Short memories of veterans. These are stories of infantrymen, artillerymen, tank crews, pilots and many other Soviet soldiers of various branches of the military. Just stories, dozens of stories about the war - as they remembered it. One paragraph - one someone's story.
...When on June 22 we heard on the radio about the beginning of the war, although we were not thinking well due to our age, none of us was shocked by what happened. The conversations were only like this: “Well, the Germans attacked, so what? Our Russian guys will quickly break his back. Why did he attack? After all, he will get his due.” When I arrived at the plant, the workers were in exactly the same mood. They only said: “Where should he go to war against us? We will quickly rebuff him...” No one then expected that the war would drag on for so long....I passed a medical examination at the military registration and enlistment office, where the conscripts were checked by two doctors: “Bend over and straighten up. Good! Next!”... Together with me, Seryozha Rusov and Vanya Kudryavtsev were called up from the village, and both of them died at the front... At parting, my father told me: “Son, I beg you. Try to stay alive. Your mother won’t survive if something happens to you...”
...How much famine we suffered in '33. There was a terrible famine. Already in the army, I immediately got to Zaporozhye, they were from the western regions, trains went through their stations to Germany, so they said: Train after train - now bread, then lard, then meat, from the USSR to Germany. Then they said: “Our lard according to our tinsel!”
...Medical units, mostly filled with young girls, were sent to war. We did not yet know what real war meant, although we were great patriots. We had some kind of romance! While they were on the road, they themselves issued combat leaflets, wrote poems and sang songs. We had fun, we went to war as if we were going to a dance! And everything that was happening around seemed incomprehensible to us. At that time there was a hay harvest campaign. We drove with the doors open and saw women with braids looking at us and crying.
...We had such an upsurge, everyone was confident that our heroic Red Army would give a worthy rebuff to the enemy, the more we were surprised when listening to the reports of the Sovinformburo. We didn’t understand why our invincible army was suddenly retreating like that.
...Then war was brewing. There was a slogan: “Komsomolets on a plane.” And one more thing - “Komsomol patronizes aviation and the navy.” But I’ll be honest: I came to the flying club for a girl. There, everyone who wanted to was taken to the flying club, and girls too... She then burned up in the air... I followed her so as not to miss her.
...I remember well the years 1940-41. Often we would come to class and suddenly someone would come in crying, a girl or a boy. They immediately moved away from him because they understood well what had happened. One of the parents, or maybe both, was arrested at night... We clearly understood this. And since my father was a military man, there were many conversations on this topic at home. The point of the conversation was that there is no need to talk about this topic, there is no need to be frank, because this is quite serious and dangerous. And if you want to say what you think, please, there is a house for that. And at these moments my parents spoke to me like an adult. Not only with me, but with others too, so in these terrible times we did this.
…When we found ourselves at the Kerch berths in the area of the Voikov plant, everything we saw made us not want to live. Thousands of people stood in a dense “wall” at the piers; there was no order, no organized evacuation. Our situation was hopeless. The piers collapsed under the mass of people, and when boats from Taman began to approach the shore at night, a wild fight began, it got to the point that people who were distraught and wanting to escape at all costs were shooting at each other in order to get on the boats first. Then the sailors moved away from the shore and began to take people only from the water, approaching the shore with their stern at low speeds. German aircraft constantly hung in the air, we were bombed day and night, and hundreds of corpses washed ashore in waves... People stood up to their necks in water, and even for me, with my height, the water was up to my neck, but on the first night I didn’t managed to get on the boat. In the morning there were calls from the commanders: “Everyone forward! Let's drive the Germans away! Otherwise, everyone is screwed!” We gathered on the shore, spontaneously gathered into some detachments under the command of desperate lieutenants. I simply haven’t seen any commanders with a rank higher than lieutenant on the shore these days. And so for three days in a row - all day long we hold the line of defense, with the tenacity of suicide bombers we go into attacks, throw ourselves with bayonets, and at night, those who are still alive go down to the sea, and again, standing up to their necks in the water, they hope and expect that they will get on boats and they will be taken away. The Germans continuously hammered along the edge of the coast with artillery and mortars, hit a small piece of land on which many thousands of soldiers and commanders who had retreated from the front line had gathered (and it should also be taken into account that, in addition to them, there were also thousands of wounded from hospitals), and dive-bomber raids became just a nightmare for us, every exploding German bomb left heaps of meat on the ground... The entire coast was continuous rubble of broken equipment and corpses of Red Army soldiers... Only on the third night, during the bombing, I managed to board some small seiner... At the assembly point I also saw the division commander, Major Zuvalov, and our commissar. This commissar had the rank of senior political instructor, was a complete bastard and a complete anti-Semite, he had never given me peace before, and when he saw that Florinsky and I got out of the encirclement alive, he simply shook with hatred, saying, “lucky for the shady Jews”... But suddenly this commissar was arrested by “special officers”, it turned out that he fled to Taman without permission, even during a German tank attack he escaped from the division and “fled across the strait”, abandoning his subordinates.
...I tried to return the plane to horizontal position. I open my eyes to see, you can’t fly blind. I can’t open my eyes - everything is burning. In case of fire, the only salvation is to jump out with a parachute. He threw the lantern aside with both hands, unfastened his seatbelts, jumped to his feet and took off. But I got caught on the edge of the cockpit and was pressed into the fuselage by the air. I was flying in my overcoat, apparently it got caught. While I was doing all this, I wasn’t breathing, but then I opened my mouth, breathed in hot air, and my mother’s face appeared in my eyes. I managed to think that she would probably cry and I don’t remember anything else. I woke up and felt that everything around me was soft, cold air was blowing over me. And I seem to be flying upward. It feels like I was sleeping. I asked myself the question: “What’s wrong with me?” He answered himself: “I jumped with a parachute.” My consciousness began to work. I immediately pulled the ring, but my hand slipped off. Then I felt the ring with both hands and pulled out the cable. I immediately felt that the parachute began to open. My legs flew down, I turned over, as it seemed to me, then I sank on the parachute and lost one of my tarpaulin boots.
...Suddenly the entire command staff from the company commanders and above disappeared, they left their soldiers surrounded. My company commander Melnikov also “evaporated” somewhere. Only platoon lieutenants remained in their positions, and regimental headquarters, including the headquarters of our 1062nd joint venture under the command of Major Zorin, had previously been outside the encirclement. We understood that a tragic outcome was approaching. We had five rounds left for the rifle and one incomplete belt for the Maxim machine gun that I had in my platoon. No one gave us the order to retreat or break through, and no one made any attempt to break through to our aid. There was simply no one to give orders, the commanders abandoned us!.. We were “surrendered”, betrayed...
...We were running out of ammunition, food was running out, we actually didn’t eat anything for several days, and once they started dropping bags of black crackers from PO-2 planes, but when they started dividing the crackers among the fighters, each one got at most two crackers Many Red Army soldiers were already close to demoralization from hunger and hopelessness. My company stood at the junction of the 1062nd and 1064th regiments and, two days before everything was over for us, we were given two tanks for the attack: a KV and a T-34, but nothing came of this attack. On the fourteenth, a tank lieutenant came to my dugout and said that he had seen two foals in the field behind us, and he and I went and shot them to feed the soldiers with horsemeat. I felt sorry for shooting the animals; believe me, it was easier to kill a man in a German uniform than these unfortunate foals. The soldiers at least managed to last time to eat before we were all taken prisoner.
...Everything in my memory was mixed up in endless transfers and unsuccessful battles. In October, famine began on the front line, we received only 400-500 grams of bread per day, and some of them could hardly move their legs from hunger. Once, when we ran out of cartridges, we launched a bayonet attack towards the Germans, but the Germans did not accept bayonet combat and retreated back. This is probably after the destruction of the German landing force in July of forty-one, the second bright memory of the battles on the Lenfront, and everything else that happened to us in those days... is a rather sad story...
...The Germans were all healthier and taller than ours. We all grew up in hunger, in the USSR.
...Our anti-tank weapons are bottles, nothing else. That's how death is - it crawls, climbs, and there's also a German tank in the crosses! We didn’t even see them then, it was wildness for us - crosses! We are all Komsomol members. Since the tank had to be brought closer to 10-15 meters, death is creeping up on you. What nerves do you need to control yourself, your feelings, to fight the enemy? These bottles, if they break, you die and you don’t even set fire to a single tank. In general, it was very difficult to fight with such weapons.
...Then I tell them: “Uncle, uncle, I know German!” The fact is that Yiddish is very close to German. He spoke it enough, fluently, and understood everything. Then this Zalman Kaminsky turned and asked: “Sprechen si deutsch?” I answer: “I-I!” Then a few more phrases and then he says to the commander of the first company: “He speaks and understands. Take it with you, it will come in handy!” But probably a week later an officer came to us, we were lined up and he asked: “Guys, who wants to take sniper courses?” Well, how?! Of course, I immediately stepped forward. I generally had a high opinion of myself and believed that with my arrival a radical change had occurred in the Great Patriotic War. And only after being wounded this opinion changed somewhat.
...So, I was arrested and put in a condo. And when the guys brought me a hangover, they told me that they wanted to send me to a penal company... But only the intervention of Elena Timofeeva, the head of our flight group, saved me from this extremely unsightly fate. The guys already told me that she asked the school commissar for me, and begged, and cried, and did everything she could, but in the end, she begged him not to punish me so severely. And it was only thanks to her efforts that two days later I went to school in general group... After being wounded, one day at the airfield I started talking with a girl, a senior lieutenant, from a bomber air regiment. And then, in a conversation with her, I suddenly accidentally found out that my savior Elena Timofeeva died... (According to OBD-Memorial, the flight commander of the 127th GBAP Guard, Lieutenant Elena Pavlovna Timofeeva, born in 1914, did not return from a combat mission on 08/28/1943 - approx. . N.Ch.) I was terribly saddened by this news.
...It became quiet, the shooting stopped... And then the soldiers began to crawl out of the trenches and stood in a crowd, most of them without raising their hands. The remains of two regiments, over 800 people, were captured on that damned morning. The Germans ordered everyone to throw their weapons into a pile and form several lines. It was still light when the Germans ordered: “Jude and the communists, get out of line!” It was like an electric shock, and in an instant my whole life flashed before my eyes, the faces of my family. I had already moved forward when my squad commander, career sergeant Tkach, grabbed me with his hand and did not let me get out of formation. He tore off my buttonholes with “cubes” and said: “Lieutenant, don’t come out”... Only about thirty people came out, they were immediately taken to the side, and we were driven into a ravine, put in the snow, on bitter cold. When they were chasing us, I saw my comrade, the platoon commander from the neighboring company, the Moldavian Jew Misha Tsimbal, lying motionless in the snow, still alive, only covered in blood. I had my Komsomol card with me, my diary, which I kept recent years, and in the pocket of his overcoat there is a lemon grenade. I was well aware of the horror of my situation and decided to blow myself up with a grenade, but my fellow soldiers were sitting around and I didn’t want any of them to be hit by shrapnel, and I didn’t even have the courage to kill myself. I was only nineteen years old and I wanted to live so badly... And then I began to carefully and quietly bury the grenade and documents in the snow below me.
...When the battle ended, the Germans immediately appeared in the village. We immediately hid in our dugouts. And I remember this moment well: German soldiers burst into our dugout and tore the hats off the men. We still don’t understand: what happened? They took off my hat and looked at me long hair and left him alone. And they, it turns out, were looking for soldiers among us who had dressed in civilian clothes and escaped captivity. I only realized this later. In the army at that time everyone had a haircut with a “zero” haircut. So some of our people ran headlong. Where to hide? It was cold in the forest; winter came to us very early. Therefore, many of our soldiers who were surrounded and escaped tried to mix among the civilian population. At that time, near Leningrad, not only regiments and divisions, but even entire armies surrendered.
...We went on the attack, captured the heights, but when we occupied the narrow German trenches, there was no one left from my machine-gun platoon; everyone was killed. The battalion commander came running and started yelling: “Where are the people? Where are the machine guns?”, and hit me on the head with a pistol, I told him that all the crews were killed, and he swore at me: “Let’s fire!” I walked to my full height among the corpses across the battlefield and collected three serviceable machine guns. I saw my friend Berlin among the dead... They gave me five fighters to replace the dead, and we went on the attack again.
...Over the course of a year, we have become such specialists in production, where it is difficult for an adult, we have sharp eyes, thin, nimble fingers. It was 1942. She herself calibrated the head fuses for Katyushas, fuses for UZRGs for lemons, RGDs for anti-tank ones, and worked with a fuse cord for demolitions. Contrary to military regulations, inscriptions were made on the shells: “Beat the enemy!”, “We await with victory!” - so that the fighter feels and knows that it is his own, native hands that are giving him the projectile. And in the chaos of war, an incredible story happened. My cousin Sashka, who was at the front. While opening another box of shells in battle, I find a label with my name on it. He wrote to the plant and found me. A correspondence began. All the soldiers admired it - well, you’re lucky - your sister is giving you weapons right to the front line.
...My platoon was the last to leave. One of my fighters, no longer young, was exhausted, sat down in the snow and said: “I can’t walk anymore.” According to the regulations, I should have shot him on the spot, but I did not do this. Silently, he turned around and followed his Red Army soldiers.
...In the morning I go out onto the road, but as a manager I could move relatively freely and was not tied to any specific place. I was wondering what was ahead. Here comes a car full of wounded. I stopped, approached, and in it was already someone from our 2nd battery, who had just left for the front line that night... I was surprised, it was just crazy to me how it could be like this, just yesterday we were playing “with him and other guys” rooster,” and now he is being taken to the hospital with a broken arm. I ask: “What happened?” “We had just started to turn around when German tanks shot us. There was only one belt left from the platoon commander...” And then I again thought about what awaits us ahead?
...Our retreat, I would say, was sheer horror and a nightmare! Anyone who was not on the front line in 1941 will find it difficult to imagine the situation in which we had to visit. Take the very Moscow-Minsk road along which our retreat took place. Something terrible happened at night! The Germans released parachutes with flashlights from airplanes. There were so many of them that the whole sky glowed in them; it seemed that there was no end to these lights.
...Then there was a rule: if a car broke down, no one would repair it. Therefore, it was thrown into a ditch, and the column continued moving further. It was there that I first saw English planes, which were given the task of accompanying us all the way to Moscow.
...The wounds and contusions didn’t bother me much later, although it was they that later provoked encephalopathy and disorders of the vestibular apparatus. The war left me the most terrible memory of myself in the form of chronic gastritis; I remember well how, without food at the front, my stomach simply burned.
…If you don’t mind, I will continue my thoughts on this pointless tactic called “Forward, advance!” To do this, I will give a simple example of how this actually happened. Suppose the division commander reported to his superiors that the division had been formed, had just arrived from the rear, one might say, had arrived combat-ready and could conduct active combat operations. In reality it was nothing! After all, a lot depended on how skillfully the food convoys and shells were delivered, that is, everything depended on the successful security of the offensive. This provision did not exist! And since they began to bring us into battle with these 150 rounds of ammunition and five shells per gun and mortar, we were actually unable to take anything. I remember when we approached one village, we were given the following task: “Take Zmievka station!” And the Zmievka station was 8 kilometers from our front line. So it’s not like we couldn’t take Zmievka, the village that was located right under our noses. People were put there, one might say, completely in vain.
...When we advanced on one village near Rzhev, the weather was clear, the sun was shining brightly. And suddenly something incomprehensible began to happen: bullets whistled, mines and shells began to explode. Everything became clouded with gunpowder and became dark as if at night, although it was day. It was very scary! But we still crawled and fired at the enemy, since we perfectly understood that behind us there was a guard of these SMERSHov men. And when I was wounded and I began to crawl back (I needed to find a medical unit, I didn’t know then that the orderlies would find me so quickly), I came across this guard in front of the ditch. "What's happened?" - they asked me. “Wounded,” he said. “Crawl,” they answered me. And so they would have been returned to battle.
...We were given the following order: “Take the station at all costs!” And so our brigade, which came here, as they say, was full-fledged, full-blooded, the number of which was something like 3,200 people, was thrown at this station. On the right, another regiment approached us and, like us, was thrown there in its entirety. Meanwhile, the Germans’ positions were very strongly fortified. In particular, on one side of the station there were three Tiger tanks and on the other side two of the same tanks, and the entire station, basement and windows were covered in embrasures. And this sea of fire, as they say, met us. And it was so “good” that when I had probably thirty meters left to run to the station, for some reason I looked back and saw the following picture: almost no one was left alive and only a few were running back. Then I turned around and crawled back through the mud. I fell down, I remember, into a rut where, apparently, a tank had recently passed. And he began to really scurry. I no longer gave myself any account of my actions! We, the miraculously surviving brigade fighters, managed to run to a school building. But we didn’t know what to do, since not a single officer remained alive, which means there was no one to give us orders. In short, we spent the whole day getting ready and physically recovering, and the next day the order suddenly came again: “Take the station!” What saved us was that when we arrived at the place, the Germans left and the station was liberated. If they had not left, it is unknown how it would have ended. However, this departure was to be expected, since essentially this group of Germans was in our rear. It’s interesting that 30 years later, when I was driving my car south with my wife, I decided to drive through certain places where I had once participated in battles. And most of all I wanted to get to Friedrichovka. When I arrived there and visited the station, I saw a large memorial wall there with the names of the victims. I counted 2860 names there. These were those who died for the station, which they could not capture at that time. People, one might say, were put there in vain.
...But the next day the Germans stopped our column in the forest and, in front of the entire column, shot all our wounded, all those who could not walk quickly. Among them was a soldier wounded in the face, with his mouth torn by a bullet and a wad of bloody bandages covering the wound. When he realized that he, too, would be shot, he looked at us so fearfully and piercingly, there was so much pain and pleas for mercy in his eyes... but how could we help him.
...At the end of the day, an armada of German bombers arrived and literally bombarded us with bombs. We lay in our trenches, pressed into the ground, closing our eyes, and only whispered: “Lord forgive and save!” I’m sure everyone said so, and those who don’t admit it are lying. After all, when you see a bomb come off a plane, and you can already roughly imagine where it will fall... And at this most terrible moment, a pigeon with a broken wing suddenly landed in our trench. I still don’t understand where he came from, but apparently, fleeing the howls and bomb explosions, he realized where he could hide. As I remember now, I took him in my hands, and his heart was just ready to jump out of his chest... But I remember very well that when I saw this unfortunate bird, I thought: “That’s it, this is a sign from above, soon this nightmare will end!”
...Two prisoners were brought to Naumov. One of them was, it seems, a Pole, and the other a German. The Pole began to cry, began showing fragments from the grenade and saying with signs: “I myself wanted to surrender, but the Russian threw a grenade at me.” Our soldier told him: “You went into captivity when you saw a grenade.” The German also began to cry, took out his wallet and showed a photograph: here, they say, are my wife and my three children. He also said: “Ich arbeite!” (“I am a worker” translated from German). He apparently knew that the worker was an honorable class in the Soviet Union, and really hoped that they would take pity on him and not shoot him. They began to interrogate them, and we found some soldier who knew German. Naumov then said: “Pour some alcohol and let them drink, but don’t give them any snacks.” They were given a drink and they drank. After this they were interrogated. Then Naumov ordered: “Take me away!” But who will take them to the camp? After all, there was a great risk of death if they were left alive. I think they were simply shot. They themselves understood very well that in such a situation no one would take them anywhere, so they got scared and cried.
...We stayed on vacation in Keikino for about two days. There was a lot of alcohol there, and many of us got drunk there: because some drank their hundred grams, some didn’t drink, and some drank for five people at the same time. And when they were completely drunk, they took out an accordion and began to sing songs to it. This gave me a very strong inner feeling: “How is this possible? How can you lose so many people and then sing songs?” So such mood swings during the war were felt all the time. Therefore, it is true in the song: “Who said that you need to give up singing in war? / After the battle, the heart cries for music doubly.”
...I think it’s appropriate to say a few words here about women in war. Of course, you can speak lofty words about patriotism and a sense of duty, but I don’t like it when such concepts are often thrown around. Many girls and women went to the front because they felt purely feminine, which means they feel unbearably sorry for the men who went to war. They went with them to share everything, but they had to drink to capacity, there was nowhere else to go... As for the attitude of the men towards them, it was different. They thought a lot about this relationship, there were different conversations, even the most indecent ones.
...To all my troubles, the camp police, composed mainly of Ukrainian traitors, who were called “sergeants” here, were constantly looking for Jews and former political instructors among the prisoners, and when I saw among the policemen my former colleague from the “school of junior lieutenants,” a Pole named Anton, I understood that if he noticed me among the prisoners, he would immediately recognize me and hand me over to the Germans for execution. And the Jews identified among the captives faced a cruel death: they could be dipped in cold water, and then left naked for the whole day in the cold until you froze to death; another time, a Red Army Jew betrayed by a traitor-policeman was tied with a rope to a car and dragged around in circles in the car. him on the ground, and the Germans looked at his suffering and laughed. The quickest death for a Jewish prisoner of war in this camp was if the guards set dogs on him, which instantly bit the victim to death.
...And then I heard someone’s panicked voice: “The head of the hospital is wounded!” And we, the three senior operating nurses, as soon as we heard this, got up and ran through the sleepers. Two of us were killed immediately. One was even torn in half: one part of the body flew in one direction, the other in the other. But I managed to run away and then get to the head of the hospital.
...He called me on the radio and said: “Receive the radiogram!” And there it was necessary to transfer letters by letter in Morse code. I had almost no experience at that time and I messed something up. But it turned out that he was scolding our commander through Morse code. In the movies they show war as ideal. In fact, at the front, commanders were constantly swearing at each other. In a combat situation this is quite natural.
...The situation in the country was so difficult that everyone was recruited to the front indiscriminately. We didn't even have any medical examination. They asked: “Well, is everyone healthy?” We replied: “Zdorrr-rows.” And they took us to the 2nd Volkhovstroy.
...When we were in besieged Leningrad, then they fed us very poorly there. The food was terrible! I even remember such an incident. We were sent to break down wooden houses for firewood. Then there was nothing to heat the stoves with! I went into the house where there used to be some kind of club. I passed concert hall, when suddenly I met a soldier. I also thought: where could he come from here? But it turns out it was a large mirror. I became so thin and thin that I didn’t recognize myself. There was one long skeleton with ribs. In the reserve regiments in Leningrad, people simply died. And at the front, compared to Leningrad, the food was very good. We were mostly given dry rations. Potatoes, canned food, and American stew were also provided. By the way, they started giving us American stew even when we were in Leningrad. This saved us a lot!
...In the camp, among the prisoners there were anti-German, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Semitic and anti-Stalinist sentiments. We hated the Germans as our tormentors and murderers, as cruel beasts and invaders. This is understandable, of course. Anti-Stalinist sentiments were most clearly manifested when the Germans told us that Stalin had said: “We have no prisoners, we have traitors.” And so many of the prisoners, who were ten years older than me, even before the war hated Stalin with his collective farms, repressions and the White Sea Canals, but after this statement by the “leader of the peoples,” most of us in the camp were already cursing him out loud. Anti-Ukrainian sentiments were caused by the fact that Ukrainians en masse went to serve the Germans and in police battalions, and in many concentration camps, for example, in Peski and Kresty, the camp police consisted of 80% Ukrainians. They were considered a “completely corrupt nation”... Anti-Semitic sentiments among the prisoners appeared thanks to the continuous systematic German anti-Judeophobic propaganda and because the “extremes” in any situation always turned out to be Jews, and the Germans and “Vlasov” agitators constantly tried to convince the prisoners that the damned war had begun because of the Jews, who are all “damned communist Jews.”
...One of our foreman sent a cook on a horse-drawn cart to take lunch to one of the batteries of our 153rd regiment in the area of that very village of Dyatlitsy. We had to go through the forest. The cook went, but did not find the battery and got lost. I went out to the edge of the forest and suddenly saw two German tanks. He turned around and galloped in the opposite direction. But the tanks noticed him and moved after him, they wanted to grab lunch and him as a living language. The cook rushed, not knowing where, in the very direction where the very battery he was looking for was disguised. They noticed their cook on the battery, and two German tanks were chasing him. The Germans got carried away in the pursuit and lost their vigilance. As a result, the tanks were shot at point-blank range by our 76-mm cannons. The cook for this unexpected feat was awarded a medal"For courage." By the way, Colonel Naumov, commander of the 308th Infantry Regiment of our division, also wrote to me after the war about that very incident: that thanks to the cook it was possible to knock out two German tanks.
...He, of course, dropped by to see his relatives, and they asked him: “Well, how did you, Sasha, fight at the front?” - “Yes, I fought.” - “So you’re not killed or wounded.” Everyone was surprised how this man was at the front, has two orders, but at the same time was not killed or wounded. People had doubts...
...I was sent to the 22nd separate communications regiment. One day, a bomb hit right into the building of our barracks, where we lived then. And 30-40 girls who served with us died right before our eyes. We dragged these dead girls into the basement. All of us who survived were moved to a neighboring barracks. And in the morning I was assigned as a sentry to guard this basement with the dead signalmen. They were covered there with raincoats. I remember this moment: the wind is blowing through the broken windows and lifting these raincoats, I get scared, they seem alive to me, it becomes scary... For the first time in my life I saw the dead. I couldn’t stand it when the shift came, I said: “I’m afraid to stand here!” And then they replaced me. Then these girls were buried. They were all from Leningrad, they served in our unit as radio operators and telephone operators. So this death left a heavy feeling in my soul, although later I saw a lot of deaths at the front.
...Soldiers learned to sleep standing while moving on the march. Someone grabbed my belt behind me, I grabbed the belt of the person in front, and slowly fell asleep. If someone stumbled and fell, then I have heard it before. So the whole thing was well organized for us. Of course, after being “on the defensive” for several days, I fell asleep involuntarily. But, of course, we slept not only while moving on the march. How was this thing organized? Suppose I changed from the dugout while standing “on defense.” After this there was a need to sleep. But in winter there were no buildings nearby. Therefore, I did the following - I dug a hole in the snow and laid out a tent where I went to sleep. Immediately after this, in order to be warmer, they buried me in the snow. And I slept. The place, however, had to be marked with something so that they could dig you up later. And they also made a small hole for air.
...When no more than 30 people remained from the battalion, we were all gathered into a group. The battalion commander and chief of staff, located in a specially dug dugout covered with snow, gave me these commands: “Forward, advance!” I had to advance with these thirty military personnel towards the village, which the division was unable to capture on February 19th. The order turned out to be completely impossible to implement. As soon as a soldier rose to attack, he immediately fell onto the battlefield. But I don’t know who died out of these thirty. We had no weapons; we went into battle with revolvers.
...When I hear talk today that front-line soldiers went on the attack shouting “For Stalin, for the Motherland!” Hurray, let's go!”, I cannot confirm this. I've never seen this before. It's all a lie. We had no impulse to fight specifically for Stalin. We did our duty and did not fight this war for the sake of Stalin.
...Think: during the Second World War, Germany enslaved almost all European states, but our country survived. This is what socialism is, this is what Stalin is! I confirm: we really went on the attack shouting: Hurray! For the Motherland! For Stalin!
...We only shouted “HURRAY!” "For Stalin!" They didn’t shout – why the hell is that necessary?! At first this was not the case at all. It started later. I only shouted “Hurray!”
...When they went on the attack, no one shouted “For Stalin.” Then during the attack there was no sound at all. There was dead silence. The one who shouted something, as a rule, died immediately. This was the case, for example, in the battles for the station in Fridrikhovka. One of our officers shouted: “For the motherland, oooh!” Take! Forward!" He was instantly destroyed. In general, I consider this battle a fantasy or some kind of enchanted case: when there was almost no chance of survival and literally only a few were saved, I did not receive a single scratch. And somewhere in Western Ukraine we fought for one small town. Having positioned ourselves in front of a small river, behind which there was a village, we prepared for the attack. On the other side of the river, near the bridge, there was a German Tiger tank, its gun was pointed in our direction. We had very few people. It seems that we were then assigned to someone else's unit. The commander shouted: “For the Motherland! For Stalin! And as soon as he had time to shout this, there was a direct hit from a shell. There is nothing left of him. As they say, there was a man, and there is no man.
...My attitude towards Stalin was not unambiguous, at one time I even had a good attitude towards him... But after demobilization I came to Dolinka to my mother, looked at what was happening around, learned a lot from people who served their sentences under Article 58 and then finally understood what country do I live in and what is Stalin like? And when the 20th Congress took place and most of Stalin’s crimes became known, I finally decided on my attitude towards Stalin - he was and is a monster, a murderer and a villain who ruined our country... When one of the veterans begins to “flood” that “...in the name of Stalin we went on the attack,” this means that he himself did not go on the attack. No one has ever shouted “For Stalin!” before a battle or when going on the attack, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply lying shamelessly.
...Vodka was sometimes given during reformation. But at the front itself, as they say, there was no time for that. What kind of vodka could there be there when they didn’t even give us ordinary food? On the collective farm or among the residents we find just grain - rye, wheat, and if you're lucky, potatoes. In the Don we began to kill fish with grenades. They chose where there were more thawed patches, jammed it with long poles, and tried to pull it closer. It worked. It didn’t matter what kind of fish we came across. Every little thing, everything went well. They were hungry, there was no bread, and they started cooking the rye in the evening, all night long, it swelled, but did not boil over like cereal. It got to the point where we ate it, and then it came out in the toilet undigested. But the worst thing I remember was this grain with the addition of fish and, most importantly, without salt. It was something terrible! I never realized that salt had such a meaning. This is grass, it’s impossible to eat, but you need to eat, otherwise you’ll just starve!
...In the hospital we went AWOL; I already had a medal “For Courage,” which I was very proud of. I remember the guys broke the thermometer and advised me to rub the medal with mercury to make it shine even more. I rubbed it, but the red letters “For Courage” fell out.
...When we went on the offensive and received the command “Prepare to attack!”, then, of course, something like jitters set in. It was scary, of course! We were heading towards death. Actually, in the first days of the fighting we were very afraid of everything. My only thoughts were: “That’s it, this is probably the last day of my life!” After all, bullets flew over you like bees, shells and mines exploded nearby, and when you were crawling on the ground, you couldn’t even take off your helmet - otherwise there would have been a hole in your head.
...I was also armed with a spoon, which I cast while in Vyazma. One friend there had a spoon with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and we all cast our own spoons according to this model. Fortunately, a downed German plane lay near the camp.
...As for food, during four months of continuous fighting we only ate cabbage from our kitchen once. And so they ate mainly by going into the village and climbing through boxes in houses in search of food. Where they found bread, where milk, where eggs, and where they found some chicken, scorched it and ate it. They often took food from dead Germans. So that's how we survived.
...At times we even envied the infantrymen - he ran across and lay down, but then we still had to drag a gun, and at least a couple of trays of ammunition. So these penalty officers are great! Just tell me, they always helped! And their role is known: either to the point of blood or to death.
...When I jumped and lay down in such a trench, two soldiers were already lying under me. Since I was the third in this trench, my back was somewhat higher than the parapet. But I hid my head and legs. And suddenly a piercing wheeze was heard below me: “Oh-oh!” Snoring followed. "What?! – I asked in surprise. “Is it hard to hold?” But he fell silent. When this whole story ended, it turned out that a fragment flew under my hand and hit him in the back. And thus he was killed.
...What we really felt from the help was that we received American cars: jeeps and Studebakers, and passenger cars - Jeeps - for the authorities. We had a Studebaker. We, the artillerymen, are very grateful to this machine. She saved us, I don’t know how: she has 2 driving axles, she also has a winch: you can hook it to a tree on a cable, turn on the motor and it will reel in and pull out. This was indispensable for us, and then, in order to carry our guns - 2.5 tons - we needed not a pair of horses, but tractors, and they are slow-moving. Studebaker reached speeds of 50 or even 70 km/h, and we became more mobile. We began to move after the enemy for 20-30-40, or even 50 km. This is a huge advantage!
...It was near the house of apparently some rich Pole. The headquarters was concentrated there. The scouts were concentrated there... Well, this whole command group. And we are all in open trenches. In order to somehow protect themselves from the rain, some made a niche for themselves in the wall of the trench. But I didn’t do it because I saw that when a mine or shell exploded nearby, the niche would collapse and collapse. Moreover, the person was pulled out already dead. Cloak tents were issued only to 82 mm mortar men and heavy machine gunners to cover machine guns and mortars. And so, when the rains started in September, there was only one place left dry. This is a cap under the helmet, and just squeeze out the rest.
...Those soldiers who fought on the right side of the Don, they saw the German strength and saw their strength, what we fought with and what they fought with. There was little faith that our Victory would come; they were much stronger than us. But, you see, they convinced us that we were stronger in spirit, but can you really catch his spirit?! And you see a German, armed to the teeth.
...Another rush forward several kilometers, but then the command: “Stop!” The battalion stood up. I remember such a wide hillock and a huge potato field on the left. New command: “Ten steps to the left. Get down! Halt." And everyone lay down in between. In the rain, in greatcoats, straight into the mud... Then Vanya Baranov comes running with his scouts and reports to the battalion commander: “Comrade Major, a hundred meters above there is a huge barn with hay. We checked, it's not mined, nothing. Let's go guys there." Here I saw for the first and last time how the battalion commander begged, literally begged people. Well, Sirotkin had to know that. He walked on these potatoes between us and said: “Well, guys, get up! Well, a little further up and there’s a barn.” There was a halt for about thirty to forty minutes, but not one got up, not one... Then they finally got up and moved on. I repeat, incredible tension, it is beyond human capabilities. If you had told me before the war that I would have to endure this at the age of eighteen, I would not have believed it.
...They brought me to Angarstroy, and the ship went to America. Our captain was Bondarenko. My duties as a barmaid included serving the command staff. This is, serve first, second. In general, lunches and cleaning the quarters of the captain and first mate. We walked for about half a month. We arrived in Portland. We loaded ourselves with granulated sugar and went back. In America, of course, everything is different. Even the air is different. I remember the Americans were crying that they had granulated sugar on ration cards. And I think: “Well, they’re still complaining, but my mother is dying of hunger in Leningrad.” This all happened in March - April 1942.
...I had normal clothes, I had boots, for example. We - the soldiers - did not understand this. The red boots were not ours, but English ones, and we walked in them and thought they were ours. They will give us food, we think it’s ours, but it’s not ours. Especially sausages. English ones in tins. Good ones! There was just one smell... It really was sausage, they don’t make that kind of sausage in our country now!
...I remember well how, even before the war, a car arrived in our village at night. Six healthy, hard-working men disappeared without a trace. The ends, as they say, are in the water. I also had a comrade at the front who commanded the first platoon. He was much older than me, born in 1903, and could easily pass for my father. Before the front, he served in the NKVD. So, he told me the following about his work: he personally received assignments from the leadership to travel around villages and arrest a certain number of people.
...The food supply at the bridgehead was very bad. All day the crossing was either bombed or shelled. Only at night they brought huge thermoses of millet porridge. And this millet porridge has already gone sour. For example, I couldn’t eat it, well, I couldn’t. I was as hungry as a dog, but I was not able to eat this porridge. They said: “Guys, it’s not our fault. This porridge was served to us in the morning, but we only came to you at night. There was no way to pass." During my entire stay at the front, I was never given vodka.
...Now I myself can’t even believe that we were able to live in the trenches in an open field, in the snow, in the cold, without undressing, without taking off our shoes, without water, without heating for three whole months... How we survived all this, I don’t understand.
...One time I was walking along the road to the regimental headquarters, almost sleeping as I walked, and suddenly I felt people “flowing around me” from all sides, I opened my eyes, and along the road they were leading a crowd of captured Germans, about thirty people, in formation, and they were walking around me with both sides. The prisoners overtook me, and when I approached the headquarters, I heard wild screams and screams. Our “son of the regiment” stood drunk and in tears at the headquarters; the Germans were brought up to him and he shot them all one by one... How these captured Germans screamed terribly before being shot.
...Then we went on the attack, and Volodya Klushin chased the German officer. But his machine gun ran out of cartridges and he, removing the disk, threw it at the fleeing German. He turned around, fired twice, and one bullet hit Volodya in the left side of his chest, under the nipple... He fell, we took his documents, and sent a funeral to his mother. It seems that before the 15th anniversary of the Victory, we gathered almost for the first time, all the veterans who were able to come. We agreed to celebrate Victory Day and collected money for a banquet. When my turn came and I gave my money and said my last name, a man sitting nearby came up and said: “Listen, where are you going?” We all addressed each other as you. I answer: “To the Chernyshevskaya metro station.” - “And I should go there too.” They went out and he asked: “Well, how are you doing with the mortar man?” I say: “Listen, you’re wrong. I’m not a mortar man.” - “Well, early in the morning of September 18, weren’t you the one who fired from the fifty-kopeck rifle?” And only then did I begin to guess who I was talking to: “Volodya, is that you?” He answers: “Yes.” I ask: “Why haven’t you responded for so many years? They killed you? A German officer shot you in front of me, and I remember how you were lying around, and the guys were pulling out your documents.” - “Well, as you can see, he’s alive...” As the doctors explained to him, the bullet passed a millimeter from the heart at the moment of its contraction. Instead of the subway, we went to some tavern and got so drunk that we crawled home, supporting each other. Well, this is the case, of course... And many years after the war, Volodya Klushin went to Estonia. He really wanted to find this trench where this “meat grinder” took place. His wife Nina Andreeva told me about this. They came there on their vacation. A local teacher drove them in his car, they searched for several days and finally found them. The crumbling trench was preserved, and Ninka told me: “I was standing at the top, Volodka jumped down there, leaned his elbows on the parapet and suddenly crawled down. Lost consciousness...” He, of course, was immediately taken to the local hospital and there they brought him back to order. I then asked him: “Vovka, what’s the matter? What happened to you? Heart?" He replies: “No heart, nothing like that. It was just a sunny day, exactly the same as the one when we were there. I jumped into the trench and saw the Krauts coming across the clearing straight towards me... I raised my hands, but there was nothing in my hands. And that’s it, I can’t tell you anything more...” These are the strongest experiences.
...An infantryman has great fear: you go on the attack, they shoot at you, and you have to go! You can only lie down on command, overcoming such fear is great courage, they are all heroes.
...These I-16s appeared, there were seven of them, they were about to land. And then our anti-aircraft gunners started shooting at them. This all happened before our eyes. The pilot flies low, shows red stars. There was great confusion because the Germans sometimes used our signs to strike, and people no longer knew who to shoot at. The plane caught fire, the pilot jumped out, the parachute opened, we thought that he would be saved, but there was not enough altitude, and he crashed. The others sat down. A car arrived, and the anti-aircraft gunner ran: “I shot it down!” His friend says to him: “Yes, you shot it down.” Look who you hit."
...I remember this moment: a blue-eyed sailor guy is walking. The rest of the sailors trail behind him. And what’s interesting: they don’t carry, but drag rifles. So tired, so hungry that they could no longer carry their weapons. For example, what kind of order did the Germans have? After they have been on the front line for a week, they are sent to the rear. There they are on fresh air, play volleyball, eat well. What did we have? They put everyone at Stalingrad, there was no rest, they were constantly in combat readiness, and, moreover, they were fed poorly.
...Every big boss always had a woman as a telephone operator. What is she forced to do? If she doesn’t lie with him today, then tomorrow she’ll join the infantry. It's better to be near this commander. Afterwards Makarenko served with me in Germany, and got married in Germany, and lived with this Polina. So what! It also seems like a violation, but there is a woman, and there is a man... Women, it was very difficult for them too! There was the greatest respect for them, nothing can be said here. Even going to the toilet is a dangerous thing, because there are men all around. I know the commander of a machine gun company, whom I would reward, I don’t know how! She has everything in order in the trench, everything is sewn on her, boots. She is a tough lady - she held the soldier like that! Commander of a machine gun company! Claudia was a nurse, healthy, and carried the deputy battalion commander! Any role is difficult, even the laundresses in the rear, and I take them most seriously. Now, by the way, there are more people alive than men. The men have died out and you see women in the hall.
...No one knew that I was a believer. I didn't emphasize this. He would go somewhere to the side and silently pray in the morning and before going to bed. I did not stay in the hospital for long. Everything healed very quickly. The bullets didn't touch the bones. Still, the Lord God protected me.
...In Leningrad I was in hospital No. 1014, at 48 Moika. When I was just brought in, I remember the head of the department, medical service colonel Sara Moiseevna, came into the ward surrounded by his retinue; unfortunately, I don’t remember her last name. I was sent to the operating room. It was necessary to remove the tampon, and when the nurse, such a healthy guy, pulled on it, I screamed and said that I wouldn’t let him. She turned to me and swore. I must say that she smoked, and she had such hands... Well, in general, a real surgeon. He asks: “How can you not give it?” - “I won’t give it to you and that’s all,” because it’s already painful, and even when they’re pulling from the inside... It feels like you’re going to die... She says, in the spirit of, like, take this fool off the table. They took me down, put me on the floor, and Sara Moiseevna said: “Wash his hands with alcohol. Let him take it out himself.” They wash my hands, and she leans over me and says: “Close your eyes!”, and puts a mask on my face. I didn't even realize it was anesthesia. He says: “Count!” I counted to fifteen or twenty when she jerked and took out this tampon. Everything is clear, hundreds of wounded have been brought in, and there is no time to bother with me alone. There was a real conveyor belt going on, and it was necessary to move faster, faster. So it was all justified. But the next time they brought me in for a dressing, I screamed again and said: “That’s it, you won’t deceive me again!” She says: “On the floor. Wash his hands. And don’t be afraid, I won’t wear a mask. Pick yourself, but if you pick at the wound, I’ll give you court martial!” This was said in all seriousness, because some did this on purpose so as not to go to the front again. I peeled off the edges, and she came up to me and said: “Well, well done!”
...Once we were forced to cover our own with artillery fire. Penalties were surrounded on the Miuss front, Saur-mogila, they could not fight back in any way and drew fire on themselves. The Germans were approaching them. It was all forced... We were sorry, we knew they were there.
...In the field they stood up on the defensive and began to dig in. And this picture stands before my eyes as if alive now. An open field, snow all around, and a “frame” flying above us. Of course, there is no smell of any kitchen. As it turned out later, our kitchen then, together with the cavalrymen, galloped 50 kilometers to the rear, and was found only on the third day. And what a shame. The barrier detachment detained everyone, and the kitchen, the only source of joy on the front line, did not have time to stop... The law of meanness.
...At this time, a German machine gun came to life, firing from the window of the only house standing on our flank. The company commander began yelling again: “Altshuller, calm down the machine gunner!” I fired and hit on the second shot. The machine gun fell into the street, and the machine gunner hung from the window. The guys told me about this later. A close explosion deafened me and I lost consciousness. Seeing this, my partner Sonya told the orderly: “Pull him out, and I’ll cover you.” The orderly crawled towards me, and at that time the Germans jumped out from behind the house and opened heavy fire. Sonya covered us with her fire and saved the orderly and me, but the bullet hit her in the collarbone, which is why her left arm remained paralyzed. After the war, by the way, she wrote me letters and invited me to visit. Moreover, she wrote with humor: “I understand that you cannot be the godfather of my children in connection with the national problem, but at least come and have a look at them.” After the war, she had four children: three boys and a girl.
...The Yak-1 aircraft were not of good quality, they had a flaw: oil leaked from the crankshaft and got onto the pilot’s canopy. In an air battle, you don’t have to think about how to shoot down, but simply survive! The planes were rather weak. This messer realized that he seemed to have wounded me, and began to finish me off. I brought the plane out of a tailspin - into a frontal attack. The German thought that I would not go head-on. But what do I care? I also press the triggers, but I actually can’t see the target, because my visor is all greasy. In short, we went through this with him - and parted ways. I arrived at the airfield alone, reporting to the regiment commander that a group of messengers met us in the Kharkov area, and an air battle began. Those two never returned from the battle, and I became deaf - I climbed up to 5,000 meters without oxygen, but remained alive. That was the end of my flight.
...And when we went further along the country road, I suddenly needed to go into the bushes. I walked in, sorry, sat down... And suddenly I saw a “Fritz” sitting not far from me, an officer, in the same position. I grabbed my pants, jumped out onto the road and literally shouted: “German!” Vanka Baranov and the guys rushed there and only returned 10-15 minutes later. They finished him off there, and the guys gave me a small “Parabellum” they had taken from him and a gorgeous fountain pen, then they called them “eternal pen”. I kept it for a very long time afterwards. It was so beautifully made that I wrote my dissertation on it and later, when I taught at school, I had it.
...I wasn’t very well oriented and chose the observation point for the enemy’s front line carelessly: I went out into the bushes at the edge of the forest, in view of the village of Chernushka, pulled out a map, let’s look at it and mark it, and at that moment a single shot rang out from the German positions, it hit me into a field bag with an explosive bullet. A piece of bullet tore out a piece of my flesh right here, the scar still remains. I didn’t feel it right away, I plopped down in the bushes next to my soldier, and he said to me: Comrade junior lieutenant, your gun went off. Then I noticed, I saw blood, but I’m young, and this is the time - I pressed an individual bag to the wound, bandaged it, and I myself had some kind of inner joy: I suffered at the front, received a wound, shed blood. Satisfied, he returned to his position, I wrote a letter to my mother, saying, Mom, don’t worry, I’m lightly wounded. She's there... jumping in fright. There were many of us, junior lieutenants and platoon commanders. And it’s a pity that so little is said about the contribution to the Victory that such yesterday’s tenth-graders made, such Vanka platoon leaders at the forefront, led people and died themselves. Out of a hundred people born in 23-24, only three survived, the rest died.
...They gave me ours three-line rifle, but with a German, Zeiss, optical sight. The three-ruler is a wonderful rifle. If you shoot her properly, what do you think? It's a reliable weapon and very simply made. The German sight was considered better than ours only because it had a gutta-percha eyecup. Ours was somewhat longer and did not have a softening eyecup, so when firing, many guys were afraid of recoil, and because of this, shooting accuracy suffered.
...I remove the pin from the grenade, the grenade remains cocked, and as soon as I release my hand, there’s an explosion and I’m gone! I’ve already thought how many of our people have died - and I still have to die. So I’d rather die from my grenade. This thought has not yet passed when I stumble upon a German armored personnel carrier, we were walking in rye, taller than a man, the rye is good. So they collided with it - the body and sides, all iron, they were sitting, I screamed: “Hands up!” Showed them the grenade. They weren't expecting me, just where did I come from? They immediately jumped up and held their hands up, I had an instant thought: “What am I going to do with them, because I myself am already surrounded.” I didn’t throw the grenade, but threw it over the side and looked in the grenade’s wake - it rolled across the floor and right at the feet of one German. He jumped, got scared. A stone under the car closer to the cabin, and then an explosion! I don’t know what happened to them in the back, but I know that the car was torn, and where the Germans were, how they were beaten, I don’t know, I didn’t see them. There wasn't even anyone left in the cabin. The explosion was so strong that the car was blown apart. They probably still had their ammunition there. Our guys from the 33rd division were right there, they were running after me and they saw this whole picture. They ran up and carried me away, and they began to blow on my cheeks and in my mouth, they realized that I was shell-shocked, completely muffled... I could barely hear the conversation: “Yes, this is someone else’s soldier, why are you messing with him? Let’s go, otherwise it will happen to us too.” Another says: “No, he’s not a stranger, you see - he killed the Germans?! This is yours! And that’s it - I feel like some kind of stone is rolling towards me, I lose all my strength and consciousness, everything is torn away from me... I don’t remember how they transported me across the Don. I just remember, but I don’t know how long, the sound of wheels on the railway - they knock at the junctions - then the knock reached my ears, and where am I, and again I’m going into some hole. I came to my senses in Ryazhsk, Ryazan region, already in the hospital, there were doctors or nurses in front of me, some were in white coats, and I realized that I was saved.
...There were fierce battles here, it was difficult because we didn’t have swampy terrain, lakes, tanks, we didn’t have planes to support us, all the military equipment was deployed in the central areas of the battles. We had such a case during the transition: a small soldier of a mortar crew, carrying a slab, and for a moment it weighed 16 kilograms, and so, he said: I can’t walk, I don’t have the strength. They tried to persuade him, but he said, shoot me, he said, I can’t go. We unloaded him, took everything, the sergeant-major fastened him to himself with part of his belt, and pulled him until he got his second wind. Then this boy became a good soldier.
...And somewhere two kilometers from the airfield he sat down. Well, we took the pilots. They brought me to the regiment commander and began interrogation. The pilot speaks Russian.
- Where did you learn Russian?
- At your place.
He was either in Moscow, or in Kyiv, in the flight units... Well, at the end of the conversation, Pavel Terentich asks:
- Tell me openly - will you defeat us?
- No. But we will teach you fools how to fight.
Well, after that he gathered us... It’s like we - seven or eight of our planes saw one German, and everyone is on him, everyone wants to shoot down... And this is wrong... He says - “If you want a result, work in pairs.” . And so things started to happen. In general, we were not prepared for war, of course, there were heavy losses.
...All the dead were then dragged into craters and filled to capacity. Then their bodies froze and became covered with snow. In fact, no one buried them then.
...When closer to spring we arrived at this bridgehead, all the craters filled with water and these corpses floated to the surface with their backs. It became impossible to breathe. But then our command realized that an epidemic could start because of this, and they made the following decision: drag the dead into large craters that were formed due to large high-explosive shells, and dump them there. They still remained there, no one reburied them. There are no roads there, a completely empty area. And the recent reburial of our fallen soldiers in Sinimäe is a drop in the ocean. Many are still lying there!
...Don’t believe that people on the front line didn’t get sick. They were still so sick. I already told you that Kolya Bodrov was simply tormented by otitis media, and Trunov, for example, was tormented by furunculosis. And this is what happened with Kiryanov. When he developed serious problems with his liver, almost jaundice began, he was admitted to the hospital. But after his recovery, he ended up not with us, but with the infantry, and trampled with them to East Prussia. And only when we met in Pompiquene, he began to beg our chief of staff to be taken back, but this was only possible with great difficulty.
...One night they suddenly caught up with soldiers; as it turned out later, it was a penal company. And I think it’s stupid, of course, that they were thrown into battle. They carried out a weak artillery barrage for about ten minutes and they went to take the heights virtually with “Hurray!” The Germans, of course, immediately became alarmed and opened heavy artillery fire. In general, not only were these penalty prisoners beaten, but many of ours also died, because the 1st battery was ordered to accompany them in the attack and support them with fire. But where would it be, in an open field without digging in... In general, this attack ended ingloriously, I think it was in vain that people were killed...
...There were additions to the winning accounts. Of course, this could happen. The Germans had only 5 thousand planes, and we shot down 10 thousand. How to understand this?
...At the end of May we were removed and taken to rest in the rear, about a hundred kilometers away. There we were immediately transferred and began to be fed according to the rear standard, and this is water and water. In the very first week, a woman from a neighboring village comes to the regiment commander in the morning to complain: “My cow is missing.” We began to investigate, and it turned out that it was not ordinary soldiers who stole it, but two of our best intelligence officers, who were awarded medals “For Courage” for the battles in Sevsk. No one else was awarded to us, only them. Suddenly we were all gathered, lined up, and regiment commander Nikolai Vasilyevich Dmitriev said: “I myself awarded these fellows, but they stole a cow from my aunt... From a mother who needs to feed her children!” I won’t tell you how he swore, but then he himself tore off these medals from them and ordered them both to be sent to a penal company...
...It happened like this once in the Baltic states: they transfer us from one section of the front to another, a very difficult march - early spring, lakes, swamps, frozen water, and on top there was such a mess of snow and ice. It's very hard to walk. We finally got onto the road, we were walking, and suddenly we heard a brass band playing military marches! We immediately picked up the pace, before that we had been trailing along. According to the ranks they say: division commander, division commander! He understood that in this state we would not be able to go straight into battle, we needed to be cheered up and instilled with fighting spirit. We all walk smart, in step, and again they pass through the ranks: girls, girls! To the right of the road there are female snipers, all young. We opened our mouths and walked and stared.
...The company commander, Captain Smirnov, was traveling with us in the carriage. The captain plays the guitar and suddenly calls me: “Will you sing along with me a Jewish song? - “Exchange forty million for me.” But I had never heard this song before and he was surprised: “How is it that you, a Jew, don’t know it?” There were four of us Jews in the platoon, two from Odessa. And when the captain began to play, Mishka came up, followed by the others, and began to sing along with him. Then two or three more songs, and the guys started asking for more. But he put down the guitar, saying that he couldn’t sing on an empty stomach: “I would give anything to eat and drink.” Mishka asks: “Would you give everything away?” The captain replies: “That’s it!” Then Mishka says: “Well, then take off your sheepskin coat.” And when we stopped, Mishka quickly ran away and found out that we would stand for two hours. He returned and said to me, another soldier and my friend Sashka: “Put on the red patrol bands and take the machine guns!” He, Lyosha Kuznetsov and another one took all this junk, but everything was new. These snow-white short fur coats are so beautiful. We went to the square where there was a market where Lithuanians sell smoked meat, moonshine, and freshly baked bread. He asks the price, gives away the sheepskin coat, and takes food into his duffel bag. And so on to the second, third... And we go behind and take note. Then we approach the first Lithuanian and say: “There is a war going on, and you are stripping the army! Do you want to take a walk with us to the commandant’s office?” Of course: “No, no, no!” and gives away his sheepskin coat. In short, we took all the sheepskin coats and felt boots back and returned with food and drink. There was enough for the whole carriage, because everyone brought a duffel bag of food on their back and two “cidors” in their hands. What was there... The guys got drunk well and rode merrily. We sang songs with a guitar.
...And one day a seriously wounded German officer came to us. He didn't know a single word of Russian. And that means they put him in a separate room. In the morning I go to see him, and he screams hysterically and points at something. I don't understand anything. But there were those who knew German, and they translated for me: “Rats are running around. He's afraid of rats." I reported this to the doctor so that he could take some action. The doctor said to him: “My dear! Our people were afraid when you hanged many of our people. So just be patient with the rats. Lie down."
...The task of our corps and division, as I understand it, was to make a hole in the enemy’s defenses, so our losses were very large, and because of this we did not have sniper groups. The snipers also had to go on the attack, they said that they could do it a little behind, but what kind of place is there behind when Vanya Budarin, our platoon commander, is running... Lord, what can we talk about?
...I looked around: nearby the girl anti-aircraft gunners were shooting with all their might, they were firing from anti-aircraft guns at these planes that we hated, the sounds of “bump-bump-bump” were heard, but everything was to no avail. Their commander was either in the rank of senior lieutenant or in the rank of captain. And then I found a covered truck next to them. It turned out that it belonged to them. I immediately ran up to them and said: “Give me the car. My hospital director is wounded.” They told me: “Okay! But you can take one of ours then.” Agreed. I put our hospital director in the back of the car. But there's a lot more free seats remained. I decided to use this chance and shouted loudly: “Who else can come and get into the car? There is room in the back!!!" And then an incident happened that I will never be able to forget. My operating room nurse is running towards the back of the car. Intestines are spilling out of her tattered belly, but she tucks them in and holds them in place as she runs. Then, of course, we put it in the back. But what to do next? We were only very roughly told: somewhere here in the forest there is a newly formed military hospital, go there. Where is he? How to look for it? We didn't know any of this.
...I remember they once gave me a Vlasovite as an orderly, a young, handsome boy, about 15-16 years old, Ukrainian. For some reason, I didn’t go to the neighboring camp for several days. And suddenly I met girls from this camp. This Vlasov man was walking next to me. “Oh-oh-oh,” the girls exclaimed, “Zhenya, what a handsome orderly you have. That’s probably why you don’t come to visit us.” And you know what? He blushed and cried and said, “You know, you can look at me. And I am a Vlasovite, and therefore I have no right to look at you.” And then he told me his story: “You know, I came to the Germans when I was only 12 years old. The Germans occupied our village. And we boys, you know, were very curious, we all hung around their guns. So I ended up with the Germans.” Further fate I don't know this guy. I felt very sorry for him.
...At night we successfully crossed neutral and walked eight to ten kilometers. Suddenly one of our two observers crawls up and says: “Fritz is coming!” We look, indeed, a German is walking along the path and whistling some kind of song. “Warm”, coming straight towards us... They took him, he didn’t even have time to utter a word. They tied my hands and imprisoned me. I started interrogating him. But at first he couldn’t even speak, his teeth were chattering so much. It turned out to be an old man, fifty-two years old. He works as a stoker in a hospital or rest home for pilots located nearby. But we didn’t need such a “language”, and we didn’t need its pilots. Well, what can they tell us? The question arose, what to do? There is no way to return without a “language”, which means you have to move on. They began to consult what to do with the prisoner, and the “Fritz” understood everything... And turning to me he asked: “Papir!” They gave him a piece of paper and a pencil. He wrote and, giving me the note, explained that he lives in Bremen, that he has three children, and he asks us, if we survive, to deliver this note to the address he wrote on it. In the note, he wrote that he was seriously wounded and would probably never return... I transferred our conversation to the guys. They sit and don’t answer. Well, of course, it’s not easy for an old man, unarmed, you know... And then he says that ahead, about two hundred meters away, there is a rock road. The commander left one person with the prisoner, ordering him to kill the German if he heard shooting. One chief sergeant took with him an officer's cloak, a cap and a large field gendarmerie badge that was worn around his neck. As soon as we lay down in the bushes on both sides of the road, a passenger car appeared - an Opel Captain. The dressed-up chief sergeant goes out to the middle of the road, stands up spectacularly and points to the edge of the road with his baton. The car stopped and we immediately jumped out. There were two officers in the car. One, when he saw us, pulled out a pistol and shot himself. The other sat and trembled, holding some kind of briefcase in his hands. The driver jumped out and ran, well, a burst of machine gun fire hit him in the back... They pulled out the officer, he turned out to be the deputy chief of the operations department of either a division or a corps. They put his own trouser belt around the captured major's neck and led him by it. Where should he go? And his trousers didn't hold up well. So, we went back and suddenly everyone started running at the same time. Imagine, we all felt sorry for the German, who was supposed to be finished off by the soldier remaining with him if he heard shots on the road... We ran up, and he was sleeping peacefully and even snoring. And next to him is a “Fritz” bound hand and foot, gagged, and staring in horror at him and at us. At night we safely crossed the front line and handed over the German captain to the headquarters. They also wrote a long letter there, in which they told how, thanks to this old man, the rock road was discovered, a valuable “tongue” was taken, and they asked to let our “Fritz” go home. They handed him this letter and, showing him where to go, sent him alone, without an escort, to the collection point for prisoners. This was memorable because they themselves did not yet know whether they would return alive, and they felt sorry for the old German.
...We were given porridge in briquettes. This concentrate could be placed in hot water and within a few minutes the porridge was ready. And short poems were printed on the packs of these concentrates. On millet, for example, they say: “Help yourself to millet porridge, / and feed the enemy steel, / so that the enemy, not invited, / does not trample his native land!” On another briquette there was a picture of a German descending by parachute. The one with the swastika on his sleeve, and sorry, with a huge butt. And below there is a Red Army soldier who is holding a bayonet and the German butt is already a few centimeters from the bayonet. Under the picture it was written: “You were looking for a landing site on the Soviet line. / Fly, fly, a place to land is already ready for you.”
...Women at the front were pitied, respected, helped in everything, because they felt that only this was our salvation, only they could save us, no one else. Well, that's how it should be. The Germans have machine guns and machine guns, but we only have rifles. What about the rifle? Sand gets into it and the shutter does not want to move. So the German overpowered us, squeezed us, and let’s run back! And I ran back. Oh, how I slipped away! My winding unwound, I fell down, quickly wound it up and run again, otherwise the Germans would take prisoner. When I was running through a village that had recently been taken, I always remembered this episode: one of the old-time soldiers was hit in the stomach. This soldier was lying behind the fence, and I was just running and ran into him. He stuffs his intestines into his stomach with his hands and says: finish me off, finish me off. Who's going to finish you off?!
...It was especially difficult for ordinary nurses. After all, for 70 people in the tent, only one sister was allocated, who, moreover, no one had yet replaced. And she was with these wounded around the clock, consoled them, calmed them down, spoke to them in different topics. This was her main responsibility. I remember when we were somewhere “on the defensive,” wounded began to arrive, but there weren’t enough nurses. And so, I come to the tent to the wounded and say: “Where is the sister? We need to take her for dressing...” To which one of the wounded said to me: “Speak quietly, she is sleeping. We won’t let her wake up.” This is how they loved the nurses in the hospitals. And it even happened: when my sister fell off her feet from fatigue and fell asleep, the wounded soldiers themselves replaced her, looked after the other wounded and said: “Let him sleep! I'm tired..."
...One sniper came to give birth to us during the war. I don’t know where they recruited them from? But she was very vulgar, and we were not used to rudeness there. And as soon as she gave birth, she left the child and fled from our hospital to the front. Where was the child supposed to go? And we had one nurse working for us, a Muscovite. She was born without a father and was the only child of her mother. And her mother wrote to her: “I want you to be alive. Give birth to a child somewhere and come to me!” And so this nurse took the baby and went to her home in Moscow. We sewed gauze diapers for her and gave them to her from the bottom of our hearts, giving her a scarf and wrappings. It's a pity I never found out her address. It would be interesting to know what happened to this boy? Now he would probably be over sixty.
...This was my first fight. There were 370 of us. They gave the command. We started screaming and screaming. The Germans fled, we beat some of them. We reached this position and captured the heights. We dug in. Night is coming. Everything is quiet, whether there is a connection or not, I don’t know. The Germans cut us off and again captured the trenches through which we broke through. The platoon commanders decide what to do next and say: we will fight our way back. In the morning we lined up and went to attack in the back of the Germans. We made our way through them again, with relative ease. But when we broke through and began to move along the no-man's land, disaster struck. The Germans opened such artillery fire on this place! We crawled out. We were gathered, lined up in a ravine, and it turned out that there were only 70 of us left.
….Once again this happened: somehow we came under heavy shelling in the Baltic States, we lay down, mine explosions were falling very close - fear! Everyone plopped down on their belly, I looked - and before my eyes - blueberries! And the berries are so big, there’s a lot of them! They didn’t care about everything, they began to collect it while lying down with their lips. Then everything was black. I immediately remembered Izmailovo, how we went into the forest to collect it. It would seem that war is a terrible thing! And here it is – blueberries.
...We nurses were constantly hungry. We were given only a cracker or a piece of bread per day. But we continued to work. Let's eat some crackers, drink a glass of boiling water, and get down to business again. We worked a lot. But the wounded didn’t ask whether we had eaten this morning or not, whether we were tired or not. They were interested in one thing: how they could get help as quickly as possible. They always moaned: “Sister, help-iii!” This was the situation: you didn’t know who to approach. And there were only four of us nurses who served them. But we were young and never refused them.
...Then we were fed mainly with pearl barley porridge, which was brought by the army kitchen at night, when the shelling subsided. To this was added a quarter loaf of bread and very occasionally some American pork stew. Since there were many dead horses in the field, we tried to cook horse meat, but the meat was tough and almost inedible.
...What was going on in this hospital! We were, one might say, already under fire as doctors and therefore knew the main rules of war. These doctors knew none of this. We brought the wounded, whom they saw for the first time. The entire hospital staff began to cry bitterly out of compassion. Then their chief surgeon tells me: “Wash yourself!” This surprised me a little. I answered him directly: “I can’t wash myself, because we have a two-hour readiness period. Now the army is preparing for an offensive. And if this is the case, I must be on the spot right away. Moreover, about half of my staff was wounded and killed.”
...There is one more thing. At the front, we were all believers to some extent, regardless of whether we were communists or not. They shoot at us or bomb us, but in their hearts almost everyone says: “Lord, blow me away!” I give you my word. Everyone was a believer at heart. - “God grant that it doesn’t kill you!” - “God grant that if they wound you, the wound will be small.” - “God grant, if death, then instantaneous, so that he dies immediately and that’s it, since this cannot be avoided.” Let the atheist communists not boast there that they do not believe in God, they believed in him in their souls.
...Near the town of Kloga we broke into the camp. Concentration camp... There were six fires there. People shot in the back of the head lay on stacked logs covered in diesel fuel. On them were again logs and again people, and so on in three or four tiers... And in this camp we captured more than thirty SS men, but most of them were Estonians. My friend Sashka approached some barn and opened the gate. He was only 22 or 23 years old, but when he opened the gate, I saw how a man instantly grows old... He didn’t turn gray, no. It’s just that his back was somehow hunched over... I and some other guys came up and we all saw in this warehouse rows of children’s slippers, women’s hair, children’s clothes lying in piles... Then Vanya Budarin came up, looked, and when he turned around... I have such a scary face I never saw it again... He says to me: “Did you see the toilets there?” And nearby there were huge wooden toilets, worth twenty points each. On the wall of the barracks there was probably a fire shield on which crowbars and shovels hung. Vanya tells me: “Take crowbars and shovels. Tell the Germans to tear down the boards with these glasses." They approached the Germans, showed them, and explained what needed to be done. They did. Then he told us to cut the wires. Showed what size it was. Then he ordered the Germans to put their hands behind their backs and said to us: “Now tie their hands.” They are screaming, but where to go? And when they tied the hands of the SS men, he turned to me and said: “Now take them there and drown them all in shit!” I was stunned, I stood motionless, and suddenly he furiously shouted: “Are you a Jew or not?!” But I stood rooted to the spot. Vanya repeated: “Get everyone there now!” More guys came up, about five of them, and we took them all... Fortunately, they had their hands tied. At this time, the second landing group landed and Major Kondratenko was running towards us. He runs up and asks: “Where are the prisoners?” It’s just that when we landed, we radioed that prisoners had been captured. Budarin says, pointing to the toilet: “Over there...” The major shouted: “Who did this?!” I don’t know what pushed me, but I took a step forward. In such a rage, he began to tear at his holster, but then Vanka stepped between us and said: “Comrade Major, I ordered him. Better come to the barn." He shouts: “... your mother! Why do I need this barn?!” Budarin insists: “No, you come, come.” The major went into the barn... He came out and said: “If you survive and are nominated for a reward, I will tear the leaf with my own hands. If next time, due to your fault, there are no prisoners left, I will “slap” without hesitation, and no commander will save you. Do you understand?”, turned around and left. I told this to you so that you understand at least a little that war is a truly terrible thing... The terrible thing, in fact, is not that he could shoot me, but that such collisions happened, it’s all inhuman. And this needs no justification. We did what we had to do! Something without which the country could not be saved, but remembering it is extremely difficult...
...This weapon was called “Farewell, Motherland!” Its essence is that it should go along with the infantry. Therefore, when the enemy sees infantry and a bunch of guns there, who will he shoot at? It is clear that based on the guns. That's why I got a real war. War is war: the smart one will profit, the handsome one will kiss, and the fool will fight. The most important thing is that they will break it - we think - well, now we’ll rest, at least get some sleep, but they’re going for ammunition, they’re bringing a forty-five again - get it!
...The whole farm was on fire and the Germans were running around it like partridges. And at this time the liaison officer of our first platoon commander comes running: “Senior Lieutenant Kremenchuk has been killed. I'm wounded." The messenger himself was wounded in the stomach. I went up to help him, and everything just poured out of there, his entire stomach was shot through with several bullets. He: “You shoot me, I’m not a tenant!” Me: “How are you not a tenant? We’ll send you to the hospital now!” - “What kind of hospital is there!?”
...In war, as a rule, we moved on foot. Two hundred kilometers - all on foot, one hundred eighty, ninety - all on foot. There were two times when we were quickly transferred by cars. And not only that - with his feet, but also with a forced march, running. Because they broke through in one place, we need to go after them, develop an offensive, but there is no one! We are removed from one area, we run to where the urgency is greatest. Like this.
...Company commanders really did not like snipers. This was especially evident in defense. After all, life was more or less calm in the defense; the soldiers were somehow settling into life. The Germans generally loved comfort. Here's a very common example. Between us and the Germans there is the only well in the entire area. And during the day, both we and the Germans took turns going to him for water. And then a guy like me arrives, let’s say. And so this guy fired from his Berdanka with an optical sight at the German at the well and that’s it, goodbye to a quiet life. In response, the Germans brought down heavy fire from their six-barreled mortars, “donkeys” as they were called then. This is horror... Everyone has to climb into “fox holes” in dugouts and can’t stick their head out, nothing... And all this, because of some “Fritz”, who perhaps hasn’t been hit yet. That’s why they didn’t like snipers, they didn’t like them. I remember twenty years after the war, at one of the meetings I suddenly saw my fellow countryman, who was also a sniper. I saw two orders of “Glory” on his chest and when we started talking, I asked him: “Fedya, how many Fritz did you put in?” He looked at me intently, laughed and said: “Not a single one!” I didn’t believe it: “What are you doing, how are you?” And he answered me: “Our deputy battalion commander told me: “Don’t disturb our peace, but we’ll do what needs to be done. You will have marks on the butt, you will receive a reward, don’t worry.”
...For example, at Stalingrad, because it was frosty, we were given frozen bread, it was impossible to cut it and before eating it, it had to be heated on a fire, you can’t take it with a knife, you can only chop it with an ax, but it flies apart.
...For our native party, Estonia was a Soviet Republic, but for us it was still a foreign country. And they behaved accordingly. I remember well a two-story house: a pharmacy downstairs, a store on the second floor. The soldiers ran upstairs, and there lay large bundles of good fabrics. Immediately the guys began to tear and cut off pieces of these fabrics. We sat down on the floor, took off our boots, threw off the decayed foot wraps and wrapped our feet in this luxurious fabric... There was a dairy plant nearby, something else, so we collected whole helmets of eggs... There was everything there. They took everything they could get their hands on. Of course, the Estonians saw all this and watched in horror, but the guys were hungry and angry. What is it, ask, they just took it away.
...They came at us twice, the ground shook... In front of me, the orderly’s left cheek was torn off, and he smiled with his right side, because he had legal right go to the rear... It’s such a meat grinder here...
…One day, from the hospital where he was recovering from a serious wound, an elderly Jew came to us for replenishment. He told me that three of his brothers had already died in battle. This soldier in our company was wounded again; during artillery shelling, he was cut by shrapnel, and he became blind. This signalman was lying alone on a snow-covered field, and heard a crunch, someone was walking towards him on the snowy crust, he saw nothing, he thought it was the Germans, prepared to die, and began shouting patriotic slogans: “Death to the German occupiers!” and the like, and the Red Army soldiers tell him: “Calm down! We are ours!”, and they dragged him to the rear, to the medical battalion...
...Suddenly, from around the corner, an Opel Blitz - a German lorry or two-ton - jumps out and rushes at great speed. Our offensive had just begun, and the Germans hoped to slip through to their own. One of the guys managed to throw a grenade, but it hit the side of the car and fell into our ditch. We were blown away by the wind, but Igolkin didn’t have time to jump out... I see Igolkin standing. His hand is raised and his fingers hang. He was a strong man, probably about twenty-eight years old, and he said to me: “Come, take out the knife!” We had such landing knives. He took his left hand with his right hand, put it on the parapet and said: “Cut!” Can you imagine cutting? And he has blood and soil there, everything is mixed up. I stand and don't move. Then Gnedin comes up and takes the knife from me, but here I was smart enough. I pulled his hand away and said: “Let’s quickly get him to the “pmp” - the regimental medical center... Two months have passed, we are standing in this town of Irru. And then one fine day the door swings open and Igolkin enters. He was treated, his fingers were sewn on, and he came to us, can you imagine? Then he said that he did some special exercises to develop his fingers. And here he stands and holds two huge vessels with moonshine in both hands. And behind them stand two recruits loaded with sausage and all sorts of other snacks. Igolkin fought until the end of the war. Thank God, he remained alive and then went to his home in Siberia.
...The national composition of the batteries was quite diverse. We had Altaians, Ukrainians, and Jews. Of all the nationalities, the “Yeldashi” fought rather weakly; we called them the Central Asian republics; they were not suitable. But everyone else fought well. Now they are scolding Ukraine, but the Ukrainians fought very well then, and the Georgians, it was a single family at the front, no national discord, nothing. There were no intentions there - what difference does it make who he is? – We do the same thing together!
...After all, what we were afraid of during the war was tanks. The worst thing was the tank. Because there was nothing to fight the tanks except guns and Molotov cocktails.
...Some people still believe that one of the reasons for our victory at Stalingrad is that “General Moroz” was on our side. But the Germans, they say, were not ready for the frost and were not resistant. And in response I say: “Why didn’t we and the Germans freeze equally? It’s minus 30 degrees for them, and minus 10 degrees for us, or what?” We were also in the cold without apartments and without anything. There really were frosts and they greatly complicated the fighting: neither the infantry nor the artillery could dig in, it was impossible to hide. Just some natural relief and shelter. Moreover, it’s still winter and everything is perfectly visible against a white background! Not everyone had camouflage suits.
...The Germans are on the other side, we are on this one. They will put us in a boat of some people and transport us there. And the German from there will fire at the boat and the end of the boat - they pull us back on a rope, wounding someone. And so we tried several times and I was wounded in the other arm.
...When I was returning back, and then there had just been shelling, I heard a cry: “Help, help!” When I looked around, I found our seriously wounded soldier. I told him: “I’ll see the orderly now and send for you.” But when I got to the place where the shelling took place, I didn’t meet anyone. And so he moved on. I somehow forgot about the wounded man. But what could I do? Firstly, I had nothing to provide him with timely assistance and bandage him. And secondly, I didn’t know what to do and how to do it, how to bandage it. Now, of course, I would help him. But then our wounded soldiers lay in heaps in craters along with the dead. So this still haunts me.
...The Germans generally fired mortars well. And we are bad, always bad. Our artillery was good, but our mortar training... I don’t know why.
...There were severe frosts near Stalingrad. The weak died first. The person weakens and becomes warm. He gets out of the trench, lies down on the parapet - falls asleep and freezes. But at night you can’t see it. And so - many.
...We didn’t shoot down a single plane during the entire war: neither anti-aircraft guns, nor our two 100-mm guns. Once, when we were standing right above Stalingrad and, as they say, it was already felt that we would defend the city, two German planes flew at us. What kind of fire we opened on them! We shot with all the means we had. We decided: yeah, since the plane is flying, then let’s shoot there. So what? They were not shot down anyway; they flew back on their own.
...When we were preparing for battle for the first time. Lay down. We took up a firing position. And the German was probably also preparing to attack. How they rose there in their positions - a dark cloud! Lined up in chains. What about us? The first year we serve, we lie down - it’s scary, our knees are shaking. We are waiting for this “cloud” to come towards us. But they didn't go. They called off their attack. And then, tomorrow, they lifted us up and went there. This was the worst thing. Then my heart turned to stone, and it wasn’t so scary.
...The soldiers called all the women “Rama”. Zoya and Valya didn’t speak there... They shouted: the frame, the frame is coming! And the women responded: “Keep your dick straight!”
...I remember: we were walking across a field, and something grabbed my stomach. He grabbed me so much that I couldn’t put on my pants, I was very weak. And our medical instructor thought that I was already finished, he felt my pulse, my pulse was barely there. Well, they left, and I stayed in the field. I remember gnawing on some kind of head of cabbage, but it was tasteless. And they went further through the field and into the forest. There they dug themselves in the forest and dug trenches. I don’t remember how many hours I spent in the field, but they let me go, I got up and followed them. He came to his platoon and dug a trench for himself. And the next morning a medical instructor came and looked - and I was sitting in a trench. He says: look - alive! And I thought that you were already finished.
...I just fell into a crater, and when I came to my senses, the self-propelled gun was already three meters away from me. I clearly remember that when she crawled nearby, I saw snowflakes melting on her side... And, probably in the heat of the moment, I stood up and threw a bottle at her. Then there were already self-igniting ones, which did not need to be set on fire first. It immediately flared up, and I, without even picking up the machine gun, rushed into the forest. He ran not towards the battalion, but down to a nearby country road. At the same time, he probably roared, because I remember, snot, tears were flowing, blood was gushing into my felt boots, I looked around and saw that two of these tankmen, SS men, were running after me. I am faster and they are faster... I will stop and so will they. I didn’t think very well then and jumped out onto the road, and “Dodges” with 76-mm guns were walking along it. I sat down right next to the road and the Jeep in front stopped, an officer jumped out and leaned over me. I remember seeing the shoulder straps of a lieutenant colonel. As I later found out, it was the artillery regiment commander: “What’s the matter?” I say: “The tank is there!” I didn’t know whether he was coming or not. The lieutenant colonel commanded, they immediately unhooked two guns and dragged them there by hand. I sit there, about twenty minutes later the guns return, and the gun commander reports. They killed one of those tankers and dragged the second one with them. The lieutenant colonel leans over again and asks: “Did you burn Ferdinand?” I answered something. He says: “Give me the Red Army book.” What kind of book is there, I’m sitting there, dying. Then, it seems, his adjutant took the book from me. They wrote something off and handed it back to me. A dressing bag was placed on the wound under the stomach. Then, seeing that I was unarmed, they put a carbine in my hands, got into the cars and drove away. I’m sitting with this carbine, and I’m getting worse and worse. Suddenly I see a “Fritz” coming towards me in the fog from the other side. I lay down, pulled the shutter and shot him point-blank. He fell about seven to ten meters away. I raised my head and suddenly such a choice swearing... Only in the navy did I hear such a thing. It turns out that it was my foreman. He pulled me onto himself and dragged me to the medical battalion.
...When we dug in, a rumor reached us that on such and such a street there was an unlooted store and there was wine and food there. Our stores before the war - there was nothing to talk about, nothing to see there. And there are dozens of varieties of wines, including German, French and Italian, Bulgarian, Polish and God knows what else. He drank and fell asleep. I woke up from the cold - I was frozen. I didn't have a watch. I opened my eyes, lay on my back, and my stars were jumping. I had no experience of being drunk, and I didn’t think it was from drinking, I immediately thought that we were being bombed and the earth was shaking. Then I listened - there were no explosions. Then I realized that apparently I was so drunk that my stars were jumping. I remembered about the connection, got up and immediately sobered up a little, but I didn’t know which way to go, it was dark, the area was unfamiliar. I heard some kind of hubbub, conversations, moreover, Russians or Germans - I didn’t know - I was careful (I didn’t want to die), and began to slowly follow this hubbub. Moreover, I could not understand in any way whether the Germans or the Russians were speaking, maybe they were still drunk, maybe they were too far away, but I couldn’t distinguish the speech. It’s just that the side from which the speech came was clearly audible. I stretched my arms forward (in case you fall again), and began to slowly move towards the sounds. Suddenly he ran into some large face ahead. The muzzle is so healthy and unshaven. I outlined her - a beard, some kind of rough, and our driver was my fellow countryman from the Stalingrad region and we had a firm agreement that if they were killed or wounded, I would definitely write a letter to my family, I had his address, and he had mine address. I ask: “Vasily Nikolaevich, is that you?” - He’s silent, sniffles, doesn’t say anything. I realized that it was not him. Well, I have this thought: What if it’s not ours, but a German? I ask: “Who?” - Silent. I ask in German - he is also silent. He puffs, but doesn’t answer. Quite a mystery! I begin to go down this beard, and what surprised me is that this beard is painfully long. And what literally sobered me up: Suddenly the beard ends and the legs begin to move at once. Without a belly. And then it dawned on me that it was I who had gone into the reeds. He grabbed the horse by the tail. It’s good that the horses are front-line, they huddled close to the man. The horse is generally a smart animal. When she is bombed, shells explode, there is shooting, she is already accustomed to the sounds. And that’s why she was tolerant of my advances.
...There was a war in the penal company that I could neither understand nor understand. Where was I sent? What did we do? How did we do? I don't understand. I remember we attacked some village. We dispersed and moved towards this village. The German opened fire and we walked across open ground. Who commanded me? What should I do? I don't know. I see that one was killed, a second, a third, there are already fewer of us. I approached the German positions so that I could hear German commands (I understand: “Prepare hand grenades!”). And there is no one to attack, everyone is beaten. I fell and am lying there. Where should I go? Night fell and I crawled back. This was my second fight.
...Snipers were taught to work in pairs, and I was assigned to pair with Parfenova Sonya, a Siberian born in 1923, originally from Tomsk. Sonya was such a large, portly girl, and to put it bluntly, I was far from being built like a guard. And I remember when I was introduced to her, she looked at me with regret. As I realized many years later, she simply felt sorry for me, because by that time she had already lost two partners, and I was the third...
...Then I look: ours have drifted away, the Germans are already visible, they are coming out from behind the trunks, but they are not going on the attack yet, they are waiting to see if ours will run, well, they almost didn’t wait. I look - one soldier is running from the left flank, I shout to him, “Get back!” Brothers Slavs, hold on!” (Note - says veteran Semyon Zilbershten) And then I was hit in the chest, I fell on all fours, my hat flew off, the gun was in my hand and there was blood from my throat, there was blood on my face, it was difficult to breathe. Will our soldiers really give up this height?! The task was to hold! But then help arrived, and our medical instructor Shamovtsev ran up to me, raised his hat, put it on my head, grabbed me like a child - such a healthy man! He took me from the battlefield to a quiet place.
...At the front there was some kind of dull fear. The human mind was more present in us: you understood that there was no other way out and orders must be followed. And if someone wanted to run away somewhere, it was the state of an animal, not a person. We somehow got over it. Of course, I could run away and desert somewhere. But how could I escape? First of all, I was patriotic. And secondly, he understood perfectly well how all this could end. IN best case scenario I would have been sent to some penal company, or at worst, shot. And then I would be a traitor, not a patriot. Each person at the front had his own concepts. For me, what was the whole point of being at the front? Hide this fear. I showed that I was not afraid in war and gradually got used to this idea. I had no other way to overcome my fear.
...Here we see a “Fritz” lying around and a carbine to the side of it. Vanya tells me: “Take the carbine!” He himself bent over the German and, taking out the cartridges from him, began to hand them to me. I’m standing with this Belgian carbine, I’ve loaded a cartridge into the barrel. And suddenly Ivan says: “Don’t move!” He takes out the horn from his “PPS” and begins to carefully fill it with cartridges. I stand there and don’t understand anything, and he again: “Don’t move!” Well, I don't move. He filled it carefully, pulled back the lever, inserted the horn, clicked the bolt and shouted: “Shoot!” I looked back... Two hefty SS men were crawling out of the bread bin right behind us. We've already passed them, why did they end up there? No more than eight to ten meters. I was literally dumbfounded, for the first time I saw living Germans so close... But I shot at the first one. The bullet hit him in the cheekbone and flew out at the back of his head... He turned sideways, fell onto his face with his knapsack up, and Ivan shot the second one. If I had the opportunity, I would film this scene. I stand, look at them point-blank, and cannot move my leg. From fear or from what, I don’t know. Ivan calmly walked up to mine, sat on his sacrum, unfastened his backpack, took out a razor and asked me: “Are you shaving?” And I didn’t shave then. He threw away this razor and something else. He took out a flat, round, plastic box orange color, in which the Germans stored margarine. He unscrewed the lid and slipped it under his left armpit. He began to take margarine out of this jar with his finger and began to wipe his finger on the German’s right shoulder, which was not splattered with brains... Then he wiped the box dry with grass, took out a pack of shag from his pocket, crushed it, and poured out the shag. Right hand He took the lid out of his armpit, wrapped it up, put it in his pocket, and stood up: “Let’s go!” I still remember all this down to the smallest detail, because I stood there in a daze... Ivan had been fighting since 1942 and was already calm about such things, but my legs can’t move.
...The commander has measured out 8 meters for you, and you must dig them out in an hour or two. And in the entire profile, that is, up to the head. Even less than two hours, because it was getting light. The load was terrible. That's why we ate a lot. Now I have such a stomach - I will die if I eat as much as I could eat then. Once, the two of us ate a piglet in one sitting. Now I can’t imagine this.
...Two Filimonenko brothers served with us - gorgeous crests. Such good guys. Vanya fought since 1941 and I have never seen anyone else receive medals: “For the Defense of Odessa”, “For the Defense of Sevastopol”, “For the Defense of the Caucasus” and “For the Defense of Leningrad”. He was wounded several times, and for the battles near Odessa he was awarded the medal “For Courage,” which he treasured very much. It was of the old type, on a square block with a red ribbon and was fastened with a “nut”. He had three more medals “For Courage”, but later ones, on pentagonal blocks, attached to a pin. And when we were standing in Estonia, the following story happened. It's just a circus. We lived in a German barracks. Suddenly at night the cry of a drunken Ivan: “Rota rise!” He picked us up and pointed to his chest, on which hung a small red block, but there was no medal on it. Ivan got really drunk then. Lined us up in a chain. They collected some German newspapers there. They twisted them into bundles, lit them and wandered around for probably an hour and a half. They cursed and swore, but they still found it - it turned out that he had lost it not very far away.
...We staged a sketch and showed it not only in the hospital, but also organized concerts for the city. The sketch is like this: I, the commander of a partisan detachment, dressed in a German uniform, appear in the village to the headman, he tells me: who is the Komsomol member, who supports the partisans, all that and when he finishes, I take off my cap, pull out a pistol, he falls to his knees , I shoot - “A dog’s death!” and that's where it ends. The political officer gave me his pistol and a cartridge, I pulled out the bullet, left a little gunpowder and filled it with bread crumbs, and used this cartridge. Once, in my excitement, I shot wide, but hit him in the sandal! He shouts “What have you done, what have you done!”, runs backstage, I follow him - I’m scared.
...After all, the German was shooting all the time. It’s just that some stray bullet might hit us in our direction. At first it was like this: we have silence, but they are constantly shooting at us. Then we started, one was sleeping, the other was on duty, constantly awake, shooting. The Germans were very active in defense. It’s dark here, but the Germans are endlessly shooting flares and they are parachuting down. Our guys didn't shoot. The Germans shouted: “Rus, when will you pay for the electricity?”
...I'll tell you one case. Believe me, it was like that. We were told to move to a different direction from this house. We ran along the trench. There is a soldier in front of me, then I then again, again, again... And a mine explodes in front of the soldier running in front of me. I think so, now it will fall. But he doesn’t fall, but turns around, covered in mud, and says: “It’s okay for me.” We ran up and looked, but the mine unfolded like a daisy and the fragments did not fly.
...The next day, in the room opposite our room, they showed a feature film, I think the title was “T-9 Submarine.” All the guys except me and the pilot went to watch. But I suddenly wanted to watch a movie too, and when the last one left, I asked him to move two stools towards me. They left, that is, how they left, some on crutches, some with a stick, and I dragged my body onto the first stool. He sat down, then moved to the second one. I moved the first one forward, closer to the door and climbed onto it. So it probably took me half an hour to get out into the corridor and get to the room where the film was being shown. The guys opened the doors and pulled me in, but then I collapsed, losing consciousness.
...Our senior operating sister was a girl named Vilgelius, a Latvian by nationality, who was originally from Leningrad. We knew that she had been married since she was 15 (an extremely rare case at that time), although she had no children. One day our hospital did not have time to turn around properly. And suddenly our entire staff encountered a foot column of marines. Vilgelius was also standing with us. And there are surprises! A young boy burst out of the column, who turned out to be her husband. He, of course, asked for time off. And we organized a joint overnight stay for him and his wife for one or two times. So what? She got pregnant. This was already in 1942 in Mozhaisk. But since our entire hospital was overcrowded, we sent a pregnant nurse in a car with one young driver. They also loaded it with straw just in case. And this Vilgelius later told us how they were driving: every time, as soon as the fight began, the driver stopped the car and ran into the forest, waited until she calmed down there, then returned again and got behind the wheel. And when she gave birth, Berkutov arranged for her to be admitted to the high command hospital in Borovikha. One day I was there at a conference of Western Front nurses and met her. And suddenly I see this: the wounded are lying on a stretcher, and a one-and-a-half-year-old child is spinning around next to them. They play with it, turn it over and feed it. In short, the wounded raised him!
...After each shelling we had to change our position. They ran along the trench. It was impossible to go upstairs because there were fragments, fragments, fragments... And here a man lay face up and dead. But we have to go. Step on his chest or stomach. ... Somehow I don’t feel at ease. And so you put one foot between his legs, and the other on his shoulder and run. He lies there until the funeral team removes him. The losses were very large. Out of our group of 19 people, 14 people were killed and wounded in less than half a month.
...And if we talk about parcels in general, then how much donor blood was sent to us in boxes from all over the Soviet Union! Such parcels arrived by plane from everywhere: from Tomsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and even from the Botkinsky district of Moscow. As the senior operating nurse, by the way, I was responsible for this. And I remember this incident well. A whole batch of blood arrived in square jars (at that time the ampoules were square, not round). And this is what was discovered: each ampoule contained half a centimeter of white film. I was scared, I even inadvertently thought: maybe there was some kind of infection, different microbes or bacteria? I turned to Berkutov, who constantly looked after me, so to speak: “Alexander Nikolaevich, I have such a story with blood.” To which he very calmly answered me: “You take it and heat it up. What do you want? This is what our people eat. How? Various surrogates." As it turned out, it was just fat. I warmed it up and then continued the blood transfusion again. Everything turned out okay!
...It even got to the point of being funny: the Americans sent us women white cambric panties and white stockings. Of course, we didn’t even put them on; we had many other worries besides this. They also sent us cans of American stew. We all called them “Second Front” as a joke.
...In January 1943 I was drafted into the army. I was 17 years and 4 months old. At the recruiting station they could have rejected me because I didn’t reach the meter-fifty mark. And my weight was 38 kilograms. This was such a “powerful” man. The nurse brought me to the military commissar and said: “He weighs 38 kilograms and is up to a meter tall - he’s not fifty.” The military commissar waved his hand and said: “He’ll survive in the army.”
...I carried a grenade specifically to explode. When we had not yet reached Nikolaev, I saw how a soldier threw a grenade at a German, one German exploded. And there are two more of them for one of ours. There was one behind and one more on the right, I was a little far away, but I saw it well, and they were pouncing on our soldier, as they piled on, and our grenade exploded and they all exploded. Then, near Nikolaev, I saw how this Muscovite girl was cut. I was afraid all the time so as not to be captured, so that the Germans would mock me. I wasn’t so afraid of bullets and shells.
...I flew because I was ordered to. What was I meant for? For war. And I knew that the war would not end in ’42, and it would not end in ’43. We haven't been to Ukraine. When will we get there again! I wanted the Americans to help... We need to finish this. Because I want to live, after all, I’m 21 years old. When Ukraine was liberated and Poland entered, it became clear that we would win. Groups of our German troops were visible from the air. You can see how they are advancing, how the operations are going. We saw that we had learned to fight. After all, during the first two years of the war we did not know how, we did not know how to fight at all.
...On this bridgehead there were Vlasovites and Germans against us. We were in captured German trenches, and there were only 50 meters between our positions. So the Vlasovites shouted “Ivan, come out, let’s talk!” This means that they leave unarmed, and ours comes out with a machine gun. They stand in the middle, no one shoots. They start talking: “We’ll capture you anyway,” the Vlasovites say, “we have smokes and everything else.” Well, these are the conversations. There is nothing to do on defense. (laughs). If we had political workers, they would scold and prohibit such conversations. But they were not there, and on the front line they did what they wanted.
...Here's how to go “to the yard”? There are soldiers all around and in an open field, we don’t walk through the forest and ravines all the time. Where to sit? And so the soldiers stood, covered her with a raincoat, and then she sat down here. How difficult it is! And there was menstruation. I used cotton wool, and when I wore underpants, I had them. Everything would dry out, it would become so hard, but sometimes we crossed some streams or rivers, I remained to stretch out a little, and if during the battle, I did nothing, I just endured everything. I’ll get it, remember, remember, and again, but what are you going to do...
...We had a soldier wounded there, he was a handsome soldier, tall, well, I couldn’t fall in love, but I just felt sorry that he was handsome! He was wounded - the bullet hit his temple, closer to the eye, and came out of the temple, his eyes popped out... I bandage it and cry. He says: “Sister, why are you crying?” - “Yes, I’m crying - I feel sorry for you!” He: “Why are you sorry, I’ll die soon.”
...Khrushchev’s son, Leonid, arrived in this regiment. He was a bomber and joined us as a fighter pilot. We went on one of the flights near Bryansk as part of the regiment. There was no air battle, and Leonid disappeared. We arrived at the airfield, reported that everything was fine, but he disappeared. Then Golubev, the regiment commander, sent two units to this area to search. We flew at low level, searched, but never found it. Then I read that he died in an air battle. But I believe that there was no air battle.
...During the war, this happened once - one guy from the year 24 was arrested for singing the following song at a party:
"When Lenin died,
Stalin was punished:
“Don’t give me enough bread,
Don’t show me any meat.”
This is how he sang it, he was taken away by the “black funnel” and then returned only 10 years later... It turned out that in prison he was building a railway somewhere on the Amur.
...It is interesting that on each tent there were inscriptions in large block letters. For example, on the American tent there was the following inscription: “As a gift Soviet Union from the Red Cross Society of the United States of America, chaired by Leonora Roosevelt." Or almost the same inscription on English tents: “As a gift to the Soviet Union from the English Red Cross Society, chaired by Miss Churchill.”
...Where I was born, they say not why, but why, not Or, but Ale. I remember in our village there are guys walking with an accordion and singing: “Ale you nya vi, nya see. Hello, can you hear me, can you hear me. The Red Banner is carried forward..." This is a kind of Pskov dialect. And then a guy came with the replenishment. He comes up to me and says: “Let’s get acquainted.” We met and started talking. I tell him: “Listen, you’re a hoarder.” He was surprised: “How do you know?” - “Because me too.” He told me that he lived throughout the occupation in a small village about twenty kilometers from Bezhanitsy. Then someone called me. He asks me: “What is your last name?” I answer: “I am a Jew.” He stared at me and asked: “Oh, what is a Jew?” I explained it to him as best I could. I repeat that there was no prejudice towards people like this guy.
...My uniform was all male, and I did not go there as a woman. My last name was Bovin, and so they write in the document Bovin O. A. Oleg Alekseevich or Alexandrovich, it is written Red Army soldier. Whatever tobacco was given to the soldiers, they gave it to me too.
...When I was first thrown to the front line, I ran along with the soldiers. The commander saw it and said: “Sister, you shouldn’t be near them, you should lag behind a little, because there may be wounded there too, go 10-15 steps behind.” I had two names: Button and Button. They didn't call me Olya. I'm small, especially in trousers in winter. And pull it out! How will I drag the wounded? Here is a raincoat, a strap is sewn on one edge, the soldier lies on the tent, or I will transfer him there if he cannot... so I pull it. How old am I? But the soldiers were even bigger! And I pulled them, strained like this to a certain place. An order... what could I do? I couldn't do anything! So I spent time in the infantry. Oh, it was so difficult!
...They crossed the Dnieper. And then we only have a little distance to reach the shore and a shell falls nearby, and we are turned over, along with the wounded. And I’m drowning, I didn’t know how to swim, I’m from the village, I didn’t swim in the river. And thank you, of course, they see that I was a well-behaved girl, they pulled me out. They say: “Eh, you, rescuer, are drowning yourself!”
...The “silt” has a smaller radius of turn and I caught it on the turn. Shot a good burst into his belly, and he pecked on our territory. Just before the ground, the pilot leveled the car and ground it into the snowdrifts. And I left. Then there were rumors that ours were flying German planes. I thought maybe I had hit mine. I think I'll go and have a look. Turned around. The pilot climbed out of the cockpit, and the soldiers were already running towards him. I looked at the plane and saw crosses. Somehow I made it to the airfield. The steering and depth rudder were damaged, and the water-oil coolers were pierced by a bullet. He reported about the battle, about five of ours shot down. He did not talk about the downed Messerschmitt. In the morning the regiment commander calls. I think: “That’s it! He probably flunked ours...” He went in. They asked me to sit down. Major General Kamanin and two civilians were sitting near the window. I sat down. “Talgat Beletdinov, did you fly on the 13th yesterday?” I jumped up. - “Sit. Sit. Did you shoot down the plane? - “It was a fascist plane!” – I almost shouted loudly. The major even laughed: “Exactly, exactly, a fascist plane.” I immediately calmed down. Kamanin says: “You shot down a pilot who shot down many planes in France, Poland and here. Do you, Begeldinov, know what you did? We discovered new tactics in attack aircraft. It turns out that attack aircraft can fight fighters, and can even shoot down.”
...The battalion commander gathered the infantrymen and ordered the scout commander; “Lieutenant, select ten machine gunners and go on reconnaissance, across the river to the village.” At three o'clock in the morning we set off. The bright moon shines quietly all around, only the weak ice crackles underfoot, dusted with snow. We walk through the field and approach the village. Right next to the road, on the outskirts, we see a house. We knock on the shutters and hear people asking in Polish: “Who’s there? “Your people, Russians, open up!” A frightened Polish woman opens the door. The lieutenant asks: “Are there any Germans?” And we can already see: there are two bunk beds, which means there were Germans. The hostess replies: “They left in the evening.” Other members of the household also woke up, and when they recovered from their sleep, they immediately turned their attention to me. And one woman said, looking at me with surprised eyes: “So little lady, but she’s fighting?” I replied that everyone, young and old, is fighting. The homeland must be defended. She looked at me and didn't say anything.
...The way the Germans were supplied with medicines and the way we were supplied with them were two big differences. The same was true for their quality. We lacked everything: even dressings. The Germans had everything canned. To the point that they received berries. Only later, when in 1944 we crossed the Baltic states, we began to receive captured German medicines. By the way, their sterile bandages or cotton wool were very good.
...I received “triangles” regularly. In addition to my fiancée Masha, my sister, who was also at the front, also wrote to me. And my mother wrote from home. In 1942, my sister was born, and by that time my father was already in the army, and my mother had to cope alone with both a small child and the household. To help her somehow, I sent home my officer's food certificate. They lived on it.
...Ask any soldier, he will tell you about the same thing: he doesn’t know why we are going, where we are advancing. He only knows the impressions and rumors that were circulating. They tell me, for example: this is the bend of the Bug, there is a bridge and the Germans are retreating along it, which is why they are offering such resistance. But I cannot say this, I was told so myself. We found one war participant here, and at the meeting I listened to him talk about his military events. He was awarded the Order of Glory and medals. And so I listen and listen and think: “What is he talking about?” He talks about some achievements, about some battles, and so on, that is, about what is known at headquarters. And I understand that he did not fight, was not on the front line. You should be fighting, not hanging around at headquarters.
...To be awarded, you must be nominated for an award. Submissions should be written by those who see me on the front line: the platoon commander, company commander or battery commander. Imagine the commander who is there, on the front line, next to you. He has nothing but a bag and soldiers. They were wounded - they left, new ones were given. People changed often, what kind of ideas are there? For example, I don’t remember the soldiers with whom I fought; I cannot now name the names of these young and very smart guys. Soldiers were rarely, rarely rewarded.
...Somehow the task was completed, and we were landing at another airfield. We came to the village, and near one house along the fence there were Germans standing with rifles! We came closer and looked at each cigarette in their mouth. It turns out that it was our infantrymen who placed the frozen corpses and gave them rifles.
…I’ll tell you one feeling, it was common to many. I thought they would kill me tomorrow. This is stupid, I understand it now. So why do I need to think about this, about shoulder straps and so on? I am sure that today or in a week, they will still kill me, I will still not survive this war. That was the thought, even if you burst.
...Who are basically the most obedient, hardworking and patient soldiers? The guys are from the villages, because from childhood they know the value of work. And as life has shown, many of the city people don’t know how to work, and most importantly, and the saddest thing is that they don’t want to.
...I encountered girls at the front as soon as I found myself in the position of company commander. The fact is that in my company there was only one girl as a driver. So my drivers immediately asked me to send her on flights only with the same guy, because they already lived as husband and wife and traveled together, and I did not violate their union.
...As agreed in advance, he stepped to the right, and I stepped to the left. But he immediately stepped on a mine, next to which there was some kind of container with gasoline. She, of course, rushed, and how he screamed... He was burning all over, and I couldn’t save him, but something pushed me. I rushed to him and that’s it... I don’t remember anything else. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was a beautiful, beautiful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl sitting next to me. She smiled and stroked my head. The room was for two, and next to him lay, it seems, an Azerbaijani. The doctor came in and handed over the fragments that had been extracted from me: “Well, your Jewish blood has been spoiled. So she gave her Polish blood, this Catholic.” He turned to the other and said: “Well, you’re a Muslim, I don’t know how you’ll figure it out now. Now the one who gave you blood will come. She's half-German. Do you understand? Half-German!” The girls gave us their blood.
...In the spring of forty-four I had the opportunity to personally see the front commander Zhukov. We marched forward and moved to the front line; the tank of company commander Salikov was the lead tank. Several Jeeps rushed past us, one of which, as it turned out, contained Zhukov. An ambulance with the wounded was stuck on the road in front of us, and Zhukov, enraged that the movement had stalled, ordered our tank paratroopers to throw the car with the wounded into a ditch...
...I had to listen to a lot of things during the war, including “Jewish face” and other things from “this repertoire.” One day I was standing by a tank, a staff captain passed by and sarcastically asked me: “Well, how are you fighting, little Jew?” By nature I am a calm and non-conflict person, and I didn’t intend to hit every such bastard in the face, I just understood well by the middle of the war that Jews in the country of the Soviets were considered “second-class citizens,” but we, three Jews who served in tank crews in our 1 1st tank battalion, must, no matter what, honestly fulfill their duty to the Motherland.
...I remember another episode from our stay in Koenigsberg. We burst into some kind of museum. I remember it was a two or three-story brick building. They began to wait for the rest of the guys to gather, because the entire street was under fire, and it was impossible to move forward. The infantrymen walked behind us, and after us several soldiers, led by a captain, ran into the museum. I remember this well. In the room where we were, there were display cases containing some coins or medals. The captain came up, looked, turned to one of his soldiers and said: “Take off the sidor.” The soldier took it off and the captain told him: “Shake out everything you have there.” The soldier took out crackers and something else. The captain does not calm down: “That’s it, I said it!” He tries to explain: “There are cartridges and two grenades.” - “I ordered!” Well, what can the soldier do? He shook everything out. Then he hit the glass with his elbow in his overcoat, called two soldiers and said: “Take out the glass!” when they took it out, he began to collect the coins and put them in this bag. And so he cleaned three or four display cases in a row...
...I really became scared, because it was enough for one of the fighters to say in the calculation, for example, that “... the Messer has better vertical maneuver than the Yak..”, so the very next morning he was arrested, and then it was a straight line road to the tribunal - “for counter-revolutionary propaganda and praise of enemy technology”...
...Another forced march. The sun is rising, and the battalion is walking through the forest. We are going with all our strength, as they say, “to the teeth.” The forest ends, the road turns, a huge clearing rises on the right and a forest in the distance. Suddenly we see from above, about eight hundred meters away, a thick chain is running straight towards us... The battalion commander shouts: “Into the ditch! To battle! Get ready! Don’t shoot without a command!” I lay down, next to Sashka Kurunov, we were waiting... I clearly remember that I was lying and thinking: “Lord! Now this battle would begin, but we’d have to lie down for two hours...” Well, it was impossible to walk any longer, impossible... That’s it, we lay there, frozen, such pleasure... And suddenly: “Rise! Form up!” Then this huge chain runs up. It turned out that these were our girls, whom the Germans had kidnapped to build some structures. The Germans left, and the girls somehow found out that the Red Army soldiers were coming and immediately rushed towards us. They ran up, hugged, kissed, cried, laughed, and the guys cursed and pushed them away. Because we have to go again, again, go again, oh...
...In the Ternopil region we stood on the defensive for quite a long time, and one night a sergeant and a private were brutally killed at an outpost, they violated the corpses, and carved stars on their bodies. There was a village near the OP, and the regiment commander immediately realized that there were “local boys” at the OP, and then, by order of the commander, control platoons were assembled from the entire regiment, and one battery joined them with guns - the soldiers prepared to comb the village in search of bandits. The regiment commander turned to the locals: “Give up the bandits yourself! Don’t take things to the extreme!”, and they answered: “No one!”, and then regiment commander Shuyakov ordered to deploy the battery and fire a volley at the village. After the very first shells from each house, fire was opened on the Red Army soldiers, the entire village was “Bandera”... As a result, this entire village was blown to pieces by our 1864th regiment, burned to the last log...
...Sending us to the infantry was a punishment for our personnel. A fighter could be “merged” into a shooter for various minor offenses or for “caught clap.” Or simply, if the commander doesn’t like you, if you show your character, you’ll quickly be “packed” into either a penal company or regular infantry... And then there’s certain death. Sergeant Gindullin, from our battery, took the vodka that was being brought to the captain and drank it himself, for which he was immediately sent to the infantry. At the very end of the war, in Germany, when they began to seriously fight against rapists and marauders, the caught rapists were no longer sent to a penal company, but were given camp sentences by the tribunal; in our country, one sergeant received 10 years in prison for such a crime.
...When they broke into Pillau, now Baltiysk, the fighting was no longer so strong, and the city was almost not damaged. So we quickly passed it, and I remember there on the shore there is the Frische-Nerung spit. And we didn’t sleep for two days, we literally fell from fatigue, and suddenly we ran into four to five hundred people, in short, more than our battalion. They pressed them to the sea, and it turned out that they were Vlasovites, or maybe not. In short, Russian men are armed and dressed in German uniforms. They surrendered and then, as I later realized, our battalion commander was faced with the question - what to do? After all, the battalion was ordered to move on and leave them behind, this meant most likely destroying the remnants of the battalion. And then he made this decision... He sent the entire battalion further, leaving one platoon. About twenty people were separated from the prisoners, and the rest were shot there on the shore... Those who remained were forced to drag the corpses into the sea... And I believe that the battalion commander simply had no other choice. And at the front there were many such terrible things that there was nowhere else to go.
...I began to return to my unit, I approached - and there was shooting, I don’t know what kind, almost from all guns: “Hurray! Hooray!" I think: “Well, that’s it, the Germans are going on the attack, probably to break through... roar, noise, I come closer, I already see my own people, I think: “They’re shooting like that - they’ll kill you to hell!” I’m crawling towards my bellies, I look - he’s standing there shooting, I tell him: “Where are you shooting?” He: “So the war is over! Why the hell are you crawling? That’s how I crawled on my stomach, so to speak, and met Victory.
...They gave us the command to line up on the main street. There is silence along the column and you can hear them say: the war is over, Germany has surrendered, the Act of Unconditional Surrender has been signed. And how everyone will scream! Not right away, there was some kind of pause: believe it or not, it’s a joke or not a joke. From rocket launchers, machine guns, machine guns, pistols, let's shoot up! Hurray, the war is over! The elderly are in tears, and I stand confused: fir-fly, what am I going to do now? I left ninth grade, my job is war, I can’t do anything else. It’s just that I look like I’m an officer, but I’m stupid.
...When it was time to fire us, cases of looting began and the Germans began to be robbed. The soldiers need to return, but with nothing - the soldier is “naked”. An order was issued: “Stop the looting by any means.” Two soldiers were caught, they shot the mother and child, but the mother survived and told everything. There was a trial right away, the trials were show trials: everyone was brought into the halls and told, this way and that, the court decision. They lined up the regiment and shot both of them. All! All looting stopped.
...What I can say with absolute certainty is that we only defended the country with our hearts, without taking into account the people and the losses. They persecuted people, just for Victory... As they say, “Everything for the front, everything for Victory!” I think that Hitler still made a big mistake when he treated our people so cruelly. Now, if he had said: “Live!”, then who knows how things would have turned out?
...I hid my nationality as best I could, otherwise it was impossible to be in captivity. I even told my best friends Lebedev and Shubenko about this on our last day in Germany, when I was sent with an officer train of former prisoners of war for state inspection, and they remained waiting for a train with privates and non-commissioned officers to be sent from our transit point. The three of us sat down, drank schnapps “on the road,” and began exchanging addresses. Lebedev dictates his – “Gorky, Piskunova Street”, and then I say – “Vitebsk region, Orsha city, Molokov Street No. 17, but now our house has burned down, a fellow countrywoman told me...”, and then I see Lebedev writing my last name further “Efremov,” and I tell him, “Don’t rush. I'll spell out your last name. Write one at a time. F..R..A..Y..M..A..N...” He looked at me, understood everything, then rushed to hug me and cried: “Arkasha... How could you stand it for so long!”...
...When I quit, they gave me bread for a month. And mom and dad only had a cow left, and she saved them. They had no bread, there was famine there in Alekseevka. What did I see! I saw a child dying on the street in the summer, lying in the dust and dying. A bunch of old women have gathered, groaning and aahing, but how can they help. And at the same time, activist stores were created, that is, all high-ranking officials and communists bought whatever they wanted: butter, sugar. And then I had this thought: “What did I fight for?!”
...When the city of Gleiwitz was captured, we were given a rest for three days, in other words - do what you want. And in the city, every street is full of shops untouched by the war, stocked with food and alcohol. So those who did not have any “moral brakes” began to rob and rape German women. We had such a senior sergeant, commander of the communications department Bogachev, so in every city we captured, he raped women. The political officer, in front of whose eyes the sergeant was raping another German woman, decided to intervene and told Bogachev: “Stop it!”, but the division commander Khlopov stopped the political officer: “You, captain, mind your own business. This is his well-deserved trophy!”
...When we first entered Germany, some of our soldiers shot civilians. I remember that we followed the infantry into a German house and saw the corpses of women and children. Of course, they immediately reported this to the commander. And literally immediately after that we received an order: “ Civilians don't touch. Whoever touches will be severely punished!” But, of course, not everyone did this.
...We walked to Prague through the Sudeten Mountains, along the highway, on which the Germans created a lot of rubble from fallen trees. While sorting through these rubble, we all got dirty in the sap of trees, and our decrepit cotton uniform looked like rags in the eyes of the Czechs, one of them even told us: “But your clothes are not very good,” to which we answered him: “But We are winning the war!
...At that time I was corresponding with one girl whom I met at the VNOS post. When I returned from the front to the school, I wrote again - there was no answer. Six months later, one girl, Natasha, wrote that the VNOS post was transferred from the Poltava region to the west, closer to the front, near the city of Dobromil. Bandera's men attacked the post - they killed all the girls and destroyed the equipment, just on Victory Day. Natasha was the only one left alive; she was considered killed. Border guards came running, she, of course, spent six months in the hospital, they stitched her up, she wrote me a letter: “Annushka loved you so much, but, alas, she died!”... I decided to join the border troops. He asked, “Where are they recruiting?” - “Ukrainian border district.” I asked - “Dobromil?” I was young, only 19 years old, head over heels in love, and I decided to serve there to fight Bandera, and to visit the grave of Anya and her girlfriends. This is how my border service began.
...In our unit there was one girl who fell in love with a gunner from another battery. Once, when the Germans disabled his gun, it was crawling from another battery under fire on its bellies towards him. They were both later given punishment. And after the war, he finally found her (the girl was from Samara)! They got married and have five children. And all the children are musicians. And that guy was always our lead singer.
...At first, violence, robberies and looting happened at every turn in the captured German cities, and then the authorities “tightened the screws” and began to fight such “banditry.” The commander of our division, Lieutenant Colonel Prudeus, ordered the entire personnel of the batteries to be lined up, everyone’s duffel bags should be turned out, and all the “trophies” found on the soldiers were, on his orders, burned on the spot. Prudeus said: “We are not looters!”, and forbade the personnel to send parcels permitted by the order of the Active Army. There was some truth to this, because in order to collect things for the parcel, all the soldiers went to German houses and collected “clothes”... Most of the looting was done by the Poles, who immediately filled Stettin, they behaved like animals, raped German women and threw them right out of the windows of the upper floors onto the pavement, and the German goods were dragged in sacks towards them.
...Banks of blood came with letters from the donors themselves. Some were very touching. For example, these: “I work at a factory, my husband is at the front, I have two children. I give my blood for the wounded. Beat the Germans! Or: “I, a third-year student, give blood...” And what did we do with these notes? When the blood came to us in the third department, we carefully cut them off with scissors and put them in the pocket of our robe. If I gave a blood transfusion to some village man, I would give him a letter from some worker. If she gave a transfusion to some handsome officer, she gave him a letter from some student. Somewhere in 1944, during the offensive, we stopped in Mozhaisk. And then the brigade commissar ran up to me: “Do you remember how they gave me a letter when they gave me a blood transfusion?” he asked. “I remember,” I say. - So what?" Then he hands me a photograph of a girl unknown to me and says: “But look at the photograph. I married her! It turns out that immediately after being cured in the hospital, he went to college and married a donor. We had a good time sitting and talking in the tent. But then, when they began to leave, this brigade commissar walked me a little along the pontoon bridge. And there he quietly said: “Zhenya! But my wife and I have different blood types. You shuffled the letter." All I said to this was: “But then they wouldn’t have gotten married.” He smiled and said goodbye.
...When the Americans occupied the Grevesmühl area, all former Soviet citizens: prisoners of war, Ost workers, and others were collected in a refugee camp. The Americans fed us excellently, as if for slaughter, and almost every day agitators, representatives of the American military administration, arrived at the camp in 3-4 Dodges, who called on us to stay in the West, prepared documents to leave for America, promised a considerable amount of raise money and getting a job in the USA. They told us: “What awaits you all in Russia is either execution for treason, or NKVD camps in Siberia, no better than the German ones. Come to your senses! Stalin will never forgive you for being captured! We offer you a free life in a free country!”, and many of the “East workers” and a considerable part of the former prisoners of war signed up with the Americans for exit registration. But the majority decided to return to the USSR, we believed that they would deal with us fairly, because we were captured in battle, and did not voluntarily go over to the enemy’s side. In June, representatives from the Soviet occupation zone frequented the camp; by their habits and behavior they were either political instructors or “Smershevites”; they made appeals, distributed leaflets and kept telling us: “The Motherland is waiting! The Motherland has forgiven everything! You haven’t seen your family and friends for four long years, and they are waiting for you! Don't be afraid of anything! I, like many, had a moment's hesitation, but I believed that some of my family might still be alive, and I felt obligated to go back and try to find them.
...There was one somewhat curious case that a former prisoner, entering the dugout for the first interrogation, saw a red banner near the wall, and suddenly clicked his heels in German, threw one hand up and shouted: “Heil Hitler!” He was immediately arrested and taken away from us.
...Poured into piles. Misha says: “First of all, I want us to remember those who did not live to see this day, to have a bright day Victory! Including my father, mother and younger sister, who died at the hands of the Nazis.” Suddenly we hear sobs. The girl stands at the door and cries. The old man says: “Granddaughter, Mariyka, come here, sit next to me.” Then he explained that her father died at the front, and her mother was raped by the Germans, and she committed suicide. Then they gave the floor to one woman: “For those who will live after us, who will enjoy the fruits of victory!” And then she burst into tears too. In general, it is both solemn and tragic – a holiday with tears in our eyes. They got married later, Misha and Mariyka. They played a modest wedding.
...Recently late in the evening I was returning back to my home. He walked along Energia Street and turned onto the sidewalk. And suddenly a group of young guys comes towards me. One of them pulled me by the shoulder. I rushed and wanted to run away, but he hit me and threw me to the ground. The other one, who was standing next to him, started to lay me down and punched me in the jaw. “Bastards! – I told them. What are you doing? I'm an old man." After that they left me. I still didn’t understand why I was beaten. And they didn’t even take my new jacket. I was covered in blood then. I didn’t go to my daughter - I didn’t want to upset her. So what does power have to do with it? There are, have been, and will always be such bad people, as well as good people. And the German would have killed me without hesitation at all. For him it was a piece of cake. What does this mean? That human qualities were, are and will be different.
...I arrived in Orsha early in the morning and did not recognize my hometown. Much was broken and destroyed. At the site of our burnt house there were only blocks of snow, and I moved on to my uncle’s house. I walk through the entrance yard, approach the gate and see my father and uncle harnessing a horse to a cart. I began to shake from excitement, my legs wouldn’t move forward, I couldn’t say a word... I somehow squeezed it out of myself, said: “Dad!”, My father turned around and didn’t notice me. Only a minute later I was able to overcome my excitement and say again: “Dad!”, and then my uncle Eina shouted to my father: “Arie! It’s Froim who’s returned!” My father rushed into the house shouting: “Froim is back!”, and my whole family: mom, dad, brother on crutches, sister and husband, everyone ran out to meet me. We stood and cried. Three of us went to the front from the family, me, my brother and brother-in-law, and here we stand: two front-line cripples on crutches, and I, the third, crippled for life by captivity... Brother Lev told me: “At least take off your hat, otherwise I don’t look like myself at all”... So I returned home...
...Peaceful life began. But if, on the one hand, it is a great happiness that the war is over, then on the other, such an unpleasant thing as boredom has begun. Just don't get me wrong. I, too, was very glad that this massacre finally stopped, but we are already accustomed to such a rich, interesting life, full of events and emotions. When, for example, during an offensive, different cities and areas are constantly changing in front of you, some events are happening, and these are new, sometimes very vivid impressions. And suddenly it all ended at once, it was like putting a free bird in a cage.
...My attitude towards the Soviet government changed when Stalin changed his attitude towards our prisoners and said: “We have no prisoners. We have only traitors to the motherland." What happened? In 1941, entire divisions of our soldiers were captured and surrounded. They were hit for the only reason that we had poor supplies in the army, three cartridges for one rifle. With such weapons it was difficult to avoid capture. Then they were in German concentration camps and experienced real horrors there. And when not all, but some of them returned to their homeland, they were put in their camps. How do we even understand this? Stalin was so cruel that many of our officers at the front were simply afraid to say his name. Because they could have immediately pointed a finger at that officer and he would have been imprisoned.
...In 1945, the first year consisted of 90% girls and only 10% boys. There were especially few men my age. Everyone said that men my age were a rare find. Almost all my peers died.
...And on May 9, something unimaginable began to happen in the hospital. Someone took out hidden pistols and began firing out of the windows into the sky. And the hospital didn’t come to its senses for probably a week. Despite the fact that there was security at the entrance, people came to us. Elderly, young, brought vodka and something else. Well, you can understand everyone. We survived, well, survive in such hell... What kind of medicine is there... An unconscious, bestial feeling in the best sense of the word surged. Survived, survived! The war is over! All! Well, it seemed that only “paradise” was waiting for us ahead, and everything would be okay.
...I did not hide at the plant that I was a prisoner of war, but until Stalin died, I knew that I could be imprisoned under Article 58 at any moment, since former prisoners were considered outcasts. It was only later, when the writer Smirnov, the author of “The Brest Fortress,” stood up in defense of former prisoners, when the film “Baltic Sky” appeared, the attitude towards us changed in better side. And before that... No one was interested in the fact that before being captured, I honestly fought on the front line for four months, commanded a rifle platoon, went on attacks, shot at the enemy and risked my life, and was captured when I found myself in a hopeless situation, without ammunition, in completely surrounded along with other soldiers who were betrayed and left to die by their own command. Any rear and staff trash who was not even one day on the front line, who did not know what the encirclement was like in 1941 and what we had to endure in the German camps, all this trash after the war settled in all the offices of the Soviet and party bodies and looked at us, the former prisoners, with mockery and contempt. I was even afraid to write a letter to Lebedev and Shubenko, fearing that a letter from a fellow prisoner could “set them up”; I was afraid to look for Tkach and Beridze, because I knew that I, “branded by captivity,” could harm them... Once at my factory I I saw a man who was like two peas in a pod, who was dying before my eyes in the “Big Camp” in 1941, and I then fed him pieces of bread, trying to save him or at least prolong his life. And I did not dare to approach this man and ask whether he was in captivity in this camp or not.
...From Germany’s allied countries we exported everything that our country was entitled to for reparations. They transported equipment, equipment, and other cargo day and night. Once I even had to transport something extremely secret, wrapped in a tarpaulin, under guard. But we were strictly ordered not to touch the cargo, and I still don’t know what I was carrying then.
...This war was terrible and truly Great. We suffered unjustifiably large losses and it cannot be said that we had the greatest, most wonderful commanders. If they were like that, there would not be such losses. And so the Price of Victory turned out to be terribly high... I think that our country still cannot wake up from this. And a lot more can be said, but there was something else... After all, there are two sides to this “coin”. I’ll tell you two more episodes, excuse the verbosity. When I was in Copenhagen, I visited the “Museum of Freedom” and asked the director a question: “Why do you have such huge stands dedicated to Stalingrad?” And he walked, his assistants and Danish children were there too. He turned around and saw the order pads on me. Perhaps I am an immodest person, but I always wear them and never take them off. So the director comes up to me and, pointing to the stocks, says: “If there had been no Stalingrad, there would have been no Danes!” Although you yourself know very well that the Germans considered them close to a superior race.
...You know, I am very glad that I met you. But not because you will write about me, not at all. I personally didn’t do anything special at the front. I just feel obligated to talk about the many worthy people with whom fate brought me together during the war. In fact, I have already forgotten a lot, but I still keep something in my memory, and where to put it all and to whom to throw it out... At one time I was thinking of writing memories in the form of front-line notes, I even came up with the name “My 747 days of war” , but then there was not enough time, then there were various worries, and now there is no strength and the mood is not at all the same. But I want the memory of these people to remain. We need you to stay! Just think about it, many of those people died many, many years ago. Moreover, they died very young and did not leave behind children, because they simply did not have time to start families. And just imagine, they have been lying in the ground for a long time, they may have no relatives left in the whole wide world, and suddenly after so many years a lot of people learn about them and remember them...
Let's talk, friends, about the memories of WWII veterans. Under the USSR, mainly, of course, memoirs of commanders and high-ranking figures of the party and state were published. And only after 1991 there was a wave of publications of memoirs of the lower command staff of the spacecraft and ordinary soldiers, those who bore the entire brunt of that war on their shoulders. So, what can you read? Links to what made the greatest impression on me are in my paper.
Electron Evgenievich Priklonsky "Diary of a self-propelled gun" http://flibusta.net/b/348536
One of the most interesting books memories of the Second World War in my memory. Contrary to the ban, the driver-mechanic of ISU-152, E.E. Priklonsky kept a diary throughout his stay at the front. True, he burned down twice along with his self-propelled guns. Later, the diary entries were expanded into a book.
Obrynba Nikolai Ippolitovich “The Fate of a Militiaman” http://flibusta.net/b/395067
A unique book. Having joined the militia, the Moscow artist Obrynba was captured in the first battle. Description of German camps, hunger, cold, abuse of German guards, etc. etc. Then escape. Then Obrynba fought in a partisan detachment. And all this time he was drawing. Drawings made with charcoal in the camp on the back of German posters (removing the poster, by the way, meant death) were carried through the entire war and survived, oddly enough.... For example, these:
Prisoners found a dead horse
Prisoners pulling a loaded cart
Flogging
Suknev Mikhail Ivanovich "Notes of the penal battalion commander" http://flibusta.net/b/186222
Everyone should read this book. A huge number of stupid questions will immediately disappear. Who are the penalty officers? How did they fight? With shovel cuttings or not? Were the evil KGB officers with guns standing behind? Moreover, Suknev went through the entire war as an infantry officer. So...
Suris Boris Davydovich "Front diary". Unfortunately, I couldn’t find where to read this book online. It was published in a small edition and is not among the popular memoirs. It must be said that Boris Suris is an art scholar and a famous collector. From a very intelligent family. The same as Nikulin, who was not my favorite, who grew up in greenhouse conditions, in big city. However, despite the critical perception of the war, military life, and the front, Suris managed not to slip into the “Nikulin” trash and frenzy. Yes, unpleasant things are described, many facts do not fit into the popular picture of the Second World War. But that’s what makes the book interesting.
Beskin Igor Aleksandrovich "The truth of a front-line intelligence officer"
Why would you like to start a story about your war?
I.Z.F. - Why are you decided that I in general I want to talk aboutwar?
Here you are want to hear the soldier’s truth, but... Who it's nowneed to?
This is a serious dilemma for me. If talk about war the whole truth, with utmost honesty and sincerity, then immediately dozens of voices of “hurray-patriots” will begin to shout - denigrating, slandering, blaspheming, mocking, slandering mud, mocking memory and in a bright way, and Somore...
If you tell in style “a la political instructor from GlavPUR ", they say - "steadfastly and heroically, with little bloodshed, with a mighty blow, under the guidance of smart and trained commanders..."- then from me so hypocritical and false speeches andthe arrogant Soviet physiologist always felt sick...
After all, people will read your interview; wars will not those who have seen and are unfamiliar with realities of that time, and generally unaware of the true cost of war. I Not I want someone not having the slightest idea what there was actually a war, said that II tell “stories” or unnecessarily tragicize the past.
Here you are with an interview was published with my neighbor on the street, former “penalty officer” Efim Golbreich. On looked in the other day Internet discussion of the text read. AND The following infuriated me. Young people accuse the veteran of that he honestly said that in mid-October forty-first There was wild panic in Moscow and there were quite a few with permission to say, “citizens” who with They waited for the Germans with peace of mind. Like how is he dares, etc.d.
How can these young people know what was going on there? himselfbusiness?
Were they there? A Holbreich was andsaw.
But when they start discussing, the veteran exaggerates orNo….
DIY Holbreich in no battles one hundred enemies of our Motherland per that light sent, and has every right to your truth and your visionwar.
All front-line trench soldiers have a common past.
But this past was truly tragic.
All my war - this is a solid clot of blood, dirt, this is hunger and anger at fate, the constant breath of death and feeling of my own doom... I I didn’t see joy in the war and warm headquarters dugouts drunk on no accordionplayed up.
Most of the information that I I can tell you, it falls under the definition of “negative”... And it's not the dirty underbelly of war, this is herface…
And do you need this? I Not I want to tell you the whole terrible truth about war.
G.K. - To begin with, I would like to ask you to look at the text of the interview with divisional intelligence officer Heinrich Katz, who came to reconnaissance in January 1944. I wanted would like to hear your story about intelligence, drawing parallels and comparisons between intelligence officers at the beginning of the war and those who ended the war in forty-fifth, serving in reconnaissance companies and reconnaissance platoons. Katz now lives here, from you in ten kilometers.
I.Z.F. - The interview is good and truthful.
You immediately feel that he worthy person anda real scout.
It will be a little difficult to make comparisons for a simple reason - Katz served in divisional reconnaissance company, and I- V regimental reconnaissance platoon. These units with different organizational structure, and most importantly, with different combat missions. Tell me honestly, Katz most likely, a lot of what they didn't tell allowed to publications on that the same reason that I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation.
G.Z.K. – My personal opinion- the truth about the war needs it. The real truth, trench, honest. Which would be scary, cruel and you wouldn't like her to be wild seemed... Without embellishment andcomments.
Veterans and they hardly try so hard talk about meanness or cowardice war, oh stupidity of bosses, oh what was happening in rear... And if they talk about something like that, then as a rule not names are called. None of not us interested in savoring “fried” facts or showing off one’s participation in war. Our The goal is to give people the opportunity to learn about those trials that befell at the frontshare of my generation.
Now the main source of information aboutwar - cinema, television series.
They're filming this!.. what's on in the middle of watching a movie real front-line soldiers have only one desire - to spit andswear...
They wander along the front trench in full growth, well-fed and shaved soldiers in brand new uniform and good boots, in orders and exclusively with PPSh, killing at least ten Germans with each machine gun burst, and knocking out a German tank with every grenade throw. AND every colonel there is like a dear father... And the field kitchen is always close at hand... Cinema, and only... you can you imagine what an infantry fighter looks like after surviving a tank attack or a bombing?! Or what remains of the crew of the burned-out "thirty-four"?! Do you know what kind of faces they have?soldiers before the attack?.. Does anyone know how incredibly difficult it is to knock out a German tank with a bunch of grenades?
The real truth about almost everyone has already gone to war land with the dead war or those who died after it... Another five years will pass and you're not with who will talk to us, front-line soldiers, are no longerwill remain.
Then, the new generation of “political instructors” will retouch the history of the war for the third or fifth time, make it “clean as a tear,” and again executioners will be declared angels, mediocrities - generals. All We've already been through this...
Lives near me former NKVD saboteur Lazar Fainshtein. Already V forty-three had the Order of Lenin, two BKZ and two “For Courage”, for special assignments in German rear. All documents are authentic in hands. talk about refuses war. More one former intelligence officer - border guard, with Order of Lenin for Khalkhin Gol, and probably the only one currently living on light commander of a separate sabotage detachment Western Front in 1941 year. No information gives, says - the time is not yet I came to tell the truth about the war. A when will that time come? So And we'll know the story WWII according to GlavPura books? or according to the modern delights of “pseudo-historians”.
For those who served in saboteurs, in their personal perception - no statute of limitations exists. The war there was too special. Yes And a simple army intelligence officer is not either will glow from happiness, telling how heI slashed the enemy's throat with a Finnish knife.
War is dirty and smelly, nothing bright and romantic in warNo.
I'll tell you honestly why I agreed to talk with you. WITH local newspapermen even for a minute conversation is not spent. Simply, you They said that the interview was for the Russian Internet. Eleven years ago I moved to live in this country. IN force of circumstances, I'm for In recent years I have lost contact with many comrades in arms. Here And hope began to glimmer that one of my relatives intelligence officers will read the text of the conversation and manage to find someone from my company. I wanted would believe that it is so will...
E.N.B. – Order was cruel, but necessary. I I personally approved this order. Understand that the country really stood on edge of the grave. And every soldier felt this commander on the front line. After all, in that same summer battle near Rzhev, in addition to mass heroism and self-sacrifice, We we've seen enough of the "crossbow shooters" and panties. If everything is straightforward tell... But better not to talk about it...
My mother is Pinigina (Glukhova) Maria Grigorievna, born in 1933 in the village of Vititnevo, Elninsky district, Smolensk region.
Her mother, my grandmother, Glukhova (Shavenkova) Alexandra Antonovna, born in 1907 in the village of Vititnevo, Elninsky district, Smolensk region, died in Irkutsk on June 6, 1986.
Her father, my grandfather, Glukhov Grigory Sviryanovich, born in 1907 in the village of Vititnevo, Elninsky district, Smolensk region, died on November 11, 1942 in a hospital.
The war has begun. My father went, like all the men in the village, to the front. He died in the hospital. We received a funeral after the war and I didn’t have a single photograph of my father left. Our house and the whole village were burned, only coals remained, what kind of photographs are there?
We made inquiries about the burial place, the last one in 2012, but the answer was the same - we don’t know.
From the beginning of the war, until about October, we did not hear the sounds of war in our village. And then, suddenly, we were ordered to line up along the road and meet the Germans. It was unexpected. We didn't know what would happen to us. They put everything they had on themselves. There were only 2-3 dresses, and they were made of canvas; they lived very poorly. We were lined up in rows on both sides of the road. The Germans were riding on motorcycles and cars, holding machine guns in front of them, they stopped next to us and began poking at us and shouting “Yudo,” they went around all the houses, turned up all the hay, they were looking for Jews, that’s what the adults said. And then they grabbed piglets and chickens and cooked them right away. I remembered the screams and tears. They didn’t linger with us and immediately drove on.
A few days later, more Germans arrived and we were herded into several houses on the edge of the village. They themselves occupied most of our houses.
I remember we had a Russian stove, and the Germans could not light it. They brought my mother and me to our house and forced us to light the stove. And they themselves threw hay in the hut, laughed and rolled around on it and shouted: “Moscow is gutted, Stalin is kaput.”
During the day we were forced to go to the site, the Germans were in swimming trunks because they were sunbathing, they set up a machine with a speaker, turned on music on German. Everyone had to dance. The women sat huddled close to each other and were silent. They began to drag them to dances, but nothing worked, everyone was afraid. The kids and I were just as swollen.
The next time there was a dance again, with officers with cockades sitting in front. They made me sing. I sang ditties and danced, and the ditties were about the war, about the Germans.
“We have Germans standing by, their suits are turning green,
They abandoned their wives and are relying on Russians.”
They translated for them and they laughed. But I didn’t understand that it could be dangerous, despite the fact that I’m small. Then several more times they forced me to sing ditties on the street, on other days. But everything worked out for me and my mother.
All village residents were escorted to the bathhouse, their clothes were handed over to the “frying room”, i.e. for processing, then the German anointed our children’s heads, and we ran away. They were required to give injections.
But these Germans also left, and we moved back to our house. Before the war my father built a nice big house, I don’t remember my father very well. There was a good Russian stove in the house. There were a lot of Prussians behind it, these are big cockroaches 4-5 cm, but we slept on it. It was difficult to light the stove; there was no wood. The forest is made of bushes, my mother and I will go for firewood, the ax is very dull, we will make bundles of branches, my mother will put a small bundle on my shoulders. I had to drag it. These branches burned for about 10 minutes. The mother often cried and prayed on her knees. The trouble and the gain was the cow, milk always. She stayed with us because she butted heads and only her mother recognized her. When all the livestock were evacuated, she ran into the forest, they couldn’t find her, then she came home herself, that is, to us.
The Germans needed people to work for them, and old people and children interfered with them. Therefore, old and young with their mothers were sent to Germany. When they announced our departure, I jumped for joy. I wanted to go to the city, I jumped and shouted “we’ll wear hats.” But when the adults screamed, I got scared, I became afraid. They loaded everyone and us into a big car, i.e. mother, me, aunt and sister and grandmother, she was about 90 years old, hunched over and small, she was not allowed to stay in the village. Only those who could work were left behind. Towards nightfall we were all moved into a small house. There were a lot of people from all the villages. Grandmother could not walk, the German carried her into the house on his back. When everyone fell asleep, my mother and I and 5 other families ran away. Grandmother and aunt and sister stayed. Grandma was deaf, she would have started crying, wailing, and everyone wouldn’t have been able to run away, that’s what I think now. It was very difficult for mom. Then they said that she kept calling my mother - “Sasha! Sasha!"
It was winter, there was virtually no forest, just bushes. The Germans were waiting for us in the village, but they didn’t look for us in the forest. We lived in the forest for a week, sleeping on tree branches. My mother woke me up so that I wouldn’t get cold, she made me walk and jump. When the last crackers ran out, we had to go to the village. My mother sent me to my aunt. I was very afraid to approach the house; there could be Germans there. She stood and cried. My aunt saw me and began to hide me. When everything calmed down, the mother came. There were already other Germans in the village and therefore they did not look for us.
I apparently looked older than my age, they gave me 2 years so that they would no longer be taken to Germany. They began to force me, like other children, to dig trenches for the Germans. The children were forced to dig trenches about a meter long and more than a meter high. The German was in charge over us, he did not allow us to be distracted, all we heard was: “Work Klein.” I was 8 years old. Somehow our guys saw that the children were working and started shooting to disperse us. We ran away screaming. They were taken to and from work under escort, the escort was 2 people, and adults were driven to dig dugouts even closer to the front line. They came home later from work than we did.
One day everyone was kicked out of their houses; there were no adults yet. We were forced to walk along the road to another village, 10 km away. We didn’t know where our relatives were, our mother wasn’t around, but we had to go in tears. They put me in a house where you could only squat, there were so many people. It was late in the evening when our relatives came running. Voices were heard everywhere, names were shouted, everyone was looking for their relatives.
Our planes began to bomb the Nazis in our village of Vetitnevo - this is the Elninsky district, Smolensk region. This was the front line. The Germans herded everyone into a dugout, its length was 100 meters, on the right side of the entrance there were floors covered with straw, their width was about 2 meters. My mother and I did not go down to the dugout. We had a cow, she did not leave her mother, we could not leave her alone. Another 3 families remained under the canopy. It was night, we fell asleep. Next to me are my grandmother and my little cousin, my mother stayed next to the cow. I woke up from a roar and scream. An incendiary mine fell very close, my handkerchief flew off, a shrapnel caught my finger and I became deaf, apparently shell-shocked, I didn’t hear anything. The grandmother is covered in blood, her leg is injured, there is no eye, and later she went blind. I ran to my mother. She cannot get up, her leg is injured. The neighbor was killed. The Germans took my mother and grandmother to the hospital.
On the approaches to our village everything was mined. The Germans were expecting an offensive right here, in our village. The attack has begun. Our people were advancing, explosions from mines were heard, but the field was not cleared. Then the Katyushas hit. The attacks continued. We all stood, listened and watched, with tears in our eyes. Our village was burning, the fire was clearly visible. The Germans began to retreat.
There was still no mother. The hospital was in a neighboring village. The village and the road were bombed. I didn’t wait for my mother and ran straight to her along the road, not realizing that I could die. I still don’t understand how it happened, how I stayed alive. Shells were exploding from all sides, I was rushing, i.e. I ran, didn’t see anything around, only my mother was in front of my eyes. I saw her very far away, her leg was bandaged, on crutches. WITH God's help we returned to the village, God heard the mother’s prayers.
The village was burned and of course our house. There were many dead our soldiers on the ground, some officer walked around and looked for addresses on their clothes (in pockets, on collars), but for the most part he found nothing and everyone was thrown into a pit. The kids and I ran around and watched everything that was happening. Then for a long time they found the soldiers and buried them. Even in our garden, next to the house, there were graves.
It was winter. There is nowhere to live. They dug a dugout, it’s an underground room, there’s a small window, they made a stove so they could cook food. The wick burned in the dugout day and night, i.e. Kerosene was poured into the bottle, and what appeared to be some kind of twisted rag was inserted. Everyone had to live in such dugouts, sometimes they lit splinters. The cow remained with us; it’s surprising that nothing happened to her. We survived the winter. Spring began, everything began to melt, the clay began to creep. We had to move upstairs, there were small dugouts located next to the pillbox. People began to dig up logs, i.e. they dismantled dugouts and built huts. We had a cow instead of a horse, they harnessed it and carried everything that was needed for everyone. There were no men; the women and children did everything themselves; they built without nails, of course.
Before the war, I finished 1st grade. And when our area was liberated from the Germans, all the children went to school. I had to walk 5 km to school, textbooks were given for 5 people, but I was the only one from the village and they didn’t give me textbooks. My mother found me a textbook somewhere in the Belarusian language; she didn’t understand much of it, but I had to study.
Many mines remained in the fields, many cartridges. The kids and I ran and collected shell casings. 7 boys died in mines. We tied feathers to the cartridges, and made ink from the soot that was in the rockets. That's why they were always dirty. They wrote on books or on cardboard, from which they made shells and cartridges.
I really wanted to study, but my mother said: “I won’t teach you.” All the kids went to school, and I sat at home and cried every day. And my mother said that they didn’t take me to school. That's how I didn't even finish 5th grade. I also had to work on the collective farm, plowing, sowing, I was 10 years old. They plowed with oxen, I followed the ox alone, and there was everything in the ground - shells, skulls, and bones. This is how my working career began, but this was not included in my work experience. At that time I was still little.
From the words recorded by Trofimenko L.I. 02/28/2012
After reading these memories, my friend Olga wrote poems, I read them to my mother, who at that time was already 79 years old, and was only 8 years old during the war.
She again remembered everything and told me, and tears came to her eyes. These are the verses.
* * *
War! Into the life of the Russian people
The unexpected guests burst in,
And pain exploded in my heart,
Bringing with him only adversity.
There is only pain, suffering and torment around,
The men went to fight
Their duty is sacred - native land protect.
Children's and women's hands remained in the village.
And how much they had to endure,
Living under the Germans, not feeling protected?
And constantly seeing death nearby?
And only God knows what tears were shed there!
The cross was heavy, because it’s on the chopping block every day,
They tried in every possible way to humiliate them.
How difficult it is to be in constant fear,
Remain a woman and do not betray your faith!
Their life is like a feat, maybe not noticeable,
We must keep it in our memory.
So let us be for them, the living and the dead,
Offer our prayers to God!
For that girl who ran under fire,
With only one thought - to see my mother,
And only the mother’s prayer warmed
And she helped her escape unharmed.
But many left a thread of life there,
Their husbands, children, health, happiness,
But they managed to preserve the Russian soul,
Not allowing the Nazis to tear it apart.
(March 2012 Olga Titkova)
I had just started studying in the 9th grade when I received a summons to be drafted into the army, along with other guys my age, born in 1926. We were sixteen years old; in difficult times of war, with poor food, we were thin, short, and emaciated. My height was 149 cm, weight 37 kg. Those whose height was below 147 cm were lucky; they were not drafted, and they did not undergo military service at all. When I returned from the front seven years later, they had already graduated from college and were working as teachers and technical specialists.
When I was called up, both sisters were far away, my brother was fighting, and my relatives took me to the assembly point in the village. No one could wasteland. A neighbor, uncle Alexander Punegov, who returned from the front without one leg, volunteered. He agreed to take me on a cart. Then there were no cars at all - they were all sent to the front, and they traveled mainly on foot or on horseback. Mother, who had flour, baked pancakes with potatoes and flour from clover flowers for the road. She was so swollen from hunger that she could not walk and just went out onto the porch - and cried, burst into tears, and this picture remained with me for the rest of my life.
A few months later, my mother died, but they didn’t tell me so I wouldn’t be nervous. But in the beginning, before I went to the front, I had the opportunity to go home for ten days.
Many relatives, acquaintances and neighbors came to see off the soldiers. Someone gave me an accordion, and I walked ahead of this whole company and played the village passage “Kebra Gora,” and the girls sang ditties that they usually performed during Orthodox holidays. I was sad in my heart because all the conscripts had someone close to them at these farewells, but I had no one except my neighbor, Uncle Oloksan.
On the outskirts of the village of Vichkodor, the column stopped and they began to say goodbye. There were a lot of tears. They didn’t know then that out of several dozen guys, only a few would return to their homeland. But their relatives felt that these fledgling chicks had not yet matured into soldiers. And they were afraid of the military millstones awaiting them...
In the Wasteland we had a snack and listened to the last parting words of Uncle Oloksan, who returned from the war as an invalid. He said that those on the front line should be very careful, vigilant, “nimble as hell.” The enemy is very strong, equipped with advanced technology, cool weapons, and many snipers. Don’t get into trouble, he said, it’s stupid.
TO ARKHANGELSK
Soldiers of the 33rd Infantry Regiment came to accompany us conscripts to Arkhangelsk. At the station At Aikino, there were already diesel cars, two-axle “calf” cars.
On the way to Kotlas, five more guys our age, freed from the camps, were dropped off with us. They were all dressed in the same uniform, similar to the uniform of the Fez officers, quite good in comparison with our worn-out coats and trousers. Our new neighbors behaved defiantly and even brazenly. Taking places around the potbelly stove, taking out bread, lard, canned food, sugar from their duffel bags, they ate, heated tea in mugs and laughed loudly. Then they started smoking, but none of our guys smoked. The closed carriage quickly became foggy with smoke. When you don’t smoke, it’s especially unpleasant, especially for those on the upper bunks. When they were told, guys, smoke shag near the windows, they stood up, almost with a finger in the eye, and when one guy was about to have a snack, these camp inmates grabbed his knapsack and began to pull out the contents, threatening them with homemade knives. Then our guys couldn’t stand it, they came down from the bunks, some grabbed a log, some snatched a belt with a badge from the hands of the bandits, some just used their fists - and began to sweep them. When they stopped rocking, they shoved them under the bunks. After two stops, when the escort was informed about the incident, they were unloaded and sent to the station hospital. We were not punished, having realized who was to blame for the drama that happened.
…There were many military men on the Arkhangelsk platform, and a brass band was playing. I had never heard a brass band in person before, so I decided it was the radio playing. And then - look - I saw the trumpets sparkling with gold, how musicians in military uniform played them, I was surprised how they harmoniously blew a military march. And the conductor stands in front and gestures to them. My soul felt solemn and light because we were greeted so well, as if at a big holiday.
Having lined up in a column, we were taken on foot to the Molotovsk military garrison, where first of all we were taken to the bathhouse. We washed ourselves, took a steam bath, took us out to get dressed in another department and into military uniform, starting with underwear and ending with an overcoat with a belt and a hat with earflaps. Of course, this uniform was not adjusted and was not new, used. Since we were immature and short, our overcoats fit baggy on us.
Literally the next day we were driven from Molotovsk to the village of Lesozavod No. 26, where machine gunners were trained. Intensified military training began. The first step is to acquire the most basic everyday skills: for example, how to wrap a footcloth so as not to chafe your feet during a long walk, how to fold a roll from a soldier's overcoat on summer campaigns, how to wear a belt and tuck in a tunic correctly in order to have a decent appearance, even how wear a cap and a winter hat so that everyone has the same outfit. For every slightest violation (for example, the platoon commander noticed that you were standing near the stove and warming yourself, or had your hands in your pockets) they will be taken outside in a gymnast in the cold and driven through the snow, forced to crawl on your bellies. But these punishments also depend on the squad commander - junior sergeant. For example, our ml. The sergeant was more humane and never abused his duties, and next to him was Jr. The sergeant went out of his way to drive his soldiers too hard.
The food was very poor. After about three months, some soldiers were so hungry that they could barely move their legs, like decrepit old men - they were then sent to the hospital to recover.
Soldiers serving in the reserve regiment were given shag, regardless of whether you smoked or not. Most of our soldiers all smoked. And my father weaned me from this habit. He planted tobacco in the garden for himself, and in the fall he dried it in a heap so that it was stronger, dried it by putting it on slats in the attic, and chopped it finely with an ax, and packed two wooden boxes. I secretly stuffed my jacket pockets from there before going as a shepherd (the older guys were playing around, and I wanted to be on par with them). There we rolled a cigar from a newspaper and smoked. But this did not last long. One day my father noticed the remains of shag in my pocket. He grabbed me, my head between my legs, and spanked my bare ass with a belt so much that my mother began to save me so that my father would forgive me. After that, I didn’t try to indulge in a cigarette and didn’t want to at all. So in the reserve regiment I collected shag in a bag and exchanged it at the village market for flatbread from civilian men, it was an extra ration.
ADVANTAGES OF LEND-LEASE
While serving in Arkhangelsk, we were twice involved in unloading and loading American ships. In 1943, large ships with food arrived from America, as a member of the anti-Hitler coalition. Mostly we received granulated sugar in bags, cereals, powdered eggs in jars, pork stew, beans, beans, etc. We had to pay for everything. And we loaded non-ferrous metals - babbitt and aluminum ingots - onto American ships heading back. They looked very beautiful in appearance, like ice. We were very tired at the end of the shift, but we were fed very well, mainly with bean and corn porridge: each soldier received, if he wished, almost a full kettle at a time. Within a month of working there we recovered quite well. The cargo was unloaded by large port cranes, and we only transported it to warehouses in carts.
If today you work transporting sand or cereals, beans, before leaving through the checkpoint, directly pour, say, sand into each other’s bags between your underwear and warm underwear and tighten your trousers with a waist belt. Maybe the inspecting soldiers guessed, but for close-up, they will move their hands from top to bottom - and get out. They also managed to hide stewed meat, cans of condensed milk and cans of powdered eggs. During these works we were accommodated in one-story houses with a kitchen. When they returned from work, they stood on the newspaper (without shoes) and shook out their catch from the port. All edible prey was collected, cooked on the stove and enjoyed by the whole herd. So every day for some time - good treats, sweet tea with condensed milk. Then again the barracks, drill.
ROAD TO THE FRONT
We began to prepare to be sent to the front. On the platform, we were each given a dry ration: two crackers instead of bread and two pieces of lard, a briquette of concentrate - pea pearl barley or millet porridge - and two pieces of sugar. Each soldier had an iron round pot and spoon. It was later that our military industry began to produce flat aluminum pots, the lid of which served for the second course (porridge), and flat flasks with a screw cap. And the Germans also had a cloth covering on the flask.
At the station Konosha we learned that we were being taken to the South. Nature began to change outside the window, it became greener and warmer, the potbelly stove no longer needed to be heated. In Vologda we were taken out of the carriages and taken to a restaurant, where they were ready to feed us. The waiters quickly served everyone a full plate of rice porridge with milk and butter. It was very tasty, and we remembered the treat of the Vologda residents for a long time. We were treated not as soldiers, but as our own sons who were going to protect them, peaceful Russians, from the brown plague.
At one station before Moscow I saw they were selling milk. And he bought a whole bucket, treated all the guys in his carriage, it turned out to be a soldier’s mug.
We reached Ukraine. We were taken off the train and taken on foot. Around there were burnt huts, destroyed adobe houses, workshops where old women and old men were fumbling around, trying to put together a shed to shelter from the rain.
We were sent to the Rifle, twice Red Banner Sivash Regiment. This famous regiment crossed Sivash in the Crimea; in a mortal battle with the enemy, one of the ten regiments captured Sapun Mountain near Sevastopol, the assault of which cost our country thousands of lives. We, young soldiers who had not smelled gunpowder, were greeted very well by the combat soldiers. They just took a lot of food trophies from the enemy. (It must be said that the old soldier’s saying “you haven’t smelled gunpowder yet” comes from reality. When a shell or mine explodes close to you, you hear the smell of burning gunpowder.)
Our soldiers, exhausted by the meager food in the reserve regiment, began to eat up - they gave almost a full pot of corn soup with lard and sliced smoked sausage. The cook from the camp kitchen only had time to pour it into the pots with a large ladle. The soldiers quickly recovered and their spirits rose.
Among the old-timers there were people of different ages, but mostly older, there were even those who took part in our retreat and took over the German offensive. Their clothes were worn, faded, and on the backs of their tunics there were white stains from the salt that had come out in hot battles and during marches. They taught us everything that could help us survive in battle. After all, even mistakes that seem completely inconspicuous can cost lives. They also introduced us to enemy weapons, because some of them had German machine guns, and captured cartridges were stored in the service platoon. These machine guns had an advantage over ours: they were blued steel and did not rust from rain, while our weapons became rusty from the slightest dampness, so they had to be constantly lubricated. But basically we were armed with our own machine guns: Degtyarev, with a wooden butt (PPD-40), and a Shpagin machine gun (PPSh-41), but it was a bit heavy. We, machine gunners, preferred the Degtyarev and Sudaev assault rifles (PPS-42). But, I repeat, they had to be constantly lubricated. They introduced us to how to fight against the Tigers, and where they have weak points for throwing incendiary bottles.
Soon we were collected and taken on foot to be loaded onto the train. I had to walk for days across the Ukrainian steppes, in the heat. Occasionally we came across a village with a well or stream. Then for the first time in our lives we learned what thirst is. You’re walking along a country road – there’s not a tree, you see a dirty puddle – you rush in, scoop it up with your cap and drink until the officer snatches it away. Suddenly my neighbor in the ranks, an elderly soldier of about forty, a Leningrader, said to me: “Son, you’re drinking wrong.” I asked: what is correct? Here, he says, we’ll come to a big rest stop (it was held from 11 to 13 o’clock, during the hottest time), we’ll eat, and before we start to rest, drink as much as you like. Then we rested - the body was saturated with water. We filled our flasks with water. During the hike, after a short time you will want to drink. But this thirst, which is still tolerable, must be endured; in extreme cases, take 2-3 small sips or simply rinse your mouth. At the first halt, I did everything on the advice of an experienced soldier. And I was simply surprised, looking at my colleagues who were rushing with their caps to the dirty puddles. And most importantly, you don’t feel so thirsty, you don’t sweat so much, and this doesn’t make you so weak. After that, I passed on the old fighter’s advice to the guys, but they didn’t take it seriously. When passing through villages, they wanted to get enough water in reserve, but it turned out to be harmful.
From the south of Ukraine we came to the north, to the station. Shchors. There we rested while we loaded horses, camp kitchens, and guns. Captured weapons were also loaded - German Volker-Erma submachine guns, MP-38 and MP-40 types, with a folding metal butt. We didn’t know where they were taking us, but judging by the names of the cities along the way, they were taking us to the northwest. A terrifying picture opened up all around. All cities, railway stations, villages lay in ruins, only chimneys remained from the villages. People dug dugout holes on the hills, covered them with planks, used some kind of canvas instead of a door, built a stove from various waste and broken bricks and huddled there.
They brought us to Vitebsk and began to unload. The city was completely destroyed, not a single intact house was visible. We walked along the outskirts of the city, it was deserted and deserted, there weren’t even dogs. We, 17-year-old soldiers from the outback of Russia, saw this for the first time. Although our people lived in poverty, the houses and collective farm buildings remained intact. Seeing the places where the front passed twice, we were horrified. Occasionally, cars with boxes of ammunition, tanks and self-propelled guns overtook us, and you envy them that they do not have to walk on foot, with soldier’s equipment (duffel bag, machine gun, bag with cartridges, roll). You hear the command “stop,” “halt,” and you immediately throw yourself into a roadside ditch with your feet in the air. They made a halt in a place where there was water and it was possible to hide from German planes. They flew constantly. If a “frame” - a reconnaissance plane - flew by, immediately wait for the Messerschmitts or Junkers. In the front-line zone they bombed us savagely. The command “air” was heard more and more often, and we tried to take cover in a ditch or hole, or in the bushes, if they were nearby. Many received first aid from experienced medical instructors who had been in the battles for Sivash in Crimea. I had to watch air battles when our Yak-9 or La-7 appeared against the Messerschmitts. They were a great help.
INCREDIBLE THOUGHTS
Before reaching Polotsk, our 953rd Sivash Sevastopol Order of Suvorov Regiment was added to the 51st Army of the 1st Belorussian Front under the command of Army General Ivan Khristoforovich Bagramyan. We were given the task of cutting off the escape routes of the German Army Group North to East Prussia. Thanks to this operation, German troops in Latvia and Estonia will find themselves in the “sack”. But to accomplish this task we have to overcome incredible difficulties, since Army Group North in this area has not only large formations of human, well-armed reserves, but also a huge amount of equipment, motorized units, tank and artillery formations, armed to the teeth . But we don’t have much, except for light artillery and infantry units, albeit with the 3rd Air Army providing them with air support. I later experienced this the hard way: when they shoot at you not only from the front, but also from both flanks - it’s like absolute hell.
Before the first fight, cats scratched my soul. Although the cooks fed us corn soup with lard, we ate without appetite, thinking about what awaits you tomorrow. What devilish forces will meet us? Or German soldiers will walk across the field standing, shooting at you, with their angular helmets and black muzzles, or maybe they won’t be visible, they will fire from trenches and bushes. Or the Ferdinands, smoking exhaust gases, will move towards you with a roar, and soldiers walk between them and fire short bursts at you, and you do not have the right to return fire - let them, they say, come closer, while the artillery fires at the tanks ... My head is confused from these pictures, and I have no appetite. Besides, I don’t like boiled hot lard. He took the pieces out of the pot, wrapped them in paper and in a duffel bag, then ate them with pleasure.
They lined us up for a rally before the battle, but our appearance was far from formal.
For months on the front line, a soldier not only cannot choose the moment to wash and dry his tunic, but he cannot even wash himself. The generals, whom I saw so closely for the first time, were in decent uniform: trousers with red stripes, a cap with a red band. After the meeting, the generals with their adjutants and colonels got into their Jeeps and drove away towards the rear. And we, when we were fed, had a rest and filled our flasks with water, soon heard the command to form into columns, platoon and squadron. The riders began to assemble the carts. The ambulance carts were loaded with various stretchers, raincoats, boxes with medicines, crutches, etc. Boxes with mines and small-caliber - so-called muzzle-loading - 50-mm caliber mortars were loaded onto the mortar carts. They were carried on the front line by the mortar men themselves. Well, carts for boxes of ammunition and transportation of camping things with camp kitchens.
We were lined up in columns, the platoon commanders checked their personnel, and set off. They walked with halts until the evening; when it was already dark, we stopped in some village; not far away we could already hear the rattling of machine gun and machine gun fire. They ordered us to settle down for the night right in the forest, since officers, cart drivers and camp kitchen cooks were located in the houses. They passed it along the chain: in an hour and a half to get ready for dinner. Although we were very tired from walking and the heat, I couldn’t sleep. There was restlessness and anxiety in my soul, and not only in me, but also in others, especially young soldiers. There was one Armenian in our platoon, and he looked especially nervous because he had a young wife and small child. I felt sorry for him that he had to worry not only about himself. He was a year older than me, with the last name Akopyan.
FIRST FIGHT
The night passed almost without sleep, in drowsiness with sleepy breaks. At dawn we were invited to receive breakfast. The cooks slept little, and they prepared food for us: first, as usual, soup from corn grits and canned food, and pearl barley porridge with lard for second. After breakfast we were lined up and given the task of operations. We had to turn around in a line and imperceptibly - sometimes on our stomachs, sometimes in short dashes - move forward to the trenches of our units. Separately, the trenches were not connected by trenches everywhere: since our troops were on the offensive, the command did not provide for long-term defense. In this offensive operation, the following was practiced: every other day, the advancing unit occupied the position of another unit, and the unit being replaced collected the dead and buried them in mass graves. And a day later - again to the front line, and they fought offensive battles. But this practice existed only if human resources allowed.
When we occupied the trenches, the fighting soldiers retreated to the rear positions to bury their fallen comrades. When we opened active fire on the German positions, they could not stand it and began to retreat unnoticed. There were relatively few of them, and they began to escape on foot - it turned out that their cars were hidden in a low ravine. We began to advance one by one towards the German trenches under the fire of the covering German lone men, and then these lone men got on motorcycles, which were also hidden from our eyes. When we reached the German trenches, we were allowed a respite in the offensive. During this time, other units arrived and dragged a 45-mm cannon, which was the only one in our regiment, to the trenches. It is very difficult for a crew to advance in a wooded area without horse traction. A treeless area opened up against our units. After a short respite, the command decided to continue the offensive. Rear units, horse-drawn vehicles - carts, camp kitchens - were ordered not to venture out of the forest into open areas until further notice. The area was downhill, and behind it was a hill where several small village huts could be seen.
When the command of the unit commanders was heard along the chain: “Forward, for the Motherland, for Stalin!”, the soldiers began to jump out of the trenches and trenches shouting: “Hurray! Hooray!" The whole chain of soldiers running towards the enemy was somehow inspiring, and I also shouted “Hurray” and ran towards the ravine. Then, from the side of the houses, the enemy opened increased fire from machine guns and machine guns with tracer bullets, although it was daytime. These sheaves of bullets, like sparks, flew at us - and flew back over our heads, instilling fear, seeing them for the first time and bringing death in reality. The Germans, sitting on a hill, could see everything in full view, every running soldier. The enemy had superiority on the ground, and we, despite this, fled as if into the devil's mouth. This was an obvious wrong decision in an offensive operation, when it was possible to take this protruding height in a roundabout way or after intensive artillery bombardment or aerial bombardment. This would have saved dozens, maybe hundreds of soldiers, and they would not have been killed and maimed.
The Germans fired tracer bullets first so they knew where their bullets were landing. As soon as they reached the middle of the beam, they were forced to stop the attack, even in short dashes, and lie down. The attack was stopped, and they were ordered to dig in, almost lying down, with their sapper shovels. But the soil was not solid; apparently, cereals had been planted there before, but then it was overgrown with turf. And we quite quickly dug a trench, where we could escape from the German bullets behind an earthen parapet, and we ourselves could open aimed fire at the points where the flashes of flame from German machine guns flashed like Morse code. That Armenian dug a trench next to me. And I watch as he lay down with his face against the parapet and periodically fired bursts from his machine gun almost upward. The platoon commander noticed such a joke, approached him - and how he hit Akopyan on the hump with a machine gun! He shouted: “Where are you shooting? By crows? Conduct targeted fire! My neighbors in the trenches and I started laughing.
The Germans continued to fire heavily, but what saved us was that there was no artillery fire. And our “forty-five” fired at the enemy, who was behind us, about fifty meters away. This greatly hampered the Germans and reduced enemy firing points. I could hear shouts from our soldiers: “Medical instructor!”, “Wounded!”, “Save!”... And I watched how medical instructors had to crawl, sometimes in short dashes, under machine-gun fire, approach the wounded and provide assistance, or even take them to the rear . The artillery crew also had to drag boxes of shells under fire. The regiment command was located about two hundred meters behind us, giving orders to the battalion commanders via wired communication. And the signalmen with the reel on their backs had to, under enemy fire, either crawl, or where the terrain allowed, then run, stand, or short dashes, to establish communications. Only division and corps commanders had radios, and regiment commanders rarely had them.
To reduce unit losses, the command decided to launch an offensive and take control of the heights at the beginning of darkness. Since we have almost decided where the firing points were, develop the main attacks in the direction of the gaps between the machine guns, and upon reaching the height, hit enemy targets from the flanks and rear. As soon as it began to get dark and the Germans could no longer discern the movement of our soldiers, there was a command to begin the offensive in a chain, but observing the strictest silence, so that there was no knocking of pots and shovels, no clinking of water flasks. Since there was no deep darkness yet, the Germans had not yet used rockets to periodically illuminate our positions.
And we rushed forward. The main thing was that we had to run to the bottom of the ravine, and when we climbed the mountain, the enemy could no longer see us. And the real battle with the enemy began in the trenches and trenches, unexpectedly for the Germans, sometimes with machine gun fire, sometimes hand-to-hand, sometimes destroyed by grenades. Only a few, mostly officers, could escape us, since their command posts and dugouts were further from the front line. Many Germans escaped in cars and motorcycles, with little visibility - it was already almost complete darkness, in addition there was fog.
The battle lasted about an hour. We pursued and finished off the last German soldiers. But about twenty of ours were killed and injured. We saw this the next morning. At night we scoured to find food trophies that had been left behind by the Germans during the sudden withdrawal. We disarmed the seriously wounded Germans and buried the corpses in separate graves from our soldiers.
They buried their own in a mass grave, with uniforms, without coffins or wrappings. The square grave is two by two meters and also about two meters deep. They were laid out in rows, and the mutilated were wrapped in a sheet and placed there too. I saw a similar funeral and fireworks several times there, on 1st Pribaltiysky. And later - on the Belarusian fronts - we were just advancing, and the soldiers were buried by special funeral units that followed us. On the plywood they wrote the names of the soldiers buried in mass grave, and installed at the top.
There was almost no civilian population to be seen in the villages where the fighting took place. Either they left with the partisans, or hid in nearby forests.
At first my heart felt terrible; it was hard to see and get used to. And it never escaped my mind that your turn would come, but when? And will the news reach you that you are in such and such a village and under such and such a bush... If your soldier friend - ate from the same pot with him - hid you and buried you, dug a shallow hole or trench and covered you with fluffy earth... And God decreed who will have what fate...
This is how my first day of the war passed. We rested, and the camp kitchen caught up with us, they fed us again, and we were full. After the night, we were again sent to the front line to replace the existing unit...