I will begin with a quotation. It is long but necessary...
"We secured a line to the west of Oder and started digging trenches. Preparing for the morning operation, we saw a baby crawling in the neutral zone near a dead woman. When the blasts subsided we heard the baby crying.
Someone said he was sorry for the baby. Others thought of their own babies left at home... 'We are not beasts, are we? The baby is alive!' exclaimed soldier Nestor Dovgalev. He gave his submachine-gun to Vasily who recollected bitterly his own children that had been burned alive by the Nazis, along with many other Byelorussian children. 'If something happens to me, remind the commander that he himself said that we had come to save Europe,' Nestor told Vasily and ran across the field cratered by bombs. The enemies opened fire. The bullet got him in the back when Nestor was already near our trench with the baby in his arms. He fell down and never got up but kept holding the rescued baby.
We found three hairs carefully folded in a sheet of paper in one of Nestor's letters and read the following: 'Dear husband, guess which one is mine and which belong to your children. I hope you have not forgotten the color.' We saw small children's hands outlined with a pencil on some pages."
This is a fragment of a letter written by World War II veteran and Muscovite Prokopy Tarasov to the daily newspaper Izvestia. Some years ago, journalists asked their readers to send in their war memories.
As time goes by, old age has claimed the war's veterans and not many remain. It is very important to preserve heroic, everyday, bitter, collective, personal and other memories of the war for future generations.
Izvestia received tens of thousands of letters. The best letters were recently published in the book "I Saw the War", that came out on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Victory in World War II. The greater part of the book was put together by Izvestia veterans Ella Maksimova and Anatoly Danilevich, who died some days before the book's release. The material they collected is unique. The fragment cited above proves this. A man with the brightest imagination could not invent this. One can only see this with his own eyes.
The Great Patriotic War was the greatest shock to all Soviet people regardless of their nationality and, above all, to veterans and their families.
"Fifty-seven men went to the front from my native village of Kisherma in the Arkhangelsk region and only four of them came back," wrote N. Kondratov from Minsk. "A few families received telegrams informing them that their relatives were dead. I lost six cousins during the war. We shed so many tears! Just imagine how widows and orphans suffered. They were dying of starvation and there was no one to help them."
Here is another letter: "My husband, a Kronstadt sailor, was killed in 1941," wrote Yelena Yastrebova from Moscow. "I was told that he was missing. But I have always waited for him. I am still crying. You cannot bury a beloved person at heart if you have never seen his grave."
Popular writer Svetlana Aleksiyevich wrote many books about the war. In one of her books, she collected horrible war memories from women and children. She wrote in the preface: "This is the evidence not of heroes, but of ordinary people who call themselves 'the proletariat of the war'. Their stories are simple and straight, which makes them even more terrible. This is a real, unsophisticated declaration of love and hate. Some events and details have lost their emotional coloring and meaning through many years and others, on the contrary, have become more significant and acquired more human and personal meaning. The event itself, even the great Battle of Stalingrad, becomes less interesting and exciting than what people saw at that time and what they understood about life and death and themselves, how they endured this knowledge and what it has done to them and all of us in the end."
Here is a fragment from another letter: "Our troops reached the Baltic Sea in Pomerania," wrote Sergei Ivanov from Kropotkin. "My 75th guards mortar regiment also fought there. Once we arrived at a village reportedly left by the Nazis. Suddenly a shot rang. We rushed to a house and saw a Nazi who had shot himself with a parabellum. Before that, he had forced his wife and two children to drink poison. The woman was frothing at the mouth. Our paramedic Korolev rushed to help them. He made them drink milk and some pills and gradually, two days later they felt better. We learnt that the Nazi officer said to his wife: 'It's all over. You and the children must not fall into the hands of Russians.' After that, the German woman cried and thanked us for saving their lives. 'My kids will always remember that you, Russians, have saved us!' she said. 'Where are they now? Do they remember us?'" the veteran wonders.
Each letter is a human drama, a plot for a story, novel or movie, such as Ballad of a Soldier, The Cranes Are Flying or The Dawns Are Quiet Here. These stories, like a mosaic of faces, actions and small details, compose the image of the soldier who defended his Motherland and liberated Europe from Nazism, the most horrible disaster of the 20th century.
All the letters were written by soldiers, no matter if their authors were privates or colonels.
"The war is won by soldiers. And also by generals if they are good soldiers," one of the letters reads.
Ahead of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, we see serious ideological and psychological arguments about the lessons of the past. This book gives readers an opportunity to see a real portrait of the liberator. The book "I Saw the War," published by Vremya publishers, has a meaningful subtitle: "A Documentary Novel." Ten copies of this book were on display at the recent International Book Fair in Paris. They were sold on the very first day.
