war without tears
Slender, almost weightless, with a thin, almost feminine voice, Vera Vladimirovna Leshenok drowned in a spacious armchair. She wears a formal jacket with even rows of awards. Yes what! Two orders of the “Red Star”, medals “For Military Merit”, “For the capture of Berlin”, a sacred award for the soldier – the medal “For Courage”.
- The jacket is heavy, I wear it once a year on May 9th. Today I put it on for you, my daughter asked, – said Vera Vladimirovna.
She evokes the war sparingly, through long pauses. It is clear that it is not easy for her.
– I cried at war the only time. She crawled to the wounded soldier, his kneecap was torn off by a mine. I just applied a tourniquet, I hear a hissing mine. I lay down on his chest, covered him with myself. Suddenly he, the poor thing, twitched under me, whispered, “Oh, again…” and fell silent. I look, and blood spurts out of his right side like a fountain. The fragment hit him right in the liver, three centimeters from me. I took his Red Army book out of my tunic pocket, read it, and seven children were registered in it. As I presented this “ladder”, which would not wait for the file, – and tears streamed from my eyes in hail. This soldier was from the Krasnoyarsk Territory, I remembered him for the rest of my life, ”says Vera Vladimirovna quietly.
The jacket is heavy, I wear it once a year on May 9th. Today I put it on for you, my daughter asked…
She was born on the last summer day of 1923 in the village of Ozerno, Tula region. She dreamed of becoming a doctor. On May 30, 1935, his father died of blood poisoning, and on the same day their hut burned down.
Vera Leshenok is one of 66,000 veterans living in Russia today. Photo: Reproduction by Vladimir Mezhov
– Mom with three children was left without a roof over her head. How we lived – it’s scary to remember, – sighs the interlocutor.
On November 7, 1941, their village was occupied by German troops. A month and a half, lived “under the Germans”, she will remember for the rest of her life.
One day, a village teenager cut an enemy telephone wire with a shovel. “As punishment” for this sabotage, the entire village of Ozerno was slaughtered.
– The old women who couldn’t walk, and the dragged ones. The cry was terrible, people said goodbye to life and each other, – at these words Vera Vladimirovna fell silent.
Everyone was rescued by the elderly grandfather, who spent four years in German captivity during World War I and spoke fairly good German. He miraculously persuaded the Nazis not to kill people for a boy’s deed. Execution has been replaced by expulsion. The whole village was driven out to live in an open field fifty kilometers from its native outskirts. Throughout the winter of 1942, Vera worked in the labor army: with a pickaxe and a shovel, she dug wide anti-tank ditches, often stopped by the clumsy German “tigers”. And in June of the same year, she volunteered for the front. On the contrary, the four of us left – classmates …
There are no girls in the war
Vera, who dreamed of medicine since childhood, was assigned to the rank of the 82nd infantry regiment of the 33rd Red Banner, Rifle Division of the Order of Suvorov. She still remembers the names of the doctors who taught her the basics of military field medicine: Tamara Mikhailovna Krylova and Mikhail Mitrofanovich Polkovnikov.
- In the military doctor’s bag, there are only haemostatic tourniquets and bandages. We had neither medicine nor painkillers then,” recalls Vera Vladimirovna.
The main task was to crawl to the wounded, stop the bleeding, bandage the wound and drag him to his positions on a cape.
In the Baltic States, she walked along a forest road with two scouts. He remembers them talking, joking. Suddenly, a terrible roar, a mine flew towards the guy who was walking beside her. Vera woke up in a ditch, how long she was there, she doesn’t remember. She stood up, towards her, swaying, was one of the scouts.
– “Where is Onezhko?” he asks me. “I don’t know”, I reply and my face feels dirty. I ran my hand, I see fragments of intestines on the palm.
This is all that remains of a cheerful guy named Onezhko, – the frontline soldier recalls.
I ask him, was there a place in this hell for love, for feelings? After all, youth stood in the yard of his life.
She waved her hand. “What love?! We forgot we were girls, we wore padded jackets all winter, we didn’t bathe in the bathhouse for months. The lice ate us. it looks like a daughter? .. “War…
“Gypsy” in the Reichstag
His regiment takes Berlin. The fights for him were especially fierce.
- But our soldiers could no longer be stopped, they crushed the Fritzes even more, – said Vera Leshenok. In May 1945, there was not a single field in Berlin that was not under fire.
Vera, along with her combatant friend, crawled from wounded to wounded under heavy fire. Medical assistance provided. He weighed forty-three kilograms and was carrying heavily injured people.
- We will sleep two hours in a dead sleep, and already happiness, – remarks Vera Vladimirovna.
Time has not erased Victory Day with a merciless eraser. She remembers him in great detail. Suddenly there was resounding silence. Then someone shouted, “Victory!” A few minutes passed and they started shooting into the sky with machine guns. They were shouting for joy, kissing each other. Out of nowhere an accordion appeared, played “Gypsy Girl”. That day, Vera danced a lot.
She remembers how on May 9, 1945, she stood in line at the Reichstag for two hours to leave an autograph on her prostrate wall. By the time it was her turn, the grim walls had already been covered in writing. Then a tall Red Army soldier picked it up. The girl climbed onto his shoulders and wrote with a piece of chalk: “Vera Dmitrieva is the village of Ozerno. (Dmitrieva is her maiden name.)
The 82nd Regiment remained in Berlin until the fall of 1945. Today, the life of a front-line instructor approaches a century, and the memory has not let go of another tragic incident from that terrible time . The first peaceful summer of 1945: post-victory Berlin, healing the wounds of war. Vera and her girlfriend were in a hurry for athletic competitions, which were organized by the command of the Soviet troops. A deserted street, in front of a German woman pushing a stroller with a baby. A motorcycle came out of the corner. Frightened Frau began to rush randomly with the stroller along the road, the motorcyclist turned sharply to the left and crashed into a tree at full speed.
- I remember, he was a handsome brunette. He was dying before our eyes, before he died he smiled and said, “We will live.” After these words, he stopped breathing, – Vera Vladimirovna said softly.
Then she learned that he was the fearless commander of a tank company. Which more than once kept his tank away from death. Been through the whole war. And such a “peaceful” death…
Defeated everything
Vera Vladimirovna arrived in the Amur city of Svobodny in 1951. She says there was a well-fed life here, and in her war-torn homeland of Tula, famine was raging. Here she graduated from accounting courses, got married. She gave birth to two children.
My mother has been an accountant all her life. She always counts perfectly in her mind, everyone is surprised at the rise in prices, ”says her daughter Lyudmila Anatolyevna.
A year and a half ago, the soldier of the great Victory broke his femoral neck. An insidious fracture, after which most elderly people no longer get up. Won here too.
- Operate, I will survive, – she told the surgeon of the city hospital. She underwent general anesthesia and a bloody operation. I got up.
Laughing, she remarks that it was only recently that she realized she was almost a hundred years old.
“I always thought of myself as young, I thought I was ninety,” Vera Leshenok waves.
Today, she has only one dream: to live until August 31 and bring together all her loved ones at the centenary celebration table. To the traditional question about the secrets of longevity, the frontline soldier answers:
- I’ve always been cold-blooded. I have always tried not to be upset by the problems in life. Everything must be endured with constancy, nothing will change our lamentations.
Character is often synonymous with destiny. Leaving, I kissed her thinly, with the blue “rivers” of the veins of one hand. Will live!
In the meantime
At the end of March 2023, only 66,000 frontline soldiers lived in Russia. About 5,000 people who took part in the battles of the Great Patriotic War are still alive in Belarus. Of the Heroes of the Soviet Union, only 100-year-old Boris Vasilievich Kravtsov, a former Minister of Justice of the USSR, survived. War participant Pavel Syutkin, born in 1922, lives in the city of Sochi, which in 2008 was awarded the title Hero of Russia. Pavel Pavlovich during the war years was twice presented with the title Hero of the Soviet Union. But due to errors in the award documents, the hero’s gold star found him 63 years after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Vasily Ivanovich Dobritsa, born in 1925, lives in Taganrog, the last of the full living holders of the Order of Glory.
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