My grandparents on father’s side always lived in a big
village in the south of Russia, near the bustling and bright multiethnic city
Rostov-on-Don. My mother is from a northern city and she happened to meet my
father at a youth conference in Moscow where they fell in love at the first
glance. After a two-year, painful long distance relationship my father moved to
my mother’s native city where seven years later I was born.
However, every
summer my dad took me and my sister to visit our grandparents in their sunny
and hot southern village. If someone
would have asked me at that time what “summer” meant for me, one of the first
things I would recall was visiting my southern grandmother. It was all about summer: hot weather, vivid
southern dialect, the sociable and hospitable inhabitants of our village where
everyone knows each other, a lot of fruits and a lot of sun, dozens of
boisterous relatives (my grandmother has three brothers and one sister) and
piles of delicious fresh and natural food.
But what I also remember is my grandmother’s grief over
her husband who died 21 years before and who she still recalls every day. Every
summer when I come, we spend long and quiet rural evenings together. She tells
me stories about her life, mostly about him, as he is still alive in her heart.
There is so much love and so much anguish in her big brown eyes when she calls
his name. I loved listening to these dramatic and at the same time vibrant stories.
But this summer I suddenly realized that it’s our, her grandchildren’s,
responsibility to save this history for future generations. That was the moment
when I started recording my 85-year-old grandmother in order to write a
chronicle of my family’s history.
There were a lot of stories about a lean childhood in
a big family, about teaching in a rural school, about hard everyday life in a
country house without any facilities. And there were stories about Second World
War or more The Great Patriotic War. My grandfather went through the whole
Second World War: from Ukraine to Berlin. He had a lot of orders and medals for
conspicuous gallantry, including such high decorations as Order of the Red Star
for saving a flag of the regiment in the battle and Order of the Glory.
He didn’t like talking
about war with me. It was something he discussed only when his brother-soldiers
came to visit him. They would sit at the kitchen, close the doors, drinking tea
and some alcohol through the whole night and sharing their memoirs. Usually, I
was spending these evenings at my friend’s not to disturb my husband and his
guests. I knew these memoirs were something sacred for them.
But war didn’t vanish
from his mind completely; it left a lot of scars there. When it is hot or he is
sick and has a fever, he screams while sleeping “Hit! Shoot!
Blood…” and other awful words. I was scared every time
when it happened, I woke him up and tried to calm him down. He often heard in
his anxious dreams a desperate cry of a little 10-year-old girl somewhere in a
small Ukrainian village. It was a “Junkers-88” raid – they were bombing this
village throughout the whole day. This little girl had her arm cut off at the
shoulder by a shell splinter. I remember how Yura (my grandfather’s name) was shaking his head and asking someone in
his memory “Why was it you, little one?”
I knew that he was
wounded gravely and that a bullet passed somewhere close to a very important
vein. But I didn’t know any details about that story till an evening right
after our wedding when I noticed a scar right opposite his heart. That’s when I
learnt that I might have never met him in my life because of this accident.
It was a fall of 1943.
This fall was really cold and rainy. And here was the order, “Don’t stop the
attack! Only forward!” Our government had decided to take Kiev, the Ukrainian
capital, as a present for the October Revolution Day on October 7th. Meanwhile,
there was an impregnable stronghold before Kiev – a river Dnepr. An order was
to make a forced crossing of a river with improvised means. Boats, launches,
rafts, and even just logs – everything was in use. Soldiers were embarking so that
they could hardly keep their boats afloat.
All of it under heavy fire. The right bank was like a cherished dream,
like a desperate call, like another little step closer to the desired victory
day.
The boat that Yura took
was so overloaded that he was sitting on the bow. A bullet, you know, doesn’t
choose a victim by itself; it’s directed by an enemy’s arm. Yura, struck by a
bullet, fell out of the boat and descended to the bottom very quickly in the cold
water. A Georgian sitting next to him in the boat, without a moment’s thought,
jumped into the freezing water after Yura. He snatched the wounded person and swam
him back to a left bank where he took him to the medical and sanitary
battalion. Yura’s chest was wounded. A bullet had passed within a millimeter of
his heart. Later, doctors said that he had barely evaded the grim reaper’s
grasp.
Yura spent about a month
in the hospital, and since his battalion travelled far away so he had to join
another one. But everywhere until reaching Berlin he was asking about the Georgian
who saved his life and whose name he didn’t know. He finally found his
battalion but nobody could tell him what happened to this Georgian after the Dnepr
forced crossing. Most probably, he was buried somewhere in the cold water of
Dnepr. Yura often talked about him with a sorrow because he saved Yura’s life
but was unable to keep his own.
For 40 years, my husband
wrote articles for a local newspaper “Priazovskaya steppe” where he tried to
tell people the truth about the war; what they, 20-year-old boys, believed in,
what ideals led them in their lives. He spent days and months trying to collect
materials about the unknown heroes who saved hundreds of lives yet remained
unnamed. Like his Georgian rescuer…
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