"Bandera robbed and executed their own countrymen"
Shelling, power and water outages, damaged apartments, and the ongoing military confrontation are the realities that Donetsk veterans of the Great Patriotic War live in year after year. All of them are under a hundred years old or more. A special correspondent of Izvestia met with eyewitnesses and participants of those events and learned about their lives then and now.
Nurse Anya
In May, Donetsk resident Anna Vasilyevna Antonenko traditionally celebrates two holidays: Victory Day on the 9th and birthday on the 12th. This year she turns 103 years old.
Anna Vasilyevna's apartment is neat, clean and bright. She herself, dressed in an elegant outfit, sitting on the edge of an armchair with her hands folded in her lap, is an example of modest dignity and femininity.
"Our grandmother is always amazingly intelligent!" her relatives tell me with pride.
Anna Vasilyevna hardly sees, as a result of the injury she received at the front. He doesn't hear well. But at the same time, he perfectly remembers the events of 80 years ago. And it is explained in such a way that one can only marvel at the clarity of consciousness of a person who has crossed the centenary.
— I was born in the village of Alekseevka, Kirovograd region, — says the veteran. — After the age of seven, she entered the medical school, graduated in 1940. She started working as a nurse in the therapeutic department. On June 22, 1941, I was on shift. I entered the ward at 5 a.m., and there the patients were listening to a broadcast from Moscow, Molotov announced the German attack. My hands were shaking with the tray of thermometers. But I thought: "It's okay, we'll beat the Germans quickly, everything will be fine." Then the head doctor came in and told me, "Go through the wards and tell the patients to go home. There will be a hospital here." At 12 p.m., the first wounded were brought to us.
Then there was the evacuation. Anya, an 18-year-old nurse, was moving along with the ambulance train, where she was helping the soldiers. Two years later, she was assigned to a military unit belonging to the Second Ukrainian Front, and they had to be rescued on the battlefield. She still remembers the name of the first wounded man, to whom she ran under fire and bandaged, Alexander Fedorov, a machine gunner.
She traveled through Europe with her fellow soldiers — Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. On the banks of the Danube, their unit fell into a trap, almost died, and their own troops rescued them. In one of the battles, a fragment fell nearby, the earth clogged his right eye, his eyesight did not disappear, but the doctor said: "Retinal detachment will occur over time." Which, alas, happened at an advanced age. Anya celebrated Victory Day in Magdeburg, Germany.
In August 1945, the unit was sent to rebuild Stalino (Donetsk). It was there that Anna met her future husband, a military signalman. She got a job as a nurse at a regional hospital, where she worked for 46 years. After retirement, she worked in a health center at the mine, and then at school.
Anna Vasilyevna has three great-great-grandchildren. Natasha's granddaughter followed in her footsteps and became a doctor. The veteran lives in a relatively quiet area of Donetsk, far from the front line, but it also reached here, shells landed right in her block. He is closely following what is happening in the special military operation zone, he is worried. And, according to her, she involuntarily imagines herself as a nurse on the modern front line.
"I'm listening to the news and it's like I'm there," the woman sighs.
Two years ago, Anna Vasilyevna was awarded the title of "Honorary Citizen of Donetsk."
The recipe for longevity
Retired Colonel Anatoly Zakharovich Karabut, 99, lives on the northern outskirts of Donetsk, 3 km from the Sands, for which fierce battles have been fought for eight years. In 2014, a heavy shell landed directly in his five-story building, injuring residents of the neighboring entrance. Another time, the fragments had already reached Anatoly Zakharovich's apartment, the holes are still black in the kitchen.
Nevertheless, when you come to visit a veteran, it's as if you don't even feel how much the ground around you smells of gunpowder. The main components of the atmosphere in the apartment are peace and comfort.
Anatoly Zakharovich has an open book on his desk — Makarenko's "Pedagogical Poem", rereading it. Next to the TV remote control, it follows the news. He lives with his daughter Tatiana. The rooms are in military order. The veteran himself is fit and stately: if you don't know about the upcoming anniversary, then you can easily throw off a quarter of a century. And the eyes also attract attention — they are clear and attentive.
— I am from the city of Kamensk, Dnipropetrovsk region, — the veteran shares with me. — In 1941, my family and I evacuated to Stalingrad, my father got a job at a factory there, and so did I, first as an apprentice, and then as a metal planer, I was 15 years old. I still remember the whole city, the famous sculpture of children around the fountain, the Central Department Store, which later housed Paulus' headquarters. Then there were Chelyabinsk and the Kurgan region.
In 1943, young Tolya was drafted into the army. He graduated from the regimental school, as well as the infantry military school. In 1947, a graduate lieutenant was sent to Western Ukraine to fight Bandera.
— Scary people, cruel. They robbed, intimidated, and executed their own countrymen," he recalls.
Once during an operation, such a bandit with an axe attacked a Red Army soldier from around the corner, Anatoly managed to see and shoot, and saved his friend. Another time, the squad went on a mission (Anatoly did not participate in it), and from an underground bunker, a nationalist woman machine-gunned 17 Red Army soldiers, including the commander. That's the kind of enemy you had to resist.
In the 1950s, Anatoly served in Germany. In 1968 he came to Donetsk. After his discharge from the army, he worked at the headquarters of the civil defense of the region, at a university, and as a military instructor at a school. He has two daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Speaking about the recipe for maintaining health, Anatoly Zakharovich notes that a strict daily routine and regular physical exercise help him. The veteran's morning exercise is at 5:30. Breakfast is at 7:30. At 9:30 walking in the courtyard. Then lunch, afternoon nap. Afternoon tea — chess and dominoes with friends. Lights out at exactly 21:30.
The veteran will turn 100 on May 29.
Little brother, Ladoga, the savior shawl
The center of Donetsk. The House of Artists. Across the street is a school destroyed by Hymars. In the house itself, the balconies were cut off after the Grad strikes. 93-year—old Margarita Nikolaevna Musa, a native of the city on the Neva River, lives here.
We're sitting in the kitchen. There's tea on the table. And black and white photo cards. On one side is the Theater Square of St. Petersburg. On the other is a girl with a pearly smile, who looks like an actress.
"It's me," Margarita Nikolaevna is sorting through the photos, her moire ribbon badge on her chest is "To a resident of besieged Leningrad." "I was told: "You're a real artist." I danced well, I was even accepted into the Beryozka ensemble, but my mother did not allow me to move to Moscow. And this," she points to a photo postcard, —is the Kirov Theater, now the Mariinsky, we lived in the building opposite. With my mom and two younger brothers.
Rita turned eight in the summer of 1941, and was going to school in the fall. The worst time was during the first winter — icy, hungry, hopeless.
— The youngest Valerik was one year old. We all became dystrophics, there was nothing to eat," the woman recalls. — Mom went to work while she could. I stayed at home with the younger ones. Valera kept looking at me and saying, "yum, yum." And then, at one point, his eyes stopped... I then sewed it into a blanket, like in a coffin. And I took them on a sled to the nearest market, where they left the dead. I arrived, put it on the ground. And I thought: he's going to be cold. And she pushed two more bodies towards him from the sides to make them warmer...
On the way back, on the bridge, little Rita sat down on a sled and collapsed into a hungry swoon. Fortunately, the female vigilantes were walking by and saved the girl. They also arranged for her and her remaining brother to go to a shelter, where they at least fed her. Mom, who could barely move her legs, didn't mind.
Six months later, the shelter was evacuated to the mainland. We sailed along Ladoga — on a barge, under the smoke. A plane with crosses circled overhead, but halfway there it turned back, either regretted it, or ran out of fuel. The children were put on a train and taken inland. Rita and her brother slept soundly on the road. And those who ate and asked for "more, more" died of intestinal inversion, their small bodies were unloaded at the stations.
The children were brought to the Yaroslavl region, to the village of Stanilovo. They stayed there until 1945.
— We lived hungry. I had a beautiful shawl lined with velvet, my mother gave it to me before I left," says the veteran. "That shawl saved me." I danced in it — in houses and villages, in front of peasant women. They gave me some food or milk.
After the Victory, Rita and her brother were taken to Leningrad by a relative. My mother was evacuated to Siberia during the blockade, where she supervised the production of captured Germans, but she was soon able to return. A few years later, Margarita met the artist Evgeny Musa and went with him to Donetsk. The last time I visited my hometown was more than 30 years ago. At the same time, I visited the Piskarevskoye cemetery, where those who died of starvation rest in a mass grave. Including one-year-old Valera, whom she once sewed into a blanket as an eight-year-old girl, took on a sled and worried that he would not be cold.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
