the Council of Veterans of the South Medvedkovo district.
Marital status: married, wife Larisa Petrovna Lappo and two daughters - Valeria and Yulia. Larisa Petrovna is a philologist, history teacher, graduated from Tomsk State University, Faculty of History and Philology. Valeria (eldest daughter) is a pharmacist, graduated from the 1st Moscow Medical Institute. Yulia (youngest daughter) – economist, graduated from the Academy National economy them. Plekhanov. The son of Valeria's daughter Savely is my grandson, studies at the Moscow High school economy.
My memories of my childhood years spent on Sakhalin after the war. The Soviet Army quickly liberated Southern Sakhalin from the Japanese army group, and the Japanese civilian population did not have time to evacuate to Japan. The Japanese constituted the main workforce in the construction of the dry dock. Russian specialists supervised the construction. I must say that the Japanese are very hardworking and very polite in their communication, including with Russian children. The life of the Japanese was very simple; when the tide came and the coastal bottom of the ocean was exposed for hundreds of meters, Japanese women took large wicker baskets and walked through the shallow water far from the shore. They collected small fish, small crabs, shellfish, octopuses and seaweed in baskets. This constituted the food of the Japanese after cooking in small stoves like our potbelly stoves. Rice, which was paid for in advance, was delivered in bags to houses on carts. There were no shops in the city. Russian families received food using cards from Lend-Lease reserves. The Japanese lived in small houses (fanzas), built from lightweight materials; the entrance doors in fanzas had sliding lattice doors and were covered with oiled paper. Russian children pierced these doors with their fingers, for which they received scoldings from their parents. Fanzas were heated from potbelly stoves, while the chimney pipe was located around the perimeter inside the fanza and only then went up. The city of Nevelsk (formerly Khonto) is a small town on Southern Sakhalin. There was one secondary school in the city, where Russian children studied together with Japanese children in Russian. At that time, there was compulsory seven-year education, and those who wanted to go to college studied in high school. My Japanese friend Chiba Noriko studied with me from the first grade to the tenth, who entered the Mining Institute in Vladivostok and subsequently worked as the head of a large coal mine on Sakhalin. I remember my difficult post-war childhood. How they also fished in the sea, made their own scooters, what games they played. How we bought our first shoes when I went to first grade. I walked to school barefoot, and only put on my shoes before school. We went in for sports. And we studied seriously and tried. We attended various clubs in the Houses of Pioneers. But they really wanted and were eager to learn. It’s funny to remember how they dressed. There were no briefcases, the mother sewed a bag from matting over her shoulder. There is something to remember, and it is interesting for children to listen to it. I get asked a lot of questions when I speak to school students.
To the 70th anniversary of Pob food in the Great Patriotic War, the district administration plans to install a memorial stone to the defenders of the Motherland - residents of villages, villages and the city of Babushkin (the territory of the modern North-Eastern Administrative District) who went to the front during the war of 1941-1945.
We need memories of eyewitnesses of these events, names of villages, villages, names of people who went to the front (possibly with a biography and photo).
Offers accepted by email [email protected] indicating contact information.
Antoshin Alexander Ivanovich
Memoirs of a member of a former public organization
juvenile prisoners of fascism concentration camps
Alexander Ivanovich was born on February 23, 1939 in the town of Fokino (former village of Tsementny), Dyatkovo district, Bryansk region. Expelled to the Alytus concentration camp (Lithuania) in 1942. “Mom had four children,” recalls Alexander Ivanovich, all
subsequently returned home. It was a terrible time,” Alexander Ivanovich continues the story, “much has been erased from memory, I remember barbed wire, naked crowds of us being forced into the shower, policemen on horses with whips, a line for slop, children of Jewish nationality being taken somewhere and the loud roar of parents, some of which later went crazy. The Red Army liberates us, they put us in the house of a lonely Lithuanian, and again we fall into a trap.”“One of the terrible pictures: It happened in the evening,” Alexander Ivanovich continues his story, “shooting was heard outside the window. Mom immediately hid us in the earthen underground. After some time it became hot, the house was burning, we were burning, we got out into the house. Aunt Shura (we were in a concentration camp together) knocks out the window frame and throws us children out into the snow. We raise our heads and there is a squad in front of us in green and black uniforms. The owner of the house was shot before our eyes. We heard these thugs shooting rampage every evening, and later we learned that they were “forest brothers” - Bandera.
They returned to their native city of Fokino in 1945, the houses were burned, there was nowhere to live. We found a dug cellar and lived in it until my mother’s brother returned to the war, he helped build small house with a stove-stove. My father did not return from the front.
In 1975, Alexander Ivanovich graduated from the Moscow State Correspondence Pedagogical Institute and worked at secondary school No. 2 in Fokino as a teacher of drawing and fine arts. Retired in 1998.
BELTSOVA (Brock) GALINA PAVLOVNA
Born in 1925. When the Great Patriotic War began, Galina was 16 years old. She studied in the 10th grade at a Moscow school. All Komsomol members of that time had one desire - to go to the front. But at the military registration and enlistment offices they sent me home, promising to summon me when necessary.
Only in 1942 did Galina Pavlovna manage to enter the Moscow Red Banner Military Aviation School of Communications. Soon the school began recruiting cadets who wanted to study to become shooter-bombers. Seven cadets, including Galina, who passed all the commissions, were sent to the city of Yoshkar-Ola to the reserve aviation regiment. Taught basic rules
aircraft navigation and weapons handling. It took them a while to get used to flying; many felt unwell in the air. When it was time to jump, the cadets didn’t have much desire to jump. But the instructor’s words: “Whoever doesn’t jump will not get to the front” was enough for everyone to jump off in one day.
The female crew that arrived to pick up the girls from the front made a huge impression. “With what admiration and envy we looked at the front-line pilots, at their brave faces and military orders,” recalls Galina Pavlovna, “we so wanted to get there as soon as possible!”
And so on April 6, 1944, Galina and a group of other girls - pilots - arrived at the front, near Yelnya. They were greeted warmly and cordially. But they didn’t let me go on a combat mission right away. First, we studied the combat area, took tests, and performed training flights. We quickly became friends with our new comrades.
On June 23, 1944, Galina received her first combat mission - to destroy a concentration of enemy manpower and equipment in the Riga area. What is indicated on the map as a front line, from the air turned out to be a wide strip of black caps of anti-aircraft shell explosions. This distracted attention, the pilots did not see the ground at all and dropped bombs, focusing on the leading crew. The task was completed.
This is how Galina Pavlovna’s combat life began; battle-hardened and experienced pilots were led into battle. After several flights, we began to feel more confident and began to notice more what was happening in the air and on the ground. A little time passed, and the young crews showed examples of courage and bravery.
“Once we were flying to bombard enemy artillery and tanks near Iecava in the Bauska region (Baltic states),” recalls Galina Pavlovna. As soon as we crossed the front line, my pilot Tonya Spitsyna showed me the instruments:
The right engine gives out and doesn't pull at all.
We began to fall behind the line. There were still a few minutes left to reach the goal. Our group is already far ahead. We decided to go on our own. We bombed, photographed the results of the attack and returned home. The group is no longer visible; the covering fighters left with it. And suddenly I see: a Fockewulf is coming at us from the right. I started shooting, fired several bursts. And here is another Fokker, but on the right front. He walked straight towards us, but at the very last moment he couldn’t stand it and turned away. No fear, only anger that you couldn’t shoot the vulture - he was in a dead zone, not fired upon by any of the firing points of our plane. Another attack is from below from behind. Gunner Raya Radkevich fired there. And suddenly there are red stars nearby! Our fighters rushed to our rescue. Oh, how timely! Having escorted us behind the front line, they left, waving their wings goodbye.”
Pilots from neighboring “brotherly” regiments treated Soviet pilots very well; at first they didn’t even believe that girls were flying Pe-2s, and then they even admired them. “Girls, don’t be shy! We’ll cover you” - was often heard in the air in broken Russian... And when friends are in the sky, even an attacking enemy fighter is not so scary.
The last day of the war. At night they reported that the war was over. The news is stunning! They had been waiting for so long, but when they found out, they didn’t believe it. Tears in the eyes, congratulations, laughter, kisses, hugs.
After the war, Galina Pavlovna returned home. The Moscow Party Committee sent Galina to work in state security agencies. In 1960, she graduated in absentia from the history department of Moscow State University and worked as a history teacher in a high school in the city of Kamyshin, on the Volga. She completed graduate school, defended her Ph.D. thesis, and worked as an assistant professor at Moscow State University of Civil Engineering.
BELYAEVA (nee Glebova) NATALIA MIKHAILOVNA
Natalia Mikhailovna was born on March 17, 1930 in Leningrad, in the clinic named after. Otto, who is still located on Vasilievsky Island, near the Rostral Columns. Natalia’s mother was a pediatrician, the head of children’s clinic No. 10 of the Oktyabrsky district. My father worked as a researcher at the All-Union Institute of Plant Protection, under the guidance of academician
Vavilova defended his dissertation. who fought among themselves. One hit in the form of a torch fell to the ground, the other flew victoriously to the side. Such a terrible picture was the war for Natalia’s children’s eyes.
Life gradually got better, schools opened. During the big break, schoolchildren were given a piece of bread. They didn’t want to learn German, they went on strike against this lesson, and insulted the German teacher. Schools switched to separate education: boys studied separately from girls. Later, uniforms were introduced, black satin aprons for every day, white ones were worn for holidays.
Natalia Mikhailovna grew up as a sickly child, so in grades 1 and 2 she studied at home, studied music, taught German. In 1939, her mother died, the girl was raised by her father and grandfather, who was also a doctor. My grandfather worked at the Military Medical Academy as an otolaryngologist with the famous academician V.I. Voyachek.
In the summer of 1941, together with her father, Natalia went on an expedition to Belarus. When they heard the announcement of the start of war, they dropped their suitcases and ran to the train station. There was hardly enough space on the train in the last carriage that managed to leave Brest. The train was overcrowded, people were standing in the vestibules. My father showed his mobilization insert on his military ID and, pointing to me, an orphan, begged to be let into the carriage.
In Bobruisk, the locomotive's whistle sounded alarmingly, the train stopped and everyone was thrown out of the cars. Two planes appeared in the sky
Natalia's father was taken to the front in the first days of the war, leaving the girl in the care of her grandfather and housekeeper. My father served on the Leningrad Front, defending besieged Leningrad. He was wounded and shell-shocked, but continued to remain in service until the blockade was completely lifted. In 1944, he was transferred to Sevastopol.
In mid-September 1941, schools stopped working, grams of bread decreased, stove heating became impossible, people were burning with furniture and books. We went to the Neva to get water once every 2 or more weeks with a sled and a bucket.
The war did not spare people from the remaining neighbors, and before the war in 8 rooms communal apartment 36 people lived, 4 people survived. In January 1942, Natalia’s grandfather died in the hospital; for the last 3 months he lived at work, there was no transport, and there was no strength to walk home.
At the end of autumn and especially in the winter of 1941-1942. Natalia and her housekeeper Nadya, a girl of 18-19 years old, lay on the same bed all the time, trying to warm each other. Nadya went once every 2-3 days to buy cards, brought some bread, which she then cut into pieces, dried, and the girls, lying in bed, sucked on it to prolong the eating process.
In the spring of 1942, bread began to increase from 110 g - 150 - 180 g, it became warmer outside, and hope for life appeared. At the end of 1942, having received an invitation from the Palace of Pioneers, Natalia became a member of the propaganda team. With a teacher and 2 other boys aged 10 and 12, they went to hospitals and organized concerts, sang and recited for seriously ill patients right in the wards. The song that had the following chorus was especially popular: “Darling, distant, blue-eyed daughter, gently cover the bear, when the battle is over, your father will return home. At short camping stops, and in harsh sleepless nights, you always stood up in front of me with this teddy bear in your hands.” The soldiers kissed the children and wiped tears from their eyes. The guys finished their performances in the kitchen, where they were treated to something. The first fireworks display on the occasion of the lifting of the blockade was met on the ice of the Neva River, with hoarse voices. Then they shouted “Hurray!” on Mariinskaya Square, and in 1945 they rejoiced on the occasion of the Victory.
N 
Atalia Mikhailovna remembers the column of pitiful Germans that was being led through the center of Leningrad. There was confusion in my soul - the pride of the victors was replaced by compassion for these prisoners, but still people.
In 1948, after graduating from school, Natalia Mikhailovna entered the 1st Medical Institute named after. I.P. Pavlova, who successfully graduated in 1954, choosing the specialty of infectious disease specialist. After completing clinical residency, she defended her Ph.D. thesis. She worked as a senior researcher at the All-Russian Research Institute of Influenza, and since 1973 as an assistant and associate professor at the Leningrad Institute of Influenza.
In 1980, for family reasons, she moved to Moscow. She defended her doctoral dissertation, became a professor, and since 2004, head. department at RMAPO.
Over the years of work, I have visited hotbeds of influenza, diphtheria, typhoid fever, salmonellosis, cholera, and VI Z infection in Kolmykia.
He constantly gives lectures to doctors, conducts consultations with critically ill diagnostic patients, and goes on business trips.
For about 20 years, Natalia Mikhailovna was the chief scientific secretary of the All-Union and then the Russian Scientific Society of Infectious Diseases, and the supervisor of graduate students.
Natalia Mikhailovna Honored Doctor of the Russian Federation, author of 200 scientific publications.
Currently, he continues to head the Department of Infectious Diseases of the Russian Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education, Dr. medical sciences, Professor.
Natalia Mikhailovna is a member of 3 scientific councils for the defense of dissertations, a member of the board of the Scientific Society of Infectious Diseases, “Honored Doctors of Russia,” and the editorial board of specialized journals.
Natalia Mikhailovna’s son is also a doctor, her grandson and granddaughter have already grown up, and her great-granddaughter is growing up. The granddaughter is also a doctor, in the 5th generation!
Natalia Mikhailovna was awarded the “Resident of Siege Leningrad” badge, medals “For the Defense of Leningrad”, “For Victory in the Great Patriotic War”, “Veteran of Labor”, “Honored Doctor of the Russian Federation”, “80 Years of the Komsomol”, and other numerous anniversary medals. He has an honorary silver order of “Public Recognition”.
Loves his family, work, Russia! Believes in her!
BARANOVICH (Simonenko) NATALIA DMITRIEVNA
Member of the Great Patriotic War.
In 1930, her family moved to Kharkov, as her father was transferred there to work. Here Natalya Dmitrievna graduated from school and entered college. After graduation, she is assigned to the regional village of B. Kolodets, Kherson region Tam
She is a teacher high school.
When the war began, the city of Kharkov fell under the occupation of German troops, and fighting took place on the Seversky Donets. The school is closed and a military field hospital is set up in its building. 3 teachers, and Natalya Dmitrievna among them, volunteer to work in it. Soon the Soviet troops are forced to retreat. The hospital is being disbanded, and some of its employees are sent to the rear. Now a military unit was stationed at the school - 312 Aviation Maintenance Battalion, 16 RAO, 8 VA - and Natalya Dmitrievna and two colleagues from the school became military personnel. She worked in this battalion until the end of the war and went a long way to Berlin, where she met Victory!
Natalya Dmitrievna was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, medals “For the victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945”, Zhukov, Czech Republic, the badge “Front-line soldier 1941-1945”, 8 anniversary awards, medals and commemorative signs, including “65 years of victory in the Battle of Stalingrad.”
After the war, she and her soldier husband were sent to Chernivtsi. There she graduated from Chernivtsi University and began teaching at school. After the husband’s demobilization, the family moved to Moscow, her husband’s homeland. First, Natalya Dmitrievna worked as a teacher at school, then as an editor at the Research Institute of the Rubber Industry - together with her husband she worked there for 20 years. She was repeatedly presented with certificates and gratitude, and was awarded the medal “For Valiant Labor.”
After retiring, Natalya Dmitrievna decided not to sit at home: a year later she got a job as the head of kindergarten No. 1928 in the Kirov district (now Severnoye district Medvedkovo),
In peacetime she worked with the same zeal and enthusiasm as during the war. She often received awards for her hard work, her kindergarten was considered the best in the area, and all her colleagues and parents fondly remember their friendly team.
Vladimir Antonovich, her husband, was seriously ill. He died in 1964, and Natalya Dmitrievna had to single-handedly raise her daughter, a student, on her feet. It was not easy, but now the mother is proud of her daughter: she has become a doctor of science and a professor, head of the department and author of textbooks.
Natalya Dmitrievna always tries to live and work honestly, help people to the best of her ability, and maintain good physical and psychological shape. She is avidly interested in everything that happens in our country and in the world. Despite having artificial lenses in both eyes, she reads and watches movies a lot. Natalya Dmitrievna truly loves people and helps them in word and deed.
Natalya Dmitrievna Baranovich is first on the left in the top row.
This year Natalya Dmitrievna turns 95 years old!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
BARSUKOV VLADIMIR EGOROVICH
Vladimir Egorovich was born on June 15, 1941, in the town of Zhizdra, Kaluga region. When the fascists occupied the Kaluga region and the city of Zhizdra, all the residents felt for themselves what fascism was: misanthropy, contempt for other peoples,
cult of brute force, humiliation of the human person.
In August 1943, the Germans forcibly took the entire Barsukov family: little Vova, his sister and mother to Lithuania to the Alytus concentration camp.
As a child, he went through a “death camp”, which remained forever in his memory.
It is impossible to remember those years without shuddering from horror and pain. At first they were placed in a barracks where there was nothing. “We were lying on the cement floor. Mom laid the children on her chest and protected them from the freezing cold of the cement, recalls Vladimir Yegorovich. - Prisoners were used for any work: loading, cleaning the territory. They fed them rutabaga and water, where some unknown pieces of meat floated. Local residents sometimes made their way to the camp and threw food to us. We were crawling for food, and at that time the Germans were shooting at us,” Vladimir Yegorovich continues the story. In all concentration camps there was hunger and beatings. Every day the Nazis took away dozens of people who then never returned. German camps were aimed at the physical and moral destruction of people. Children especially suffered.
In September 1944, the Nazis began to transport prisoners to Germany. On the border with Poland, freight cars in which people were transported were liberated by a group of partisans. The road home was long and difficult; it took almost two months to get home hungry and half-naked, and when we arrived in the city of Zhizra, we saw the city burned down. There were only chimneys, there was not a single house. But there was still joy that we were in our homeland. “There was hope in my heart that my father would soon return from the front and life would get better,” recalls Vladimir Yegorovich, “but they received a funeral. My father died on March 15, 1945 in a battle on the outskirts of the city of Schutzendorf.”
We lived in a dugout, after 4 years, Vladimir’s mother received a loan to build a house.
From 1947 to 1958, he studied at school, then worked at the Lyudinovsky Diesel Locomotive Plant as a turner. From 1964 to 1967, he participated in a geological exploration expedition in the city of Vorkuta, where he went with a friend.
In 1968, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Radio Electronics and Automation. He worked at the Academy of Medical Sciences as a senior medical engineer. equipment. In 1995, he retired as the head of the design bureau.
Vladimir Egorovich loves to play chess and dominoes with friends.
VALUYKIN GLEB BORISOVICH
Gleb Borisovich was born on October 16, 1937, in the city of Pavlovsk, Leningrad Region.
In 1941, fascist troops approached the city of Leningrad, and the blockade of the city began. All residents ended up in occupied territory. The shelling went on day and night, shells hit houses, from the fire of one house, entire streets. This is how the Valuikin family was left without a roof over their heads overnight. The family moved to live in their grandmother's house.
The main concern of the parents was the fight against hunger. Mom went out of town to the fields to collect unharvested vegetables. In the spring of 1942, many families, including the Valuykin family, were loaded into railway cars and sent to Germany. In the area of the city of Siauliai (Lithuania), families were sorted into farms. In one of which, in the landowner’s house, Gleb Borisovich’s parents worked as laborers. They did different jobs personal plot and in the yard, early in the morning they went to work and returned exhausted, wet, hungry and cold late in the evening, for this they received a roof over their heads and food.
In 1944, the Red Army troops freed the prisoners, and the family returned home to Krasnoye Selo.
DEITCHMAN LEV PETROVICH
Memoirs of a participant in the Great Patriotic War
Born on February 6, 1925 in the city of Kremenchug, Poltava region in a family of workers.
In 1932, he went to school, and in 1940, to the Moscow Vocational School No. 1 of Railway Transport, during the war years
Students within the walls of the school make shells, which are then sent to the front. In 1943, by decree of the USSR Government L.P. Deitchman is called to military service. At first, the recruits were trained to be sent to the front, and in 1944, they took part in combat operations on the 1st Baltic Front, the 3rd Belorussian Front on two Far Eastern fronts, first as part of the 14th separate anti-tank artillery brigade, then 534 and 536 anti-tank artillery regiment. For participation in hostilities 14 separate I.P.A.B. awarded the Orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov, the regiment was awarded the Orders of Kutuzov, and the personnel were presented with government awards. Lev Petrovich served as a carrier of shells in an artillery battery.
L.P. Deitchman awarded the order"Patriotic War II degree", medals "For Courage",
“For the capture of Keninsberg”, “For the victory over Germany”, “For the victory over Japan”, etc.
In 1948, demobilized from the army. Graduated from the Moscow Food College with a degree in mechanical engineering. Worked for about 50 years industrial enterprises and transport of the city of Moscow. He was awarded labor medals.
Lev Petrovich is still in service, studying social activities, spoke to young people and schoolchildren with stories about the courage of our soldiers, about the cost of the Victory.
Despite his advanced age, he actively takes part in sports competitions not only in the region, but also in the district. He has more than 20 sports awards and letters of gratitude. He loves skiing and takes part in the annual competitions “Moscow Ski Track” and “Russian Ski Track”.
In 2014, as part of the Moscow delegation, he traveled abroad.
Currently, he is the Chairman of the Council of Veterans of the 2nd Guards Army; in 2014, he was awarded the title of Honorary Veteran of the City of Moscow.
The employees of the council, the administration of the Moscow Region, and the State Budgetary Inspectorate of the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo district sincerely congratulate you on your anniversary!
We wish you good health, sporting victories, attention, care and respect from family and friends!
DUBROVIN BORIS SAVOVICH
Participant of the Great Patriotic War.
My maternal grandmother is from a peasant family from a village near the town of Levishevichi. Mom graduated from medical school and worked as a doctor at the Lefortovo hospital. My father was from the Ukrainian maternity hospital from the city of Uman, worked as a printing worker, and then as a commissar of the 1st Cavalry Army, later as an engineer at the TsGAM plant, and was the head of one of the large workshops.
“I started studying at the age of 6, I was a mediocre student, I didn’t like to read or write, I took everything by ear,” recalls Boris Savvovich.
In 1936, my father was arrested as an enemy of the people, he died in prison, then the “funnel” came for my mother, she was arrested because she did not inform on the enemy of the people. Nine-year-old Boris and his three-year-old sister were taken in by their grandmother. All things were sold or exchanged for food, and still they lived from hand to mouth.
There was no doctor in the camp in Minusinsk; the head of the camp appointed Boris’s mother to take over. She spent 6 years in prison and came out disabled. Mom worked as a doctor and remained in the settlement in the Ostyak-Vagul district. Being not healthy herself, she went out to see the sick on skis. She was loved.
When the war began, Boris Savvovich went to work at a defense plant as a turner, making shells for anti-tank guns, working 12 hours a day. Boris had a reservation, but in 1944, he went to the front as a volunteer. He ended up in the infantry in a rifle regiment, from which he was sent to aviation. At first he was a mechanic, then he asked to become an air gunner. He became an air gunner - the fourth member of the crew after the pilot, navigator and radio operator. The gunner must lie flat on the bottom of the aircraft and guard the rear of the aircraft. Air gunners died more often than other crew members. And on the very first day I had to face signs.
In the barracks they said: “Choose where to put your things.” I see everything is densely packed with duffel bags, and there is an empty space in the middle. I put my duffel bag there and went on a mission. When Boris Savvovich returned, he was greeted strangely: “Are you back? And we didn’t even wait.” It turned out that there was a sign that if the new shooter put his duffel bag in the place of the dead one, he was doomed.
So I was left without an overcoat. It turned out they exchanged it for Polish vodka,” recalls Boris Savvovich, “and so as not to be upset, they poured me a glass.
He fought on the 1st Belorussian Front, liberating Belarus, Poland, Warsaw, and Germany. He ended the war in Falkenberg with the rank of private. What he is very proud of is that he served in the army for a total of 7 years.
After the war, Boris Savvovich entered and successfully graduated from the Literary Institute. Gorky. As a true patriot, devoted to his Fatherland, the poet Boris Dubrovin could not live a calm creative life. 30 years of close friendship with border guards gave the poet the opportunity to visit all sections of the border (except the Norwegian one). During the Afghan war, Boris Savvovich performed with artists under fire. And to the song based on his poems “The Way Home” our troops left Afghanistan. He is a member of the Writers' Union, a laureate of many international competitions and literary awards, the television competition Song of the Year "From the 20th to the 21st Century", the All-Russian competition "Victory-2005", laureate of the medal named after. S.P.Koroleva. Author of 41 books – 33 collections of poetry and 8 books of prose. 62 poems were included in the Anthology of World Poetry. About 500 of his poems became songs that were and are performed by M. Kristalinskaya, I. Kobzon, A. German, V. Tolkunova, E. Piekha, L. Dolina, A. Barykin and many others. other. His poems have been translated and published in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Germany.
Boris Savvovich is rightfully proud of his medals: the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree, medals “For the Liberation of Warsaw”, “For the Capture of Berlin”, Polish medals.
EVSEEVA FAINA ANATOLIEVNA
Born on January 27, 1937, in Leningrad. When the war began, Faina was 4.5 years old, and her sister was 2 years old.
My father was taken to the front, and he held the rank of Art. Lieutenant, throughout the blockade, defended the Pulkovo Heights for almost 900 days. Faina Anatolyevna’s family lived in a nearby suburb, in the city of Uritsk, near the Gulf of Finland.
Less than a month after the start of the war, German troops found themselves in Uritsk. Residents were forced into basements with their children. And then
The Germans kicked everyone out of the basements, not allowing them to take any things, money, food, or documents. They lined everyone up in a column on the highway running along the Gulf of Finland and drove them with the dogs towards Leningrad. People ran for 15 km. Mom carried in her arms younger sister Faina Anatolyevna, and Faina, holding her grandmother’s hand, ran on her own. When we approached Leningrad, those who fled first were lucky, including Faina Anatolyevna’s relatives. They managed to get through the foreign post, but the rest were cut off by fire. The family managed to escape, they found relatives in Leningrad and temporarily settled in a room of 16 square meters - 10 people. We lived for 7 months in a hungry hell, under constant bombing. The winter in 1941 was cold, the thermometer needle dropped to -38 0 C. There was a potbelly stove in the room, the wood quickly ran out, and it had to be heated, first with furniture, then with books, rags. My mother went to buy bread; bread was sold strictly according to ration cards; after harvesting cabbage in the fields, she collected frozen cabbage leaves on the outskirts of Leningrad. Water was drawn from the river. Not you. One day she saw a lump of flour floating on the water, there was nowhere to put it, without hesitation, she took off her skirt and brought it home. Happy walked through the city wearing only pants. At some point, a cat was slaughtered, and broth was made from its meat for a month. Leather belts were used for broth, and jellied meat was made from clester. Every month people died of hunger. Of Faina Anatolyevna’s 10 relatives, three remained alive: herself, her sister and mother. Their father saved them; he helped his wife and children evacuate through the Ladoga Road of Life to the Urals in Chelyabinsk. The Ladoga road was also bombed both day and night. In front of the car in which Faina was driving with her mother and sister, a bomb hit the car with people and it went under the ice.
Then the route to the Urals was by rail. People were loaded into a train, the carriages of which were adapted for transporting livestock; there was straw on the floor, and in the middle of the carriage there was a potbelly stove, which was heated by the military. No one walked around the carriage; people lay half dead. Along the train's route, at stops the dead were unloaded, and the children were given a saucer of warm, liquid millet porridge. In Chelyabinsk, Faina was separated from her mother. She was admitted to an adult hospital, and her daughters to a children's hospital. At the children's hospital, the girls became infected with diphtheria; after three months, Faina and her sister were discharged. They lived with Aunt Maria, my mother’s sister. She worked as a dishwasher in a factory canteen and had the opportunity to bring a handful of burnt food in the evening; this was not enough, so during the day the girls tried to get their own food. The house in which they lived was located not far from the railway, next to the factory where white clay was transported. The girls collected clay that fell from the cars and ate it all day long. It seemed sweet, tasty, buttery to them. Mom was discharged from the hospital after another 3 months, she got a job at a factory, received rations, and life became more satisfying.
To return to Leningrad, a challenge was needed. To find out if my father was alive, my mother had to go to Leningrad. Having handed over my daughters to Orphanage, she went home. A terrible picture appeared before her eyes: there was not a single house left in Uritsk, there was nowhere to return. She went to Leningrad to visit her father's sister. What a joy it was when she met her husband there, who after the war stopped to live with his sister. Together, the parents returned to Uritsk, found a dilapidated basement and began to improve it: the father cleared away the rubble, twisted the barbed wire, and they helped him clear the area near the house. Mom took her daughters from Chelyabinsk, the family was reunited. A father from Estonia to Uritsk managed to transport a cow that he accidentally saw in the forest; only he could milk it. The animal lived with people in the basement. During the day, the girls picked quinoa and nettles for themselves and the cow.
In 1946, Faina went to school, we walked to study, every day 3 km to the station. Ligovo. They wrote on the newspaper between the lines, there was a great desire to study, I wanted to learn as much as possible, and most importantly, learn the German language. After graduating from 7 classes, Faina entered the Leningrad Mechanical Engineering College at the Kirov Plant. She worked as a designer at the brake plant named after. Koganovich. She got married and moved with her husband to Moscow. She raised her daughter, granddaughter, and now great-granddaughter. Faina Anatolyevna has suffered through her own blockade character, which helps her live and remain optimistic for many years.
ZENKOV VASILY SEMENOVICH
Participant of the Great Patriotic War. Participant in the Battle of Kursk. Staff Sergeant.
Born on October 12, 1925, in the village. Maloe Danilovskoye, Tokarsky district, Tambov region.
After graduating from 7 classes, Vasily Semenovich entered the pedagogical school. On June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began. Germany attacked the Soviet Union, peacetime ended, Vasily’s father was taken into the army, where in one of the battles he died defending his homeland.
Vasily Semenovich was forced to quit his studies and go to work in a printing house, first as a printer's apprentice. His
They were assigned to an experienced, highly qualified mentor, and the training took place on the job and fulfilled the norm. After just 1.5 months, Vasily was working independently. The mother raised 3 children, Vasily earned money to support the whole family.
In December 1942, Vasily Semenovich was drafted into the Red Army. Preparation went on day and night, classes lasted 10-12 hours. At the front he was a sniper and a machine gunner.
In September 1943, during the expansion of the bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper, during a shootout, he was wounded by an explosive bullet. He was treated at the hospital in Lukoyanov, Gorky region. (now Nizhny Novgorod region). After treatment, he continued to serve in the army and was sent to school to learn how to drive a motorcycle, and after studying he ended up in the Mechanized Corps as a motorcyclist. On my thorny, difficult path I saw and experienced a lot: the bitterness of retreat and the joy of victory.
Vasily Semenovich joyfully celebrated Victory Day in Germany in the Oberkuntzedorf region.
After serving in the army for 7.5 years, he was demobilized as a civilian and returned to work as a printer. Soon he was sent to study at the MIPT in the evening department, and having received a diploma, he worked as the head of a printing house, the chief engineer of the MHP printing house, from where he retired in 1988.
He took an active part in the work of the Council of Veterans of the South Medvedkovo region.
Vasily Semenovich was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, I and II degrees, the Red Star, the medal “For Victory over Germany,” and anniversary medals.
Ivanov Nikolay Alekseevich
Memoirs of a member of a public organization
former juvenile prisoners of fascism concentration camps
Nikolai Alekseevich was born in 1932, in the village of Orlovo (formerly the village of Svoboda) of the Mezhetchinsky village council, Iznoskovsky district, Kaluga region.
In January - February 1942, the Germans captured the village, driving the villagers out of their houses, German soldiers settled in them, and the residents were forced to live in dugouts.
The moment came when the Germans kicked everyone out of the dugouts, lined them up in a column and drove people to the West. “In Vyazma, we were united with other refugees and driven to Smolensk,” Nikolai Alekseevich recalls with pain in his heart, “Many people gathered in Smolensk, after a few days, people began to be sorted, some were sent to Germany, others to Belarus. Our family: mother, father and four children were driven to the city of Mogilev. They settled me on the outskirts of the city in a broken down barracks. I didn’t have to live long, I was taken somewhere again. This time to the village of Sapezhinka, which was located near the city of Bykhovo (Belarus). All daylight hours, adults worked in the fields, did agricultural work, processed vegetables; the Germans loved to grow Kohlrabi cabbage.
All war time were forced to live in labor for the benefit of German soldiers, and were beaten for the slightest offense.”
In the spring of 1944, Soviet troops freed the prisoners. Father Nikolai Alekseevich died, mother and children returned to their homeland. There was nowhere to live, the village was destroyed. We settled in a surviving house. Later, fellow villagers began to return, together they rebuilt their houses and improved their everyday life. In the fall, school started working, Nikolai went to 2nd grade.
From 1952 to 1955, he served in the army, in the city of Vologda, in the air defense radar forces, then served in the police. And later he worked in trade, from where he retired in 1992.
Everything turned out well in Nikolai Alekseevich’s life: 2 daughters were born, now a grandson and a great-grandson are growing up, but the horrors of wartime, no, no, are still remembered.
KRYLOVA NINA PAVLOVNA (nee Vasilyeva)
Memoirs of a young resident of besieged Leningrad.
Born on August 23, 1935, in Leningrad, st. Nekrasova, house 58 sq. 12. Nina Vasilievna’s parents – Pavel Fedorovich
and Maria Andreevna worked at the People's House opera house. My father died near Leningrad, my mother died during the siege. By the will of fate, little Nina ended up in orphanage No. 40. Until the spring of 1942, the orphanage was located in Leningrad.
When the “road of life” opened, according to documents on April 7, 1942, the orphanage in which Nina Vasilievna was located was taken to the Krasnodar Territory. Due to illness, Nina went to school late. “After what time the Germans arrived, I don’t remember that time well. - says Nina Pavlovna, - but the following picture is etched in my memory: New Year. Stands decorated big Christmas tree, and instead of a five-pointed star on the very top of the head there is a fascist sign. Another
“I remember the incident,” Nina Pavlovna continues her story, “We were hidden in some pits, if the Germans had found us, they would not have spared us.”
After the war, Nina Pavlovna really hoped that her dad was alive, she waited for her every day. She sent requests to various organizations, but when she received the terrible news, her hopes were dashed, and Nina Pavlovna became very ill.
After graduating from school, she entered an art school, and later, as part of her assignment, she went to Yaroslavl, where she met her future husband, a cadet at the Moscow Military School. In 1958, Nina Pavlovna got married and moved to Moscow to her husband’s place of service. They had two children, and now two grandchildren.
KOSYANENKO (Meinova) KHATICHE SERVEROVNA
Memoirs of a member of a public organization of former juvenile prisoners of Nazi concentration camps
The city of Simferopol, where Khatiche’s mother lived, was occupied by the Germans in 1942. There were
There were daily raids, the Germans went from house to house and forcibly took away young people to be sent to Germany.
In April 1943, after another German raid, Khatiche’s mother, like many other girls, was loaded into a railway carriage and sent to an unknown destination, and two months later, mother realized that she was pregnant. She was overcome with despair and burst into tears from grief.
Khatiche's mother was assigned to a German family to do housework, and when they found out about her pregnancy, they drove her out into the street with sticks.
Along with other captured girls, Hatiche’s mother was placed in a barracks, in a dark room without windows. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Czechs, and Italians already lived there. German soldiers drove girls to work in the fields, to factories. IN different time For years they were engaged in: planting, weeding and harvesting vegetables in the field, went to the factory to weave fabric, and at the factory they made tin cans. For the slightest offense they were put in a punishment cell, left for several days without food or water.
The living conditions of the people were on the verge of survival: their clothes were made of rags, their shoes were made of wooden lasts.
In such difficult conditions, women bore and kept their children alive.
In 1945, American allied troops liberated European cities from German invaders, the Germans retreated, and in order not to leave witnesses, the German government decided to drown all the barracks in which captive women and children lived. Huge hoses with strong water pressure quickly filled the barracks. Women, trying to save their children, held them on outstretched arms. In the barracks where Khatiche and his mother were, the water rose almost to the ceiling and suddenly stopped. A little later, American soldiers helped everyone get out. Those who could walk walked alone; many of the exhausted were carried out by the military in their arms. The women were filled with joy for the saved life; they thanked the soldiers by hugging and kissing them, and holding their children tightly to them. And they cried loudly, loudly.
Before being sent home, the liberated women were kept in Hungary for a long time. Unsanitary conditions, dirt, heat, insects all contributed to the spread of diseases. People died without food, water or medical care. Hatiche was also on the verge of death.
But the thirst to live and return to their homeland was higher than death. It was difficult then to predict what kind of torment would befall upon returning to their homeland. By order of the government, people could return only to the place from which they were taken away. Numerous interrogations and humiliations to which Mama Khatiche was subjected by state security structures did not break her strong character. For a long time they had no housing, their mother was not hired, the question of sending Khatiche and her mother to a camp was considered,
Orenburg region.
Khatich's father fought in the ranks of the Soviet army, in 1944, he and his parents were deported from Russia and the connection between the Meinov spouses was interrupted. And only in 1946, a letter came from Khatiche’s father with an invitation to Uzbekistan, the mother happily made the decision, and she and her daughter left to join her father and husband. There, Khatiche graduated from a pedagogical university and worked as a teacher. junior classes, got married, 3 children were born in her family, and did not notice how she retired.
In 1997, the family moved to Russia, and in 2000, to Moscow.
Khatiche Serverovna likes to knit for her mood. And decorate the entrance to create a mood for your neighbors.
MANTULENKO (Yudina) MARIA FILIPOVNA
Memoirs of a member of a public organization of former juvenile prisoners of Nazi concentration camps Maria Filippovna was born on May 22, 1932, in the village of Mekhovaya, Khvastovichesky District, Kaluga Region.
In January 1942, the Germans entered the village of Mekhovaya and drove the residents to Bryansk, to a camp. “We walked 25 kilometers,”
Maria Filippovna recalls that the Germans drove the prisoners with whips. Then we traveled through Belarus by train. They brought us to the Stuttgart camp, then to Stetin, and later we were in the Hamburg camp. They lived in common barracks, all mixed up: children, men, women. They fed them with gruel (sweet and salty rutabaga soup, similar in composition to flour) and buckwheat husks. Children were given 100 grams of bread per day, adults 200 grams. People fell unconscious from hunger. One day, Maria Filippovna’s mother also fainted.
They applied kerosene to prevent lice. In September 1943, the Yudin family was taken into his employ by the Bavarian Shmagrov. Each family member had his own responsibilities around the house: the grandfather worked in the garden, the father in the stables, the mother in the vegetable garden, the brother in the calf barn, the grandmother managed the house, she cleaned and prepared food.
In the German village, Belgian, French, and Italian prisoners lived with other owners.
On April 26, 1945, the families of Russian prisoners were liberated by Soviet troops. “When we returned home,” Maria Filippovna continues the story, “we saw burned houses, all the villages in the area were burned to the ground. Cold December 1945, we lived in a hut, later we dug a dugout, in 1947 we built a house.
To earn some money, in 1948-1949, Maria Filippovna went to peat mining in Yaroslavl region. She arrived in Moscow in December 1949. She worked in construction. In 1950, Maria Filippovna went to work at Metrostroy, as an underground pumper, and lived in a dormitory. In 1963, she received an apartment in Medvedkovo, where she still lives.
MUKHINA VALENTINA ALEXANDROVNA
Memoirs of a young resident of besieged Leningrad
Born on June 8, 1935, in Leningrad. Mom worked at the Baltic plant, dad was a sailor. When Valya was 1 year old, her father drowned.
June 22, 1941, Sunday, warm, sunny morning. And people’s mood is just as joyful and sunny. They go for a walk around the city, to the parks. They gather for dances and museums. The films “The Pig Farmer and the Shepherd”, “ Funny boys", "What if there is war tomorrow...". But the war will not come tomorrow, it already happened today, the Great Patriotic War.
Hitler hated the name of the city on the Neva, the glorious traditions and patriotism of its inhabitants. He decided to wipe the city off the face of the earth. It was proposed to blockade the city and, by shelling from artillery of all calibers and continuous bombing from the air, raze it to the ground. The blockade began on September 8, 1941.
Six-year-old Valechka remembers the bombings both day and night, and how scared it was to go outside. It is impossible to remember what this girl experienced and suffered without pain and righteous anger.
Valina’s mother, like many other workers, did not leave the frozen workshops for 12-14 hours. The motto of the Leningrad workers is “Everything for the front!” Everything for Victory!
Valya lived with her aunt, her mother’s sister. Life became very difficult: there was no electricity, heat, firewood, since there was a stove
heating. They lit the stove, and everything that burned was used for heating: books, furniture. There was no drinking water. The children were forced to follow her to the Neva River, they tied pots and flasks to the sleds, and drew water from ice holes.
But the worst thing is hunger. There was nothing to eat. “Before the war, my mother was a big fashionista - this helped us out,” recalls Valentina Aleksandrovna, “with the beginning of the war, we exchanged many of her things for food. A neighbor supplied us with duranda – it was delicious, and they made jelly from wood glue.”
Grandma Valya went to the tobacco factory and brought back cigarette casings, which were also exchanged for food. To fill empty stomachs and drown out the incomparable suffering from hunger, residents resorted to various methods of finding food. They caught rooks, furiously hunted for a surviving cat or dog, and took out everything that could be eaten from the home medicine cabinet: castor oil, Vaseline, glycerin. People had money, but it was worth nothing. Nothing had a price: neither jewelry nor antiques. Only bread. There were huge queues at the bakeries, where daily rations of bread were issued using cards. Valya remembers the siege bread - black, sticky. When it was cut into pieces. It stuck to the knife blade. Valya cleaned off this sticky mass and ate.
Someone looted apartments, someone managed to steal a bread coupon from a half-dead old woman. But the majority of Leningraders worked honestly and died on the streets and workplaces, allowing others to survive. In 1942, at the age of 31, Valina’s mother died. She returned from work and, scooping ice water from a bucket, drank to her heart's content. Her body was weakened, she contracted pneumonia and never recovered. She was taken on a sled to the Smolensk cemetery and buried. So Valya became an orphan. YES, Valya herself and her aunt’s family were so weak that they could hardly move. In 1942, residents began to be evacuated. In August, aunt’s family and Valya were sent to Altai region. The train in which they were traveling was bombed, their belongings were burned, but they themselves miraculously survived.
Return to hometown happened at the end of 1944. The city was sharply different from the city of 1941. Public transport was already running along the streets, there were no snowdrifts or garbage to be seen. Enterprises that received fuel and electricity were operating. Schools and cinemas opened, almost all houses had running water and sewerage systems, city baths worked, and there was a supply of firewood and peat. 500 tram cars ran on 12 routes.
Valya finished 7th grade and entered a technical school. In 1955, she arrived on assignment to the Moscow hydromechanization section. She worked as a hydraulic engineer-builder for hydroelectric power stations.
During her working career, she worked on projects for the construction of the Novodevichy, Ramenskoye, Lyubertsy ponds embankments, made a great contribution to the construction of the Luzhniki stadium and many other objects.
Since 1990, Valentina Alexandrovna has been on a well-deserved rest. But her active life position does not allow her to only raise 2 granddaughters and three great-grandchildren.
Valentina Aleksandrovna is the chairman of the Council of Siege Survivors of the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo District, an active participant in all events held in the region and district. Frequent visitor to area schools.
In 1989, she was awarded the badge “Resident of besieged Leningrad.”
Meetings with schoolchildren
PAVLOVA YULIA ANDREEVNA
Memoirs of the chairman of a public organization of former juvenile prisoners of fascism in a concentration campth
Yulia Andreevna was born on October 4, 1935, in the town of Yukhnov, Kaluga region. The city is located in a picturesque area, in a forest, with the Ugra and Kunava rivers flowing through it. Before the war, Yulia Andreevna’s father worked as a school director, and her mother was a primary school teacher.
The winter of 1941 was snowy, cold, the frost reached -30 0 C. The Germans burst into the city and began to drive all the half-naked residents out of their houses, a column more than a kilometer long lined up, “Mom grabbed the sled, sat my seven-year-old sister and me on it,” Yulia Andreevna recalls, and our torment began. They walked for a long time, surrounded on all sides by armed Germans with shepherd dogs, then drove, coming under fire from German pilots; many prisoners did not reach their destination. The survivors were brought to Roslavl and placed in camp No. 130. The territory was surrounded by barbed wire, and there were towers with machine gunners along the entire perimeter. The children were separated from their parents and forcibly placed in different barracks. The roar was terrible, small children kept asking for their mothers. The barrack was a dark room, with two tiered shelves on which lay straw. Small children were assigned to sleep on the lower bunks, older children on the upper ones. The food that was brought could hardly even be called food. Swimmed in the water potato peelings, but we really wanted to eat, so we tried not to notice the stench that came from the cup. And the next day everyone vomited. They didn’t give us any bread, we forgot its taste.” The women who were sitting in the next barracks were forced to work in peat extraction in the spring, the work was hard, they took peat out of the swamp, cut it, dried it, and the Germans sent it for their needs. Children were driven to the square to watch the public hanging of Soviet prisoners of war and the execution of Jews. Children's eyes saw many terrible moments in 1 year and 3 months, while six-year-old Yulia was in the camp. “One day, shooting was heard somewhere very close, bombs were falling from the sky, it seemed that the barracks were about to collapse,” recalls Yulia Andreevna, “it’s hard to say how long the battle lasted, it seemed long, and then the door opened and 2 soldiers entered the barracks and they say that everyone is freed; those who can go outside on their own, go out; those who cannot, we will carry them out in our arms. Taking each other's hands, we began to go out; the sight of the children was terrifying: thin, exhausted, dirty, hungry. Seeing the parents, a commotion began, screaming, mothers rushed to their children, children to their mothers, it is not clear where the strength came from. Not all mothers were able to hug their children, and not all children hugged their mothers. Happiness overwhelmed some and terrible grief overwhelmed others. Many prisoners died from hunger and overwork. Distraught mothers hugged the soldiers through tears, kissed their dirty boots, and thanked them for their liberation. It was in August 1943, a column of women and children left the camp, and 2 hours later, by order of Hitler, the barracks were blown up to hide the facts
violence, but the Nazis failed to destroy living witnesses. There was no way to get home in the town of Yukhnov; we waited a week for a car and lived in an open-air square. Sometimes cars with soldiers drove by, but it was impossible to take civilians, and there was nowhere to go. When we returned to our city,” Yulia Andreevna continues to recall, “everything was destroyed and burned, there was nowhere to live, we slept on the street, ate grass, sometimes went into the forest to pick berries, but it was mined and many people died from mine explosions.” shells."
Yulia Andreevna’s father, like many men from their cities, fought at the front, so it fell on women’s shoulders to restore the destroyed city. They cleared away rubble, cleared streets, tidied up houses and moved into them. A school for children was opened on the territory of the destroyed monastery, the teacher approached from child to child, explaining the material. They wrote with quills on old yellow newspapers between the lines, the ink was made from soot. There was also nothing to wear; schoolgirl Yulia and her older sister shared one pair of felt boots and a padded jacket between them.
Despite all the difficulties that befell this fragile woman, she did not lose faith in a better life.
Yulia Andreevna is the chairman of a public organization of former juvenile prisoners in the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo district, visits lonely members of her organization in the hospital, meets with schoolchildren at courage lessons, answers numerous children’s questions, and takes an active part in events in the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo district.
RYAZANOV VLADIMIR VASILIEVICH
Memoirs of a participant in the Great Patriotic War.
Retired colonel.
“When the Great Patriotic War began, I finished 9th grade,” recalls Vladimir Vasilyevich. - I still remember that Molotov announcement. I was born on the banks of the Volga. It was the Mari Republic, and now it is Mary El. My father was the chairman of the artel. Then a congress was organized in Moscow. And my father took me to look at the capital. I don’t know exactly the 20th or 21st, but the next day a greeting from the country’s leadership was planned on the square. And suddenly: “Attention! Now there will be a very important government message.” The message was about the beginning of the war. And after that, there were no special occasions, everything turned up and everyone went home. I haven't even looked around our capital. My father and older brother were drafted into the army. Mother didn't work. And I have 2 more brothers, one was 13, the other was 9 years old and a sister was 4 years old. After school, I went to a factory, managed to work for 6-7 months, and mastered the profession of an electrician.”
In June 1942, at the age of 17, Vladimir Vasilyevich graduated from high school. When the schoolchildren were lined up in the school yard, and the director began issuing certificates, a military commissar arrived in time. All young men over 18 years of age were given summonses. Among the tenth graders there were 12 such boys, only four of them returned from the front. Two of them are now alive.
Vladimir Vasilyevich participated in the battles of the Great Patriotic War as part of the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts as the driver of a combat vehicle of the anti-aircraft division of the 104th Guards Order of Kutuzov, II degree. rifle division 9th Army. The combat biography of Vladimir Vasilyevich includes victorious battles on the territory of Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia from January to May 1945.
In Hungary, he took part in the defeat of a German tank group: in the area of Lake Balaton and the capture of the cities of Szekesvehervár, Mor, Pape, etc., the capture of Vienna, St. Pölten in Austria, Jarmorzice and Znojmo in Czechoslovakia. In all battles he showed courage, courage, and resourcefulness.
He was discharged from the Soviet army in September 1975.
After his dismissal, he worked as a senior personnel inspector at Remstroytrest. In 1981-1996. military instructor at a vocational school, then until 1998, a senior engineer in the construction department of MISIS.
Vladimir Vasilyevich was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd degree, medals “For Victory over Germany”, “For the Capture of Vienna”, “For Military Merit”, and other anniversary medals.
Suleymanov Sauban Nugumanovich
Memories of a WWII participant
Sauban Nugumanovich was born on December 12, 1926, in the city of Chistopol in Tatarstan. Called up for the army 
when he was not yet 17 years old. The six months of preparation that Saurban underwent were very difficult: large physical exercise plus constant hunger. In 1943, Sauban Nugumanovich went to the front and fought on the III and I Belorussian fronts. In one of the heavy battles near Minsk, he was wounded in the leg. He was treated in a hospital in the city of Sasovo, Ryazan region. He recovered, became stronger and went to the front again. I celebrated the victory of 1945 in Berlin. He was demobilized in 1951. He studied to become a combine operator and went to work in Uzbekistan, where his uncle invited him. He got an apartment and met his wife Maya Ivanovna. She was 19 years old, he was 29 years old, they lived for 15 years in the city of Nizhnekamsk. They had 2 daughters. Sauban Nugumanovich is an excellent family man; his children and wife love him very much. The daughters brought their parents to Moscow and are helping them.
Suleymanov S.N. awarded the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War, medals “For the Capture of Berlin”, “For the Capture of Warsaw”, two medals “For Courage”, the Zhukov Medal, the Order of Labor Glory. Sauban Nugumanovich - winner of 4 five-year plans in peacetime.
Sauban Nugumanovich is a kind, sympathetic person. On November 27, 2014, as part of events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the Sulemanov family was presented with a television.
TYMOSHCHUK ALEXANDER KUZMICH
“They managed to pull me out of the burning tank”
On June 25, 1941, Alexander Timoshchuk would have turned 16 years old. True, by this age he had only three
Education class. At the age of 11, Sasha lost his mother, and his father, left alone with five children, sold his cow out of grief and drank the money away. Sasha had to quit school and go to work on a collective farm.
“On June 22, 1941, an emka came for me,” recalls the veteran, “and I was sent to the railway school, where I studied for 6 months. I spent another 3 months gaining my mind at the railway technical school, studying the braking system of cars. We studied for 4 hours, worked for 8.
Having received a train master's certificate, Alexander accompanied military trains until mid-February 1943. “Then I ended up at Koltubanovskaya station,” recalls Alexander Kuzmich. - Lord, I think where I ended up: two rows of wire, towers all around. We were brought to a former prison camp to build barracks. We had to live in dugouts, which could fit two companies, and were heated by only two potbelly stoves. They fed us gruel and soggy bread. Soon many, including myself, fell ill with pneumonia. Not everyone survived."
In August 1943, Alexander Timoshchuk was sent to the 1st Baltic Front. At the Western Dvina station, the train was partially bombed, the survivors were given rifles and thrown into battle. “I immediately ran into a healthy red-haired German with a machine gun. When he saw me, he raised his hands. I was taken aback. But the NKVD came up from behind: “Come on, soldier, go ahead. - recalls the front-line soldier. “And near the village of Zheludy, Pskov region, I was wounded twice, I almost lost my arm.”
After hospitalization, Alexander was sent to the 3rd Belorussian Front in the 11th Guards Army under the command of General Chernyakhovsky. Once I went on reconnaissance with my comrades and found myself surrounded from which they could not escape for 15 days. “And when we got out,” says A.K. Tymoshchuk, - from the entourage, was so hungry that, upon seeing dead horses in the field, they immediately cut off a piece of meat and boiled it in swamp water. Everyone was terribly poisoned. I still can't even see the meat. And when we returned to the unit, we were like those who had left
Alexander Kuzmich had a chance to take part in Operation Bagration, during which he was once again wounded. When he recovered, an acquaintance advised him to go to the Ulyanovsk tank school, where Alexander received the specialty of commander of a T-34 gun. “In January 1945, we were formed into a crew and we went to Nizhny Tagil, where, under the guidance of experienced workers, we assembled our own tank, which we later used to fight in East Prussia,” the veteran recalls. “I especially remember the battle three kilometers from Frischhaf. During the battle, our tank was knocked out, but my comrades managed to pull me out of the burning tank.” NKVD officers interrogated me from the encirclement several times until General Chernyakhovsky intervened.
Alexander Kuzmich was awarded the Order of Courage, 1st degree, medals “For the Capture of Koenigsberg”, “For Victory over Germany” and 20 more anniversary medals.
Interview conducted by I. Mikhailova
TSVETKOVA NINA ANATOLIEVNA
Memoirs of a member of a public organization of former juvenile prisoners of Nazi concentration camps
Nina Anatolyevna was born on January 2, 1941, in the village of Baturino, Baturinsky district, Smolensk region.
In March 1943, the Germans took Nina Anatolyevna’s family to peat mining in Belarus (white peat bogs). Small children were thrown into carts, while mothers and grandmothers ran after them.
The work in development was very hard, and the time was very hungry, many children died. In May 1945, Soviet troops freed the prisoners, and the family returned to their home village.
The father returned from the front, threw a bundle of large bagels around his daughter’s neck, it was so unexpected and tasty that it could not help but bribe the child’s attitude towards him. Little Nina had never seen her father before this meeting.
Nina Anatolyevna, due to her age, does not remember those terrible years, all her memories are from the words of her mother, who is no longer alive. Now Nina Anatolyevna would question her in more detail.
In 1958, Nina Anatolyevna graduated from school and entered the Andreevsky Railway College. In 1963, she got a job at Mosgiprotrans. She built a career from a technician to the head of an estimate group. She retired in 1996 and continued working until 2013.
“Now,” says Nina Anatolyevna, “there is time to meet friends, visit exhibitions, and go on excursions.”
Ustinova (nee Proshkina) Anna Grigorievna
Memoirs of a member of a public organization of former juvenile prisoners of Nazi concentration camps Anna Grigorievna was born on January 10, 1938, in the village. Gavrilovskoye, Shablykinsky district, Oryol region.
On August 13, 1943, five-year-old Anechka was forcibly taken to Germany with her parents and younger sisters. The family was settled in
the German’s house, or rather it was a barn with straw on which the Ustinov family with small children slept. During the day, parents went to work, and the girls sat locked up in the dark. In this barn there was a small window through which Anya and her sisters loved to look out onto the street, sometimes they saw German children going to school, but most of all the girls loved to watch the stork’s nest and watch how their chicks grew.
In January 1945, the Soviet army was advancing, the Germans were retreating, and the German owner fled for his life. The Ustinov family escaped from the barn and sat in a ditch for several days, afraid to stick their heads out. When the noise of bustle and leaving carts died down, Anya’s father decided to see how things were in the village where they lived. Realizing that there was not a soul, they returned to the barn. And in the morning the liberating soldiers came, one handed Anya a small chocolate bar, she held it in her hand for a long time, not realizing that she needed to eat it, because she had never seen or tasted chocolate before. The military took the Ustinovs with them and helped them return to their native village. My father stayed to fight with the soldiers.
The Germans burned the village, leaving not a single house. The villagers returned home and huddled in cellars and basements, building huts for themselves. In the fall, school started working, Anya went to study in the 7th grade, she had to walk 5 km to get there, but no one complained.
At the age of 16, Anna Grigorievna left for the Tula region, worked at a brick factory, then in a mine.
In 1960, she married fellow villager Ustinov A.F., and her husband moved to Moscow, where they still live today.
I was born on May 20, 1926 in the village of Pokrovka, Volokonovsky district Kursk region, in the family of an employee. His father worked as a secretary of the village council, an accountant at the Tavrichesky state farm, his mother was an illiterate peasant woman from a poor family, half-orphan, and was a housewife. There were 5 children in the family, I was the eldest. Before the war, our family often went hungry. The years 1931 and 1936 were especially difficult. During these years, the villagers ate the grass growing around them; quinoa, cattail, caraway roots, potato tops, sorrel, beet tops, katran, syrgibuz, etc. During these years there were terrible queues for bread, calico, matches, soap, and salt. Only in 1940 did life become easier, more satisfying, and more fun.
In 1939, the state farm was destroyed and deliberately declared harmful. My father began working at the Yutanovskaya State Mill as an accountant. The family left Pokrovka for Yutanovka. In 1941, I graduated from the 7th grade of Yutanovskaya Secondary School. The parents moved to their native village, to their own house. This is where the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 found us. I remember this sign well. On the evening of June 15 (or 16), together with other teenagers from our street, we went to meet the cattle returning from the pasture. The greeters gathered at the well. Suddenly one of the women, looking at the setting sun, shouted: “Look, what is that in the sky?” The solar disk has not yet completely sunk below the horizon. Three huge pillars of fire blazed beyond the horizon. “What will happen?” Old woman Kozhina Akulina Vasilyevna, the midwife, sat down and said: “Get ready, little ladies, for something terrible. There will be war! How did this old woman know that war would break out very soon.
There they announced to everyone that our Motherland had been attacked by Nazi Germany. And at night, carts arrived with men who had received summonses to be drafted into the war to the regional center, to the military registration and enlistment office. Day and night in the village one could hear the howling and crying of women and old men as they saw off their breadwinners to the front. Within 2 weeks, all young men were sent to the front.
My father received the summons on July 4, 1941, and on July 5, Sunday, we said goodbye to my father, and he went to the front. Anxious days dragged on; news from fathers, brothers, friends, and suitors was awaited in every house.
My village suffered a particularly difficult lot due to its geographical location. A highway of strategic importance connecting Kharkov with Voronezh passes through it, dividing Sloboda and Novoselovka into two parts.
From Zarechnaya Street, where my family lived in house No. 5, there was an uphill climb, quite steep. And already in the fall of 1941, this highway was mercilessly bombed by fascist vultures that broke through the front line.
The road was packed to capacity with those moving east, towards the Don. There were army units that had emerged from the chaos of the war: ragged, dirty Red Army soldiers, there was equipment, mostly semi-trucks - cars for ammunition, there were refugees (then they were called evacuees), they were driving herds of cows, flocks of sheep, herds of horses from the western regions of our Motherland. This flood destroyed the harvest. Our houses never had locks. Military units were located at the behest of their commanders. The door to the house opened, and the commander asked: “Are there any fighters?” If the answer is “No!” or “Already left,” then 20 or more people would come in and collapse on the floor from fatigue and immediately fall asleep. In the evening, in each hut the housewives cooked potatoes, beets, and soup in 1.5-2 bucket cast iron pots. They woke up the sleeping soldiers and offered them dinner, but sometimes not everyone had the strength to get up to eat. And when the autumn rains began, the wet, dirty windings were removed from the tired sleeping soldiers, dried by the stove, then they kneaded the dirt and shook it out. Overcoats were drying at the stove. The residents of our village helped in any way they could: simple food, treatment, soared the fighters’ legs, etc.
At the end of July 1941, we were sent to build a defensive line, outside the village of Borisovka, Volche-Alexandrovsky village council. August was warm, there were hardly any people in the trenches. The comfreys spent the night in the barns of three villages, taking with them from home crackers and raw potatoes, 1 cup of millet and 1 cup of beans for 10 days. We were not fed in the trenches, we were sent for 10 days, then we were sent home to wash ourselves, mend our clothes and shoes, help our family, and after 3 days we were sent back to do difficult tasks. earthworks.
One day, 25 Pokrovites were sent home. When we walked through the streets of the regional center and reached the outskirts, we saw a huge flame engulfing the road along which we should go to our village. Fear and horror took possession of us. We were approaching, and the flames rushed and swirled with a crash and howl. Wheat was burning on one side and barley on the other side of the road. The length of the fields is up to 4 kilometers. When the grain burns, it makes a crackling noise, like the sound of a machine gun firing. Smoke, fumes. The older women led us around the Assikova gully. At home they asked us what was burning in Volokanovka, we said that standing wheat and barley were burning - in a word, unharvested bread was burning. But there was no one to clean up, tractor drivers and combine operators went to war, draft animals and equipment were driven east to the Don, the only lorry and horses were taken into the army. Who set the fire? For what purpose? For what? - still no one knows. But due to fires in the fields, the region was left without bread, without grain for sowing.
1942, 1943, 1944 were very difficult for the villagers.
No bread, no salt, no matches, no soap, no kerosene were brought to the village. There was no radio in the village; they learned about the state of hostilities from the lips of refugees, fighters and just all sorts of talkers. In the fall, it was impossible to dig trenches, since the black soil (up to 1-1.5 m) became wet and dragged along with the feet. We were sent to clean up and level the highway. The standards were also heavy: for 1 person 12 meters in length, with a width of 10-12 meters. The war was approaching our village, fighting was going on for Kharkov. In winter, the flow of refugees stopped, and army units went every day, some to the front, others to the rear for rest... In winter, as in other seasons, enemy planes broke through and bombed cars, tanks, and army units moving along the road. There was not a day when the cities of our region were not bombed - Kursk, Belgorod, Korocha, Stary Oskol, Novy Oskol, Valuiki, Rastornaya, and the enemies did not bomb airfields. The large airfield was located 3-3.5 kilometers from our village. The pilots lived in village houses and ate in the canteen located in the building of the seven-year school. In my family there lived a pilot, officer Nikolai Ivanovich Leonov, a native of Kursk. We accompanied him to his assignments, said goodbye, and his mother blessed him, wanting to return alive. At this time, Nikolai Ivanovich was searching for his family, who had been lost during the evacuation. Subsequently, there was correspondence with my family from which I learned that Nikolai Ivanovich received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, found a wife and eldest daughter, but his little daughter was never found. When pilot Nikolai Cherkasov did not return from his mission, the entire village mourned his death.
Until the spring and autumn of 1944, the fields of our village were not sown, there were no seeds, there was no living tax, no equipment, and the old women and young children were not able to cultivate and sow the fields. In addition, the saturation of the fields with mines was a hindrance. The fields are overgrown with impenetrable weeds. The population was doomed to a half-starved existence; they mainly ate beets. It was prepared in the fall of 1941 in deep pits. Beetroot was fed to both Red Army soldiers and prisoners in the Pokrovsky concentration camp. In the concentration camp, on the outskirts of the village, there were up to 2 thousand captured Soviet soldiers. Late August - early September 1941 we were digging trenches and building dugouts along the railway from Volokonovka to Staroivanka station.
Those who were able to work went to dig trenches; the population who were unable to work remained in the village.
After 10 days, the comfrey soldiers were allowed to go home for three days. At the beginning of September 1941, I came home, like all my friends from the trenches. On the second day, I went out into the yard, an old neighbor called out to me: “Tanya, you came, but your friends Nyura and Zina left and evacuated.” What I was wearing, barefoot, in just a dress, ran up the mountain, onto the highway, to catch up with my friends, not even knowing when they left.
Refugees and soldiers walked in groups. I rushed from one group to another, cried and called my friends. I was stopped by an elderly fighter who reminded me of my father. He asked me where, why, to whom I was running, and whether I had documents. And then he said menacingly: “March home to your mother. If you deceive me, I will find you and shoot you.” I got scared and ran back along the side of the road. So much time has passed, and even now I wonder where the strength came from then. Running to the gardens of our street, I went to my friends’ mother to make sure that they had left. My friends left - this was the bitter truth for me. After crying, I decided that I had to return home and ran around the gardens. Grandmother Aksinya met me and began to shame me for not taking care of the harvest, trampling it, and called me to talk to her. I tell her about my misadventures. I’m crying... Suddenly we hear the sound of flying fascist planes. And grandma saw that the planes were doing some maneuvers, and… bottles were flying out of them! (So, the grandmother said, screaming). Grabbing my hand, she headed into the brick basement of the neighbor's house. But as soon as we stepped out of the entryway of my grandmother’s house, many explosions were heard. We ran, grandma in front, me behind, and we had just reached the middle of the neighbor’s garden when grandma fell to the ground and blood appeared on her stomach. I realized that my grandmother was wounded, and screaming, I ran through three estates to my house, hoping to find and take rags to bandage the wounded woman. Having run to the house, I saw that the roof of the house was torn off, all the window frames were broken, glass fragments were everywhere, out of 3 doors there was only one warped door on a single hinge. There's not a soul in the house. In horror I ran to the cellar, and there was a trench under the cherry tree. My mother, my sisters and brother were in the trench.
When the bombs stopped exploding and the all-clear siren sounded, we all left the trench, I asked my mother to give me rags to bandage Grandma Ksyusha. My sisters and I ran to where my grandmother was lying. She was surrounded by people. Some soldier took off his undershirt and covered the grandmother’s body. She was buried without a coffin at the edge of her potato garden. The houses of our village remained without glass and without doors until 1945. When the war was coming to an end, they began to gradually give glass and nails according to lists. In warm weather, I continued to dig trenches, like all the adult fellow villagers, to clean the highway in the slush.
In 1942, we were digging a deep anti-tank ditch between our village of Pokrovka and the airfield. Something bad happened to me there. I was sent upstairs to rake the earth, the earth began to creep under my feet, and I could not resist and fell from a 2-meter height to the bottom of the trench, receiving a concussion, a shift in the spinal discs and an injury to my right kidney. They treated me with home remedies, a month later I worked on the same structure again, but we didn’t have time to finish it. Our troops retreated fighting. There were strong battles for the airfield, for my Pokrovka.
On July 1, 1942, Nazi soldiers entered Pokrovka. During the battles and the deployment of fascist units in the meadow, along the banks of the Tikhaya Sosna river and in our vegetable gardens, we were in the cellars, occasionally looking out to see what was going on there on the street.
To the music of harmonicas, the sleek fascists checked our houses, and then, taking off their military uniforms and armed with sticks, they began to chase chickens, kill them and roast them on spits. Soon there was not a single chicken left in the village. Another fascist military unit arrived and ate the ducks and geese. For fun, the Nazis scattered bird feathers into the wind. Within a week, the village of Pokrovka was covered with a blanket of down and feathers. The village looked white, as if after snow had fallen. Then the Nazis ate the pigs, sheep, calves, and did not touch (or maybe did not have time to) the old cows. We had a goat, they didn’t take the goats, but they mocked them. The Nazis began to build a bypass road around the Dedovskaya Shapka mountain with the help of Soviet soldiers imprisoned in a concentration camp.
The earth - a thick layer of black soil - was loaded onto cars and taken away; they said that the earth was loaded onto platforms and sent to Germany. Many young girls were sent to Germany for hard labor; they were shot and flogged for resistance.
Every Saturday at 10 o'clock our rural communists had to appear at the commandant's office of our village. Among them was Kupriyan Kupriyanovich Dudoladov, former chairman of the village council. A man two meters tall, overgrown with a beard, sick, leaning on a stick, he walked to the commandant’s office. Women always asked: “Well, Dudolad, have you already gone home from the commandant’s office?” It was as if the time was being checked by it. One of the Saturdays became Kupriyan Kupriyanovich’s last; he did not return from the commandant’s office. What the Nazis did to him is unknown to this day. One autumn day in 1942, a woman covered with a checkered scarf came to the village. She was assigned to spend the night, and at night the Nazis took her and shot her outside the village. In 1948, her grave was found, and a visiting Soviet officer, the husband of the executed woman, took away her remains.
In mid-August 1942, we were sitting on a hillock in the cellar, the Nazis were in tents in our garden, near the house. None of us noticed how brother Sasha went to the fascist tents. Soon we saw a fascist kicking a seven-year-old child... Mom and I rushed at the fascist. The fascist knocked me down with a punch and I fell. Mom took Sasha and me crying to the cellar. One day a man in a fascist uniform approached us at the cellar. We saw that he was repairing fascist cars and, turning to his mother, said: “Mom, there will be an explosion late at night. No one should leave the cellars at night, no matter how the military rages, let them yell, shoot, close yourself tightly and sit. Tell it quietly to all the neighbors, all along the street.” At night there was an explosion. The Nazis were shooting, running, looking for the organizers of the explosion, shouting: “Partisan, partisan.” We were silent. In the morning we saw that the Nazis had dismantled the camp and left; the bridge across the river had been destroyed. Grandfather Fyodor Trofimovich Mazokhin, who saw this moment (we called him Grandfather Mazai in childhood), said that when a passenger car drove onto the bridge, followed by a bus filled with military personnel, then a passenger car, and suddenly a terrible explosion, and all this equipment collapsed into the river . Many fascists died, but by morning everything was pulled out and taken away. The Nazis hid their losses from us, the Soviet people. By the end of the day, a military unit arrived in the village, and they cut down all the trees, all the bushes, as if they had shaved the village, there were bare huts and sheds. No one in the village knows who this person is who warned us, the residents of Pokrovka, about the explosion and saved the lives of many.
When your land is ruled by invaders, you are not free to manage your time, you have no rights, your life can end at any moment. On a rainy night in late autumn, when the residents had already entered their houses, there was a concentration camp in the village, its guards, the commandant’s office, the commandant, the burgomaster, and the Nazis burst into our house, knocking down the door. They, shining flashlights on our house, pulled us all off the stove and made us face the wall. Mom stood first, then my sisters, then my crying brother, and last I stood. The Nazis opened the chest and dragged everything that was newer. Among the valuables they took was a bicycle, my father's suit, chrome boots, a sheepskin coat, new galoshes, etc. When they left, we stood there for a long time, afraid that they would return and shoot us. Many people were robbed that night. Mom would get up in the dark, go outside and watch from which chimney smoke would appear, so that she could send one of us, the children, me or my sisters, to ask for 3-4 burning coals to light the stove. They ate mainly beets. Boiled beets were carried in buckets to the construction of a new road to feed prisoners of war. These were great sufferers: ragged, beaten, rattling shackles and chains on their feet, swollen from hunger, they walked back and forth with a slow, staggering gait. On the sides of the column were fascist guards with dogs. Many died right during construction. And how many children and teenagers were blown up by mines, were injured during bombings, firefights, and air battles.
The end of January 1943 was still rich in events in the life of the village, such as the appearance of a huge number of leaflets, both Soviet and Nazi German. Already frostbitten, in rags, fascist soldiers walked back from the Volga, and fascist planes dropped leaflets on the villages, where they talked about victories over Soviet troops on the Don and Volga. From Soviet leaflets we learned that battles were coming for the village, that residents of Slobodskaya and Zarechnaya streets had to leave the village. Having taken all their belongings so that they could shelter from the frost, the residents of the street left and spent three days outside the village in pits and in an anti-tank ditch tormented, waiting for the end of the fighting for Pokrovka. The village was bombed by Soviet planes, as the Nazis settled in our houses. Everything that can be burned for heating - cabinets, chairs, wooden beds, tables, doors, the Nazis burned everything. During the liberation of the village, Golovinovskaya Street, houses, and barns were burned.
On February 2, 1943, we returned home, cold, hungry, many of us had been sick for a long time. In the meadow separating our street from Slobodskaya, lay the black corpses of killed fascists. Only at the beginning of March, when the sun began to warm up and the corpses thawed, was the burial of the Nazi soldiers who died during the liberation of the village organized in a common grave. February-March 1943, we, residents of the village of Pokrovka, kept the highway in constant good condition, along which vehicles with shells and Soviet soldiers also went to the front, and it was not far away, the whole country was intensely preparing for the summer general battle on the resulting Kursk Bulge. May-July and the beginning of August 1943, together with my fellow villagers, I was again in the trenches near the village of Zalomnoye, which is located along the Moscow-Donbass railway.
On my next visit to the village, I learned about misfortune in our family. Brother Sasha went with the older boys to the torah. There stood a tank that had been knocked out and abandoned by the Nazis, and there were many shells near it. The kids placed a large projectile with its wings down, placed a smaller one on it, and hit it with the third one. The explosion lifted the boys up and threw them into the river. My brother’s friends were wounded, one had his leg broken, another was wounded in the arm, leg and part of his tongue was torn off, his brother’s thumb right leg, and there were countless scratches.
During the bombing or shelling, for some reason it seemed to me that they only wanted to kill me, and were aiming at me, and I always asked myself with tears and bitterness, what did I manage to do so bad?
War is scary! This is blood, the loss of family and friends, this is robbery, these are the tears of children and the elderly, violence, humiliation, depriving a person of all his natural rights and opportunities.
From the memoirs of Tatyana Semyonovna Bogatyreva
My father, Lyubchenko Alexander Mitrofanovich, was born in 1914, in the village (now city) Boguchar, Voronezh region. In 1937 he graduated from the Voronezh Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Agricultural Machinery. In 1939, he was drafted into the ranks of the Red Army, Place of conscription: Kaganovichsky RVK, Voronezh region, Voronezh. (I learned the place of conscription from the electronic document bank “Feat of the People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.”).
In 1939, he was drafted into the ranks of the Red Army, Place of conscription: Kaganovichsky RVK, Voronezh region, Voronezh. (I learned the place of conscription from the electronic document bank “Feat of the People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.”).
He graduated from the school for junior commanders, and in the same year he was awarded the rank of sergeant. Specialty: auto and armored vehicle repairman. At the beginning of the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940. he served in the tank corps, which was attached to the 7th Army. Army with the outbreak of hostilities in November 1939. launched an offensive on the Karelian Isthmus. My father was the commander of a repair department as part of a repair company of a tank corps. The department's task was to repair damaged tanks, armored vehicles and transport vehicles.
Repairs often began on the battlefield. Sometimes, without waiting for the end of the battle, a repair team approached or ran up to the damaged tank, and sometimes even crawled. The first task was to determine whether it was possible to quickly restore the car to a state where it would leave the field under its own power for repairs. If not, can it be towed by a tank tractor? The worst thing was, as my father said, to find dead people in the tank. The conventional signal that there were wounded was the firing of a red rocket. Orderlies were sent for the wounded. Repairs were different. Sometimes they simply started a stalled engine that the crew could not start. Sometimes they replaced the tracks and pulled the torn tracks onto the rollers. As a rule, the repairmen were accompanied by one gunner, who kept surveillance from outside during the repairs. In case the attack flounders and the Finns launch a counterattack.
This is what happened in November 1939. Our units launched an offensive on the Karelian Isthmus, in the Vyborg direction. We have not yet reached the Mannerheim line. The area was swampy, with copses. There were huge boulders and even rocks in the forest. The terrain is not suitable for tanks. Although our heavy tanks of the KV type could go straight through the forest, cutting down trees. But still, the offensive for the most part took place along roads and along roads.
Once in a copse, on a country road, a fight broke out. Ours brought up 2 tanks. But they didn’t provide help for long. One hit a mine, the ammunition detonated, the turret jumped over the tank and fell next to it. The second tank continued to support the offensive and moved along the forest road. He approached the huge boulders that formed a gate along the road. It was impossible to go around them. The tank began to move forward, and then it also ran into a mine. He was luckier. The mine broke the track, the caterpillar exploded, and the tank stopped. There was a battle all around, the tankers were shell-shocked. They managed to be taken out of the tank, and at the same time the machine gun and radio were removed from the tank.
It got dark. The battle died down on its own. Neither the Finns nor ours dared to stay in the woods at night. We moved to the edges, on opposite sides of the copse. My father received a task: in the dark, before dawn, approach the tank with two repairmen from his department, pull the track, start the tank and take it out of the forest. They promised to send security immediately at dawn. The father and two soldiers took 2 tank tracks and a tool in their backpacks and went into the forest.
They walked to the tank with caution; Finns appeared behind every tree. However, they reached the tank and inspected it. We started to repair. And then the father saw that they were surrounded. The Finns walked quietly, wearing camouflage suits. There was 50 meters before them. There was no point in accepting a fight. The repairmen were only given pistols; as they joked, “it was convenient to shoot yourself with, but not so much for fighting.”
The father commanded in a low voice: “get into the tank.” Either the Finns didn’t see ours until the last moment, or they didn’t want to open fire, but, as my father said, they managed to climb into the tank through the driver’s hatch and battened down all the hatches from the inside. The Finns approached, apparently saw traces of the repairs that had begun and realized that the repairmen were inside. They tried to open the hatches, but could not. Then they started shouting “Ivan surrender!” There was no answer from the tank. Soon, those in the tank heard that pieces of wood began to hit the tank. It was the Finns who dragged dry trees to the tank and covered the tank with brushwood. Soon the smell of smoke was felt, smoke began to climb out of all the cracks. The Finns started shouting again, “Ivan give up!” and “Ivan bath!” It’s good that it was a BT-7 diesel tank; they did not ignite as quickly as gasoline tanks.
Father and his soldiers were sitting in the tank, with a hollow overcoat wrapped around their heads. This protected them at least a little from the smoke. And they thought what would happen first - they would lose consciousness from the smoke or the fuel tanks would ignite. It was getting hot. But there was no thought of giving up. My father said that he had already mentally said goodbye to his sisters; then he was not yet married. In general, we prepared for a painful death.
Almost in a half-fainting state, they suddenly heard shots. A shootout ensued, but quickly ended. Someone hit the armor with a butt and shouted “Are you alive?” Now the most important thing was to open the hatch. The father remembered the last thing he did: he opened the driver’s hatch and lost consciousness. He woke up lying on the ground, someone lifted his head and tried to pour vodka into his mouth. The father coughed and came to his senses. His head hurt like crazy, but he was alive! His fighters also came to their senses. They sat in the snow, looked at each other and smiled. But then the company commander came up and ordered us to continue working. In general, the caterpillar was soon repaired, the tank was started and it left the forest under its own power. This was the first time death was very close.
The Great Patriotic War began for my father on June 22 near Odessa on the Southern Front. There were heavy battles and retreats. At the beginning of the war, he was awarded the rank of senior sergeant. Then there was the defense of Moscow, the defense of Stalingrad. For participation in these battles, he was awarded the medals “For the Defense of Moscow”, “For the Defense of Stalingrad”, and the medal “For Military Merit”. He was once slightly and once seriously wounded and shell-shocked several times. But after treatment he returned to duty. I found the nomination for the Order of the Red Star in the electronic document bank “Feat of the People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.” It is especially valuable that this presentation was made on the Stalingrad front. (see photo for copy of performance). I also saw a copy of the order in “Feat of the People.” In accordance with this idea, the order for the 90th Tank Brigade dated December 16, 1942 states the awarding of the medal “For Military Merit.”
The second incident occurred in March 1945, during the liberation of Czechoslovakia. By that time, my father was already a guard technician-lieutenant, commander of a repair platoon. There were stubborn battles; the 12th Guards Tank Brigade, where my father served, took part in battles against the armies of Group Center.
The Germans resisted desperately, the advance was slow. One day, he received an order to examine a tank that remained on the battlefield. As the repair crew approached the tank, a shell exploded nearby. The blast wave threw my father into a crater and covered him with earth. He lost consciousness. The orderlies who were picking up the dead and wounded saw boots sticking out of the ground. They dug up my father, but he was without signs of life. The father, along with the other dead, was taken to a barn on the edge of the village and laid on a tarpaulin on the earthen floor of the barn.
Tomorrow all those killed would have to be buried in a mass grave. Friends and fellow soldiers remembered their murdered friend in the evening. And then someone remembered that the night before the officers were given cash allowances. Afterwards we played cards and my father was lucky. He won well. We decided to look through personal belongings, but found no money. They thought that maybe he hid it somewhere behind the lining of the uniform, and maybe the orderlies didn’t have time to find it and pull it out. We decided to go to the barn and check. In the darkness of the barn, by the light of a lantern, they found my father. They started searching. And then one of them noticed that he was warm and there was breathing. The orderlies from the medical unit were called. The father was taken to the medical unit. There they were convinced that he was indeed alive, but very badly shell-shocked and unconscious. The next morning he was sent to the hospital. A month and a half later he was again in service and took part in the liberation of Prague.
For the capture of Prague he was awarded the medal of the same name. He ended the war in the Czechoslovakian city of Rakovnik, where the photograph shown on the first page was taken. At the end of the war in June 1945, my father was nominated for an award - the Order of the Patriotic War, II class. I found the idea in “Feat of the People.” However, in the award order in accordance with this idea, the order is also in the “Feat of the People”, he was awarded the second medal “For Military Merit”. A copy of the presentation is shown in the photo.
My father’s awards were 6 military medals (for the defense of Stalingrad, they were not preserved, although they were mentioned in the presentation of the order in 1945) and 1 post-war, anniversary medal. My father was proud of his awards. Order bars were sewn onto his festive suit. The medals are carefully kept in our family.
Since 1946, my father worked in various Moscow research institutes specializing in mechanization Agriculture. In 1951, father met mother and a new family was formed. In 1953, I did not appear.
My father passed away early, in 1967, when I was only 14 years old. He finished his career at the Ministry of Agriculture of the RSFSR. War wounds and poor health at the front took their toll.
I never thought that I would see the documents that accompanied my father’s military path, and that I would work in a company that fulfills this noble mission - making front-line documents into the public domain. When I look at the documents in the OBD Memorial and “Feat of the People”, it seems to me that my father is telling us “Thank you!”, because people do not die as long as the memory of them is kept in our hearts!
Lyubchenko Sergey Alexandrovich
We have collected for you the best stories about the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. First-person stories, not made up, living memories of front-line soldiers and witnesses of the war.
A story about the war from the book of priest Alexander Dyachenko “Overcoming”
I was not always old and frail, I lived in a Belarusian village, I had a family, very good husband. But the Germans came, my husband, like other men, joined the partisans, he was their commander. We women supported our men in any way we could. The Germans became aware of this. They arrived in the village early in the morning. They kicked everyone out of their houses and drove them like cattle to the station in a neighboring town. The carriages were already waiting for us there. People were packed into the heated vehicles so that we could only stand. We drove with stops for two days, they gave us no water or food. When we were finally unloaded from the carriages, some were no longer able to move. Then the guards began throwing them to the ground and finishing them off with the butts of their carbines. And then they showed us the direction to the gate and said: “Run.” As soon as we had run half the distance, the dogs were released. The strongest reached the gate. Then the dogs were driven away, everyone who remained was lined up in a column and led through the gate, on which it was written in German: “To each his own.” Since then, boy, I can't look at tall chimneys.
She bared her arm and showed me a tattoo of a row of numbers on inside hands, closer to the elbow. I knew it was a tattoo, my dad had a tank tattooed on his chest because he is a tanker, but why put numbers on it?
I remember that she also talked about how our tankers liberated them and how lucky she was to live to see this day. She didn’t tell me anything about the camp itself and what was happening in it; she probably pitied my childish head.
I learned about Auschwitz only later. I found out and understood why my neighbor couldn’t look at the pipes of our boiler room.
During the war, my father also ended up in occupied territory. They got it from the Germans, oh, how they got it. And when ours drove a little, they, realizing that the grown-up boys were tomorrow’s soldiers, decided to shoot them. They gathered everyone and took them to the log, and then our airplane saw a crowd of people and started a line nearby. The Germans are on the ground, and the boys are scattered. My dad was lucky, he escaped with a shot in his hand, but he escaped. Not everyone was lucky then.
My father was a tank driver in Germany. Their tank brigade distinguished itself near Berlin on the Seelow Heights. I've seen photos of these guys. Young people, and all their chests are in orders, several people - . Many, like my dad, were drafted into the active army from occupied lands, and many had something to take revenge on the Germans for. That may be why they fought so desperately and bravely.
They walked across Europe, liberated concentration camp prisoners and beat the enemy, finishing them off mercilessly. “We were eager to go to Germany itself, we dreamed of how we would smear it with the caterpillar tracks of our tanks. We had a special unit, even the uniform was black. We still laughed, as if they wouldn’t confuse us with the SS men.”
Immediately after the end of the war, my father’s brigade was stationed in one of the small German towns. Or rather, in the ruins that remained of it. They somehow settled down in the basements of the buildings, but there was no room for a dining room. And the brigade commander, a young colonel, ordered the tables to be knocked down from shields and a temporary canteen to be set up right in the town square.
“And here is our first peaceful dinner. Field kitchens, cooks, everything is as usual, but the soldiers do not sit on the ground or on a tank, but, as expected, at tables. We had just started having lunch, and suddenly German children began crawling out of all these ruins, basements, and crevices like cockroaches. Some are standing, but others can no longer stand from hunger. They stand and look at us like dogs. And I don’t know how it happened, but I took the bread with my shot hand and put it in my pocket, I looked quietly, and all our guys, without raising their eyes to each other, did the same.”
And then they fed the German children, gave away everything that could somehow be hidden from dinner, just yesterday’s children themselves, who very recently, without flinching, were raped, burned, shot by the fathers of these German children on our land they had captured.
The brigade commander, Hero of the Soviet Union, a Jew by nationality, whose parents, like all other Jews of a small Belarusian town, were buried alive by punitive forces, had every right, both moral and military, to drive away the German “geeks” from his tank crews with volleys. They ate his soldiers, reduced their combat effectiveness, many of these children were also sick and could spread the infection among the personnel.
But the colonel, instead of shooting, ordered an increase in the food consumption rate. And German children, on the orders of the Jew, were fed along with his soldiers.
What kind of phenomenon do you think this is - the Russian Soldier? Where does this mercy come from? Why didn't they take revenge? It seems beyond anyone’s strength to find out that all your relatives were buried alive, perhaps by the fathers of these same children, to see concentration camps with many bodies of tortured people. And instead of “taking it easy” on the children and wives of the enemy, they, on the contrary, saved them, fed them, and treated them.
Several years have passed since the events described, and my dad, having graduated from military school in the fifties, again served in Germany, but as an officer. Once on the street of one city a young German called out to him. He ran up to my father, grabbed his hand and asked:
Don't you recognize me? Yes, of course, now it’s hard to recognize that hungry, ragged boy in me. But I remember you, how you fed us then among the ruins. Believe me, we will never forget this.
This is how we made friends in the West, by force of arms and the all-conquering power of Christian love.
Alive. We'll endure it. We will win.
THE TRUTH ABOUT WAR
It should be noted that not everyone was convincingly impressed by V. M. Molotov’s speech on the first day of the war, and the final phrase caused irony among some soldiers. When we, doctors, asked them how things were at the front, and we lived only for this, we often heard the answer: “We are scuttling. Victory is ours... that is, the Germans!”
I can’t say that J.V. Stalin’s speech had a positive effect on everyone, although most of them felt warm from it. But in the darkness of a long line for water in the basement of the house where the Yakovlevs lived, I once heard: “Here! They became brothers and sisters! I forgot how I went to jail for being late. The rat squeaked when the tail was pressed!” The people were silent at the same time. I have heard similar statements more than once.
Two other factors contributed to the rise of patriotism. Firstly, these are the atrocities of the fascists on our territory. Newspaper reports that in Katyn near Smolensk the Germans shot tens of thousands of Poles we had captured, and that it was not us during the retreat, as the Germans assured, that were perceived without malice. Anything could have happened. “We couldn’t leave them to the Germans,” some reasoned. But the population could not forgive the murder of our people.
In February 1942, my senior operating nurse A.P. Pavlova received a letter from the liberated banks of the Seliger River, which told how, after the explosion of a hand fan in the German headquarters hut, they hanged almost all the men, including Pavlova’s brother. They hung him on a birch tree near his native hut, and he hung for almost two months in front of his wife and three children. The mood of the entire hospital from this news became menacing for the Germans: both the staff and the wounded soldiers loved Pavlova... I ensured that the original letter was read in all the wards, and Pavlova’s face, yellowed from tears, was in the dressing room before everyone’s eyes...
The second thing that made everyone happy was the reconciliation with the church. The Orthodox Church showed true patriotism in its preparations for the war, and it was appreciated. Government awards showered on the patriarch and clergy. These funds were used to create air squadrons and tank divisions with the names “Alexander Nevsky” and “Dmitry Donskoy”. They showed a film where a priest with the chairman of the district executive committee, a partisan, destroys atrocious fascists. The film ended with the old bell ringer climbing the bell tower and ringing the alarm, crossing himself widely before doing so. It sounded directly: “Fall yourself with the sign of the cross, Russian people!” The wounded spectators and the staff had tears in their eyes when the lights came on.
On the contrary, the huge money contributed by the chairman of the collective farm, it seems, Ferapont Golovaty, caused evil smiles. “Look how I stole from the hungry collective farmers,” said the wounded peasants.
The activities of the fifth column, that is, internal enemies, also caused enormous indignation among the population. I myself saw how many of them there were: German planes were even signaled from the windows with multi-colored flares. In November 1941, at the Neurosurgical Institute hospital, they signaled from the window in Morse code. The doctor on duty, Malm, a completely drunken and declassed man, said that the alarm was coming from the window of the operating room where my wife was on duty. The head of the hospital, Bondarchuk, said at the morning five-minute meeting that he vouched for Kudrina, and two days later the signalmen were taken, and Malm himself disappeared forever.
My violin teacher Yu. A. Aleksandrov, a communist, although a secretly religious, consumptive man, worked as a boss fire department Houses of the Red Army on the corner of Liteiny and Kirovskaya. He was chasing the rocket launcher, obviously an employee of the House of the Red Army, but could not see him in the darkness and did not catch up, but he threw the rocket launcher at Alexandrov’s feet.
Life at the institute gradually improved. The central heating began to work better, the electric light became almost constant, and water appeared in the water supply. We went to the movies. Films such as “Two Fighters”, “Once Upon a Time There Was a Girl” and others were watched with undisguised feeling.
For “Two Fighters,” the nurse was able to get tickets to the “October” cinema for a show later than we expected. Arriving at the next show, we learned that a shell hit the courtyard of this cinema, where visitors to the previous show were being released, and many were killed and wounded.
The summer of 1942 passed through the hearts of ordinary people very sadly. The encirclement and defeat of our troops near Kharkov, which greatly increased the number of our prisoners in Germany, brought great despondency to everyone. The new German offensive to the Volga, to Stalingrad, was very difficult for everyone. The mortality rate of the population, especially increased in the spring months, despite some improvement in nutrition, as a result of dystrophy, as well as the death of people from air bombs and artillery shelling, was felt by everyone.
My wife’s food cards and hers were stolen in mid-May, which made us very hungry again. And we had to prepare for winter.
We not only cultivated and planted vegetable gardens in Rybatskoe and Murzinka, but received a fair strip of land in the garden near the Winter Palace, which was given to our hospital. It was excellent land. Other Leningraders cultivated other gardens, squares, and the Field of Mars. We even planted about two dozen potato eyes with an adjacent piece of husk, as well as cabbage, rutabaga, carrots, onion seedlings, and especially a lot of turnips. They planted them wherever there was a piece of land.
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The wife, fearing a lack of protein food, collected slugs from vegetables and pickled them in two large jars. However, they were not useful, and in the spring of 1943 they were thrown away.
The ensuing winter of 1942/43 was mild. Transport no longer stopped, that's it wooden houses on the outskirts of Leningrad, including houses in Murzinka, were demolished for fuel and stocked up for the winter. There was electric light in the rooms. Soon the scientists were given special letter rations. As a candidate of science, I was given a group B ration. It included monthly 2 kg of sugar, 2 kg of cereal, 2 kg of meat, 2 kg of flour, 0.5 kg of butter and 10 packs of Belomorkanal cigarettes. It was luxurious and it saved us.
My fainting stopped. I even easily stayed on duty all night with my wife, guarding the vegetable garden near the Winter Palace in turns, three times during the summer. However, despite the security, every single head of cabbage was stolen.
Art was of great importance. We began to read more, go to the cinema more often, watch film programs in the hospital, go to amateur concerts and artists who came to us. Once my wife and I were at a concert of D. Oistrakh and L. Oborin who came to Leningrad. When D. Oistrakh played and L. Oborin accompanied, it was a little cold in the hall. Suddenly a voice said quietly: “Air raid, air alert! Those who wish can go down to the bomb shelter!” In the crowded hall, no one moved, Oistrakh smiled gratefully and understandingly at us all with one eye and continued to play, without stumbling for a moment. Although the explosions shook my legs and I could hear their sounds and the barking of anti-aircraft guns, the music absorbed everything. Since then, these two musicians have become my biggest favorites and fighting friends without knowing each other.
By the autumn of 1942, Leningrad was greatly deserted, which also facilitated its supply. By the time the blockade began, up to 7 million cards were issued in a city overcrowded with refugees. In the spring of 1942, only 900 thousand were issued.
Many were evacuated, including part of the 2nd Medical Institute. The rest of the universities have all left. But they still believe that about two million were able to leave Leningrad along the Road of Life. So about four million died (According to official data, about 600 thousand people died in besieged Leningrad, according to others - about 1 million. - ed.) a figure significantly higher than the official one. Not all the dead ended up in the cemetery. The huge ditch between the Saratov colony and the forest leading to Koltushi and Vsevolozhskaya took in hundreds of thousands of dead people and was razed to the ground. Now there is a suburban vegetable garden there, and there are no traces left. But the rustling tops and cheerful voices of those harvesting the harvest are no less happiness for the dead than the mournful music of the Piskarevsky cemetery.
A little about children. Their fate was terrible. They gave almost nothing on children's cards. I remember two cases especially vividly.
During the harshest part of the winter of 1941/42, I walked from Bekhterevka to Pestel Street to my hospital. My swollen legs almost couldn’t walk, my head was spinning, each careful step pursued one goal: to move forward without falling. On Staronevsky I wanted to go to a bakery to buy two of our cards and warm up at least a little. The frost penetrated to the bones. I stood in line and noticed that a boy of seven or eight years old was standing near the counter. He bent down and seemed to shrink all over. Suddenly he snatched a piece of bread from the woman who had just received it, fell, huddled in a ball with his back up, like a hedgehog, and began greedily tearing the bread with his teeth. The woman who had lost her bread screamed wildly: probably a hungry family was impatiently waiting for her at home. The queue got mixed up. Many rushed to beat and trample the boy, who continued to eat, his quilted jacket and hat protecting him. "Man! If only you could help,” someone shouted to me, obviously because I was the only man in the bakery. I started shaking and felt very dizzy. “You are beasts, beasts,” I wheezed and, staggering, went out into the cold. I couldn't save the child. A slight push would have been enough, and the angry people would certainly have mistaken me for an accomplice, and I would have fallen.
Yes, I'm a layman. I didn't rush to save this boy. “Don’t turn into a werewolf, a beast,” our beloved Olga Berggolts wrote these days. Wonderful woman! She helped many to endure the blockade and preserved the necessary humanity in us.
On their behalf I will send a telegram abroad:
“Alive. We'll endure it. We will win."
But my unwillingness to share the fate of a beaten child forever remained a notch on my conscience...
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The second incident happened later. We had just received, but for the second time, a standard ration and my wife and I carried it along Liteiny, heading home. The snowdrifts were quite high in the second winter of the blockade. Almost opposite the house of N.A. Nekrasov, from where he admired the front entrance, clinging to the lattice immersed in the snow, a child of four or five years old was walking. He could hardly move his legs, his huge eyes on his withered old face peered with horror at the world around him. His legs were tangled. Tamara pulled out a large, double piece of sugar and handed it to him. At first he didn’t understand and shrank all over, and then suddenly grabbed this sugar with a jerk, pressed it to his chest and froze with fear that everything that had happened was either a dream or not true... We moved on. Well, what more could the barely wandering ordinary people do?
BREAKING THE BLOCKADE
All Leningraders talked every day about breaking the blockade, about the upcoming victory, peaceful life and restoration of the country, the second front, that is, about the active inclusion of the allies in the war. However, there was little hope for allies. “The plan has already been drawn up, but there are no Roosevelts,” the Leningraders joked. They also remembered the Indian wisdom: “I have three friends: the first is my friend, the second is the friend of my friend and the third is the enemy of my enemy.” Everyone believed that the third degree of friendship was the only thing that united us with our allies. (This is how it turned out, by the way: the second front appeared only when it became clear that we could liberate all of Europe alone.)
Rarely did anyone talk about other outcomes. There were people who believed that Leningrad should become a free city after the war. But everyone immediately cut them off, remembering “Window to Europe”, and “The Bronze Horseman”, and the historical significance for Russia of access to the Baltic Sea. But they talked about breaking the blockade every day and everywhere: at work, on duty on the roofs, when they were “fighting off airplanes with shovels,” extinguishing lighters, while eating meager food, going to bed in a cold bed, and during unwise self-care in those days. We waited and hoped. Long and hard. They talked about Fedyuninsky and his mustache, then about Kulik, then about Meretskov.
The draft commissions took almost everyone to the front. I was sent there from the hospital. I remember that I gave liberation to only the two-armed man, being surprised at the wonderful prosthetics that hid his handicap. “Don’t be afraid, take those with stomach ulcers or tuberculosis. After all, they will all have to be at the front for no more than a week. If they don’t kill them, they will wound them, and they will end up in the hospital,” the military commissar of the Dzerzhinsky district told us.
And indeed, the war involved a lot of blood. When trying to get in touch with the mainland, piles of bodies were left under Krasny Bor, especially along the embankments. “Nevsky Piglet” and Sinyavinsky swamps never left the lips. Leningraders fought furiously. Everyone knew that behind his back his own family was dying of hunger. But all attempts to break the blockade did not lead to success; only our hospitals were filled with the crippled and dying.
With horror we learned about the death of an entire army and Vlasov’s betrayal. I had to believe this. After all, when they read to us about Pavlov and other executed generals of the Western Front, no one believed that they were traitors and “enemies of the people,” as we were convinced of this. They remembered that the same was said about Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, even about Blucher.
The summer campaign of 1942 began, as I wrote, extremely unsuccessfully and depressingly, but already in the fall they began to talk a lot about our tenacity at Stalingrad. The fighting dragged on, winter was approaching, and in it we relied on our Russian strength and Russian endurance. Good news about the counteroffensive at Stalingrad, the encirclement of Paulus with his 6th Army, and Manstein’s failures in attempts to break through this encirclement gave the Leningraders new hope on New Year's Eve, 1943.
I celebrated the New Year with my wife alone, having returned around 11 o’clock to the closet where we lived at the hospital, from a tour of evacuation hospitals. There was a glass of diluted alcohol, two slices of lard, a piece of bread 200 grams and hot tea with a piece of sugar! A whole feast!
Events were not long in coming. Almost all of the wounded were discharged: some were commissioned, some were sent to convalescent battalions, some were taken to the mainland. But we didn’t wander around the empty hospital for long after the bustle of unloading it. Fresh wounded came in a stream straight from the positions, dirty, often bandaged in individual bags over their overcoats, and bleeding. We were a medical battalion, a field hospital, and a front-line hospital. Some went to the triage, others went to the operating tables for continuous operation. There was no time to eat, and there was no time to eat.
This was not the first time such streams came to us, but this one was too painful and tiring. All the time, a difficult combination of physical work with mental, moral human experiences with the precision of the dry work of a surgeon was required.
On the third day, the men could no longer stand it. They were given 100 grams of diluted alcohol and sent to sleep for three hours, although the emergency room was filled with wounded people in need of urgent operations. Otherwise, they began to operate poorly, half asleep. Well done women! Not only did they endure the hardships of the siege many times better than men, they died much less often from dystrophy, but they also worked without complaining of fatigue and accurately fulfilled their duties.
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In our operating room, operations were performed on three tables: at each table there was a doctor and a nurse, and on all three tables there was another nurse, replacing the operating room. Staff operating room and dressing nurses, every one of them, assisted in the operations. The habit of working many nights in a row in Bekhterevka, the hospital named after. On October 25, she helped me out in the ambulance. I passed this test, I can proudly say, as a woman.
On the night of January 18, they brought us a wounded woman. On this day, her husband was killed, and she was seriously wounded in the brain, in the left temporal lobe. A fragment with fragments of bones penetrated into the depths, completely paralyzing both of her right limbs and depriving her of the ability to speak, but while maintaining the understanding of someone else's speech. Women fighters came to us, but not often. I took her to my table, laid her on her right, paralyzed side, numbed her skin and very successfully removed the metal fragment and bone fragments embedded in the brain. “My dear,” I said, finishing the operation and preparing for the next one, “everything will be fine. I took out the fragment, and your speech will return, and the paralysis will completely disappear. You will make a full recovery!”
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Suddenly my wounded one with her free hand lying on top began to beckon me to her. I knew that she would not start talking any time soon, and I thought that she would whisper something to me, although it seemed incredible. And suddenly the wounded woman, with her healthy naked but strong hand of a fighter, grabbed my neck, pressed my face to her lips and kissed me deeply. I couldn't stand it. I didn’t sleep for four days, barely ate, and only occasionally, holding a cigarette with a forceps, smoked. Everything went hazy in my head, and, like a man possessed, I ran out into the corridor to come to my senses at least for one minute. After all, there is a terrible injustice in the fact that women, who continue the family line and soften the morals of humanity, are also killed. And at that moment our loudspeaker spoke, announcing the breaking of the blockade and the connection of the Leningrad Front with the Volkhov Front.
It was deep night, but what started here! I stood bleeding after the operation, completely stunned by what I had experienced and heard, and nurses, nurses, soldiers were running towards me... Some with their arm on an “airplane”, that is, on a splint that abducts the bent arm, some on crutches, some still bleeding through a recently applied bandage . And then the endless kisses began. Everyone kissed me, despite my frightening appearance from the spilled blood. And I stood there, missing 15 minutes of precious time for operating on other wounded in need, enduring these countless hugs and kisses.
A story about the Great Patriotic War by a front-line soldier
1 year ago on this day, a war began that divided the history of not only our country, but the whole world into before And after. The story is told by Mark Pavlovich Ivanikhin, a participant in the Great Patriotic War, Chairman of the Council of War Veterans, Labor Veterans, Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies of the Eastern Administrative District.
– – this is the day when our lives were broken in half. It was a nice, bright Sunday, and suddenly they announced war, the first bombings. Everyone understood that they would have to endure a lot, 280 divisions went to our country. I have a military family, my father was a lieutenant colonel. A car immediately came for him, he took his “alarm” suitcase (this is a suitcase in which the most necessary things were always ready), and we went to the school together, me as a cadet, and my father as a teacher.
Immediately everything changed, it became clear to everyone that this war would last for a long time. Alarming news plunged us into another life; they said that the Germans were constantly moving forward. This day was clear and sunny, and in the evening mobilization had already begun.
These are my memories as an 18-year-old boy. My father was 43 years old, he worked as a senior teacher at the first Moscow Artillery School named after Krasin, where I also studied. This was the first school that graduated officers who fought on Katyushas into the war. I fought on Katyushas throughout the war.
“Young, inexperienced guys walked under bullets. Was it certain death?
– We still knew how to do a lot. Back in school, we all had to pass the standard for the GTO badge (ready for work and defense). They trained almost like in the army: they had to run, crawl, swim, and also learned how to bandage wounds, apply splints for fractures, and so on. At least we were a little ready to defend our Motherland.
I fought at the front from October 6, 1941 to April 1945. I took part in the battles for Stalingrad, and from the Kursk Bulge through Ukraine and Poland I reached Berlin.
War is a terrible experience. It is a constant death that is near you and threatens you. Shells are exploding at your feet, enemy tanks are coming at you, flocks of German planes are aiming at you from above, artillery is firing. It seems that the earth is turning into small place, where you have nowhere to go.
I was a commander, I had 60 people subordinate to me. We must answer for all these people. And, despite the planes and tanks that are looking for your death, you need to control yourself and the soldiers, sergeants and officers. This is difficult to accomplish.
I can’t forget the Majdanek concentration camp. We liberated this death camp and saw emaciated people: skin and bones. And I especially remember the children with their hands cut open; their blood was taken all the time. We saw bags of human scalps. We saw torture and experiment chambers. To be honest, this caused hatred towards the enemy.
I also remember that we entered a recaptured village, saw a church, and the Germans had set up a stable in it. I had soldiers from all cities Soviet Union, even from Siberia, many had fathers killed in the war. And these guys said: “We’ll get to Germany, we’ll kill the Kraut families, and we’ll burn their houses.” And so we entered the first German city, the soldiers burst into the house of a German pilot, saw Frau and four small children. Do you think someone touched them? None of the soldiers did anything bad to them. Russian people are quick-witted.
All the German cities we passed through remained intact, with the exception of Berlin, where there was strong resistance.
I have four orders. Order of Alexander Nevsky, which he received for Berlin; Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree, two Orders of the Patriotic War, 2nd degree. Also a medal for military merit, a medal for the victory over Germany, for the defense of Moscow, for the defense of Stalingrad, for the liberation of Warsaw and for the capture of Berlin. These are the main medals, and there are about fifty of them in total. All of us who survived the war years want one thing - peace. And so that the people who won are valuable.
Photo by Yulia Makoveychuk