Victory Day - We Will Remember Them

In case you are confused, if there had been anything done to mark it, the UK would have marked VE day yesterday (maybe there was but it got no coverage I saw), but by the time the surrender was signed on 8th May 1945 it was so late that in the Soviet Union it was already the 9th, hence the difference in the date. To this day it is a national holiday in Russia, and parades are held in most towns and cities to remember the dead and honour the survivors. Old people (and those younger who have fought in more recent wars too) come out with their medals, and people stop them in the street and say thank you for what they did for their country and their people. My blip 2 years ago has some stats on what the Great Patriotic War did to the Soviet Union if you are interested.

Today a friend posted a link on Facebook to a website with memories from and about female veterans, who had a much wider variety of roles in the Soviet army than in the UK, and faced a whole variety of difficulties both on the battlefield and when they returned. I can't just send you there as it's in Russian, so here are some of the stories I selected and translated. But if you have time, please do click through the link and look at some of the old photos, which are wonderful. The stories come from a book by Svetlana Aleskievich, who interviewed female veterans. You may find some of them upsetting, so be warned. I have deliberately moved the most likely to upset people to the end, so you can choose not to read it. Our world is full of conflict, and if we forget the ones which have gone before we are even more likely to mess up again in future.

"One night an entire company was involved in reconnaisance in the area covered by our regiment. By sunrise they had moved on, but from no man's land we could hear groaning. An injured soldier had been left behind. "Don't go out there, they will kill you". The soldiers wouldn't let me go out - "you see, it's already getting light". I didn't listen to them and crawled out. I found the injured man, and dragged him back for 8 hours, having tied a belt to his arm. I brought him back alive. My commanding officer found out and was furious, sentencing me to 5 days for going AWOL. But the deputy commander of the regiment reacted differently. "This deserves a medal!" At 19 I had a medal "For Gallantry". At 19 my hair went grey. At 19 in my last battle I was shot in both lungs, the second bullet just missing my spine and paralysing my legs. They thought I was dead. At 19... I have a granddaughter that age now, I look at her and I can't believe it - she's just a child."

"And when he appeared a third time, and this was just for a moment, he appeared, then hid, I decided to shoot. I decided, and suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: it's a human being, he may be an enemy, but he's a person, and somehow my finger started to shake. Some sort of fear. It still comes back to me sometimes in my dreams, even now. It was hard to shoot a living person. I could see him in the gun sights, see him clearly, it was like he was close by, and inside me something is rebelling, wouldn't let me do it, I couldn't make my mind up. But I brought myself in hand and pulled the trigger. We couldn't do it right away. It's not a woman's thing this, to hate and to kill, not something we are comfortable with. I had to convince myself, talk myself into it."

"These were brave, incredible women. Statistics exist: losses among the front line medics are second after the rifle battalions, the infantry. What does it mean, for example, to take an injured soldier from the battle field? I'll tell you. We were on the attack and were cut down with machine guns. An entire battalion was on the ground. They weren't all dead, many were injured. The Germans were beating us back, not pausing in their firing. Then unexpectedly for everyone from the trenches emerged first one girl, then another,and a third... They started to bandage and drag away the wounded, even the Germans paused for a time, dumb with shock. By about 9pm all the girls were seriously injured, and each had saved at most two or three injured soldiers. Medals were not awarded generously, at the beginning of the war they didn't throw medals around. You had to drag an injured soldier back with his weapon - the first question at the medical station was 'where is the weapon?' Early in the war there weren't enough weapons. Rifle, automatic weapon, machine gun, these all had to be brought back too. In 1941 order number 281 was issued about the awards which could be made for saving the lives of soldiers. For 15 seriously wounded carried from the battlefield with their weapons the 'Military Service Medal'. For 25, the Order of the Red Star, for saving 40, the Order of the Red Banner, for saving 80, the Order of Lenin. And I [a male soldier who watched them do it] have described what it took to rescue a single soldier, and all while under enemy fire."

"Our mother didn't have sons, and when Stalingrad was under siege we all went to the front together. The whole family, mother and 5 daughters, our father was already fighting by then."

"I remember being demobilised. Before I went to my aunt's I went into the shop. Before the war I had really loved sweets. I said to the shopkeeper: "Give me some sweets" The girl looked at me like at a mad woman. I didn't understand, I had no idea about ration cards, about the blockade [Leningrad was blockaded for 872 days and conditions for the people in the city were horrific]. All the people in the queue turned and looked at me, and I've got my rifle, which is bigger than I am. When they were given out I remember looking at it and thinking 'when will I grow into this rifle!' And suddenly they all started to ask the shop assistant to give me sweets, and telling her to take tokens from them. And they gave me the sweets."

"And there we got our tank. We were both senior mechanic-drivers, and in a tank there should only be one mechanic driver. Headquarters decided to appoint me commander of tank IS-122 and my husband - senior mechanic-driver. And so we made it the whole way to Germany in that tank. We were both wounded, we have medals. There were plenty of females in the medium tanks, but I was the only one in the heavy tanks."

"I went all the way to Berlin with the army. I returned to my village with two Orders of Glory and medals. I stayed there three days and on the fourth my mother got me out of bed and said to me: 'Daughter, I've got your things together, go away, go away. You have two younger sisters here growing up. Who will marry them? Everyone knows that you were at the front for 4 years, with men...' Don't touch my soul. Write, like everyone else, about my medals."

One of our nurses was captured. A day later we beat them back and took the village, everywhere around there were dead horses, motor bikes, armoured transporters. We found her. Her eyes had been cut out, her breasts cut off, they had impaled her. It was frosty, and she was whiter than white, and her hair was grey. She was 19 years old. In her rucksack we found letters from home and a green rubber bird. A child's toy."