Participants of the Great Patriotic War shared their memories

Veterans of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) shared their memories of wartime. Footage and archive photos are published by Izvestia on May 9.

"Mom told my sister and me that we gave her the strength to survive that terrible time. He would ask us, "Are you hungry?" And my sister and I look at each other and wave our heads: No! And they all have smiles on their faces. That's how we supported each other," blockade survivor Natalia Kurepina told the publication.

Now she is 95 years old, she is an honorary veteran of Nizhny Novgorod. A year before the Victory, Kurepin was evacuated to the Gorky region (now Nizhny Novgorod).

Lyudmila Nikolaeva, a 90-year-old WWII veteran, also met the war as a child. She remembers the siege of Leningrad and survived the death of her father and grandmother, after which she was evacuated to Novosibirsk in 1942, then to Tula, where she had to share a room with seven relatives. Nikolaeva lives in Tula to this day.

"Thank you for honoring me, the veterans and those who participated in the war," said WWII veteran Nikolai Loginov.

He went to the front at the age of 11, went through the Smolensk region, Belarus and Ukraine and met Victory in Yugoslavia as a teenager. But his service to his Homeland did not end there — years later, the Soviet Army and the deck of the Alexander Suvorov cruiser were waiting for him.

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WWII veteran Semyon Lyulko, in an interview with Izvestia on May 9, told how he deceived the military enlistment office at the age of 17 to get to the front, and recalled a 100-kilometer trek through mountainous and wooded areas under fire. In 1943, the summons came. The head of the personnel department said that Lyulko had a reservation and an order not to let him go, but the veteran remained silent. That's how he got into the 301st Regiment.