A veteran spoke about the challenges of being a nurse during WWII

During the Great Patriotic War (WWII), the battle with death was not only in the soldiers' trenches on the front line, another round-the-clock battle for the lives of soldiers was waged under fire by front-line doctors and nurses. On February 2, 99-year-old Nadezhda Semyonovna Toptunova, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, told the Izvestia correspondent about the difficulties of the work of medics at that time.

She still has a photo with a grateful signature from one of the young soldiers to whom she saved a leg.

"True thanks for the good overhaul of my leg. Petrovich." And there Petrovich was 18 years old," she reveals.

She herself was even younger at the time. Toptunova went to nursing courses right after 10th grade. Despite the lack of years, she was taken to work at the hospital. At first her hands trembled when she bandaged the soldiers, and she cried because she was afraid to take hold of wounded limbs.

In the bloodiest year of 1943, when 6 million 300 thousand Red Army soldiers were wounded, Nadezhda Ivanovna saved soldiers near Kursk. The continuous battle lasted 50 days and nights, correspondent Roman Ishmukhametov pointed out. Not only blood loss was dangerous, but also infection. At the time, expensive Western antibiotics were almost non-existent, and domestic scientists had only just begun to create them. Inside the bag of a WWII nurse was only the most necessary: sterile bandages, a tourniquet to stop blood, and pins to attach a sheet with personal data about him to the soldier's uniform.

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Earlier in the day, the Victory Museum in Moscow launched an immersive program dedicated to the 82nd anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, which visually immerses guests in the historical events of that time. Museum guests are met by guides in wartime uniforms. Talking about the course of the battle on the Volga River, they offer visitors to examine Soviet fortifications, try to throw a grenade, assemble and disassemble 1941-1945 weapons and much more.

In 2025, May 9 marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War (WWII). In January 1945, the USSR army launched an offensive on Berlin. At the end of hostilities at 00:43 Moscow time on May 9, the commanders-in-chief signed an act of unconditional surrender of Germany, which served as the end of the Great Patriotic War.