Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya’s Memorial

Below are images of Zoya’s hero of the SU Diploma, and her grave, with memorial statue. The statue is particularly striking, and shows her, bare-breasted, head back, as she is in the photo of her dead body…

A month later Zoya’s body was brought to Moscow and buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. A monument has been placed on her grave, and on its black marble are carved the words of Nikolai Ostrovsky, the words which Zoya once wrote as a motto, as a behest in her notebook, and which she justified by her short life and by her death: “Man’s dearest possession is life, and it is given to him to live but once…So he must live that, dying, he can say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world—the fight for the Liberation of Mankind.”

From The Story of Zoya and Shura written by her Mother, L. Kosmodemyanskaya. This website has a full transcript of the rare book telling her life story.

Christmas in the Third Reich

This is the cover to the pamphlet. A mother holds the booklet while her four children look on. The father is presumably at the front. Page 2 introduces the pamphlet: “Dear German mother! Christmas has always been particularly a festival for children. War and destruction may rage in the world, and everyone, man or woman, in Germany may have to arm themselves with hardness and will in order to continue the battle until victory — yet our children should delight in this most German of all holidays as much as possible. We are fighting this war for our children, for them we are bearing the burdens and dangers, but their eyes should remain bright during the Christmas season, and they should laugh with joy in anticipation and Christmas pleasure…. In most families, the father is in the field, and often they have been forced to leave their homes because of the war. Death’s hard hand may even have torn holes in the family. Still, the German mother will hold her hand protectively over childhood joy and childhood thoughts in this Christmas season.”

One day before Christmas. Two German soldiers stand by a Christmas tree covering the grave of a comrade. The text: “In war or in peace, you may never forget the quiet thankfulness and obligation owed to those whose sacrifices enabled you to celebrate Christmas. Therefore, a candle should burn in every home for those most loyal who stand eternal watch on the wide fronts of this war.”

 

How We Celebrate Christmas by Wilhelm Beilstein

Lonely watch
Ice-cold night!
The frost creaks
The storm rages
The peace I extol
I see in them.
The bright flame blazes!
Murder, hatred, death
They fill the earth
With grim threatenings.
Never will there be peace, they say,
Swearing an oath with bloody hands.
What care I about cold and pain!
In me burns an oath
Blazing as a flame
With sword and heart and hand.
Come what may Germany,
I am ready!

The Ladoga Ice Road (the Road of Life)

During the Siege of Leningrad,  the ice road across lake Ladoga was used to supply the city and evacuate citizens/scientists/armaments etc. (from September 9, 1941, to January 18, 1943, when a narrow land corridor to the city was established. The total lifting of the siege occurred at January 27, 1944)

It was known as the Road of Life, Doroga zhizni: Дорога жизни, The Stavka ordered the building of the road even before Lake Ladoga froze, as it became clear that they were not able to lift the German blockade of the city. It was designated as a military vehicular road: voenno-avtomobil’naia doroga/BAD 101, and stretched between Kobona on the eastern shore, across Shlissel’burg Bay to Vaganova on the western shore. The German capture of Tikhvin on November 8th 1941 forced the Soviets to construct a much longer road, BAD 102, 17.5-20 miles long.

The road was built in extremely dificult conditios, under constant enemy fire; artillery and air bombardment. The builders also had to work around the changing conditions on the Lake itself, including cracks and fissures which often appeared in the ice, frequent storms and periodic thaws. The first cargo of supplies reached the besieged Leningrad on November 23rd.

Between the 18th and 28th November, engineers constructed a second route, 16.8 miles long from Kokkorevo via Kloch’ia Island to Kobona, and further routes to the north as the ice thickened (the winter of 1941/2 was unprecendentedly cold, with temperatures regularly reaching -40). By the end of December the ice was 3.2 feet deep, and covered in almost a foot of snow, and was able to sustain the weight of military vehicles up to the size of a KV Tank. By the end of all the road construction, they extended a total of 1106 miles, including road guides, communication points, medical and rescue points, feeding stations and combat seurity posts along the routes.

The intial success of the road in the 1941/2 winter was hampered by disorganisation and a temporary thaw in November before the onset of the very cold winter, but improved when party leaders Zhdanov and Kuznetsov took over operations. Daily shipments rose to 800 tons by December 23rd. This meant that the bread ration of Leningraders could be increased to 100 grams for workers/engineers and 75 grams for dependants/children (remmbering that 75 grams is one slice of bread). Still, the food shortages in the city were catastrophic, and the ice road increased it’s supplies to up to 3 convoys a day. By the end of January 1943, food supplies were able to reach targets, but by this time most of the total 1.2 million casualities of the siege had died, mainly from starvation. But the drivers across the lake tried to achieve the target of “two convoys per driver per day”, and successfully acheived by 261 drivers in january 1942, rising to 627 in March.

The Road of Life was also used to evacuate the sick, women, children and the elderly from the city, (11,296 in January; 117,434 in February; 221,947 in March and 163,392 in April) as well as munitions and industrial equipment from Leningrad’s factories.

The thaw started towards the end of March, and all movement across the ice was halted on April 12th, when transport by boat and barge was used.

Thanks to David Glantz’s “The Siege of Leningrad” for much of this information.

To be continued…

Soviet Literature of the GPW

Click the pictures for a larger view

Let the Living Remember: Ed. L. Lazarev

  

 

The Story of Zoya and Shura: Lyubov Kosmodemyanskaya

  

 

 

Partisan Propaganda

Glory to the partisans, who destroy the rear of the Fascists

Partisans, be ruthless!

Anna Kuzmina

SHE DEFENDED HER MOTHERLAND

By Olga Troshina

Six decades have passed since the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. That war, which lasted four long years – from June 1941 to May 1945 – was the bloodiest in the history of mankind. In those harsh times those who rose to defend their Motherland included many women, who demonstrated unprecedented courage fighting at the frontlines and stood out against the ordeals life had in store for them.

“In the early days of the war everyone, and residents of Moscow too, were so patriotic,” says a war veteran Anna Kuzmina. “They couldn’t wait to get to the fronts to defend their Motherland.” A well-known Soviet wartime poetess Yulia Drunina wrote about herself: “I stepped from my childhood… to leave for a medical platoon.” Anna Kuzmina’s case was a similar one. She left for the front in July 1941, when she was just sixteen years old. She went straight into the hell of the war, having covered the path from Moscow to Koenigsberg as a medical instructor.

A few years before the war broke out Anna Kuzmina did a training course to be a nurse – she knew that this profession would soon become a must for her. “That was in 1938, and the situation was a critical one,” Anna Kuzmina recalls. “Everyone felt that a war with Hitler was imminent. There were thirty-six of us, girls, all from the same school, who signed up for a nurse training course and finished it eighteen months later.”

And the nursing skills did come in handy. The war against Nazi Germany began for the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. On that tragic day Anna came home from her friend’s place and found her mum in tears. “Anything wrong?” she asked. “Yes”, her mum replied. “The war has started.” Anna’s first reaction was as clear as day. She’ll fight the enemy at the frontlines. She could think of nothing else. In the local registration and enlistment office, where she came together with other girls, Anna was reassured that she would be sent to the front. She only had to wait a little, she was told. So, she waited impatiently, avidly listening to every single news bulletin from the fronts. And the news was disconcerting at first, to say the least. Her heart ached as she listened to it…….

Read the rest of her amazing story here: ROAD TO VICTORY [THE VOICE OF RUSSIA]

__________________

The Execution of Women by the Nazis

It is estimated that more than 4,000 women of various ages were hanged by Nazi forces between 1939 and 1945. Many more were shot or guillotined and many were tortured before minimal or non-existent trials. They could be sentenced to death by People’s Courts and executed within prisons, by the commandants of concentration camps or by military commanders in the field and summarily executed, usually in public. Some of these “field” executions were documented and photographed. A lot of the photographs were private snaps taken by individual soldiers and discovered after they had been captured or killed

A gallows was used when the Nazis wanted to make a particular example of the prisoner and these were usually crude and simple structures that did not have a trapdoor or drop. They typically consisted of just a post with a short beam projecting from the top cross braced to the upright. Trees or balconies were also used as was any other structure that was available, e.g. the roof beams of a barn.

Prisoners were never hooded and rarely blindfolded. Their hands were normally tied behind their backs with cord but their legs usually left free. They were given little or no drop, partially to prolong the pleasure of the soldiers and because their cruel and slow deaths would act as a stronger deterrent to the local people who were often made to witness the event. Typically a thin rope was used, fashioned into a simple slip knot. It was not unusual for prisoners to kick and struggle after suspension and to lose control of their bladders and bowels. The bodies could be left hanging for several days as a grim reminder to others. In cold weather, they were sometimes left hanging for a week while in summer they would be taken down sooner, perhaps two to three hours after the hanging.

Some of these women were:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Masha Bruskina

Masha Bruskina was a Russian teenage female partisan. She was a 17 year old Jewish high school graduate and was the first teenage girl to be publicly hanged by the Nazis in Belorussia (Byelarus), since the German invasion of Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. Her execution and that of the two men hanged with her took place on the 26th of October 1941 in the city of Minsk. In the photos of her, you will see that she has blond hair, but her natural colour was dark. She dyed her hair when she started to work for the underground. Witnesses to her  hanging, testified that Masha struggled hard and lost control of her bladder and bowels. After hanging for 3 days, she and the men were taken down and only when her body was traditionally washed before her burial by local people and members of her family, did her dark hair show up. She worked as a nurse in a military hospital and was a member of an underground cell which aided Soviet officers hospitalised there to escape and join the partisans. The members of this cell were informed on and quickly rounded up. Masha and two of her male comrades, Volodya Sherbateivich and Krill Trous, were sentenced to death. They were led through the streets with Masha wearing a large placard proclaiming that they were partisans and hanged one at a time, Masha first, by the 707 Infanteriedivision, who meticulously filmed the proceedings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maria Kislyak

Maria Kislyak was born in March 1925, in the village of Lednoe in the Kharkov region of the Ukraine. The village had been occupied by the Germans during 1943. Maria and her school friend, Fedor Rudenko, who were both Komsomol members, hatched a plan to murder a German officer as an act of revenge for the cruelty inflicted by the Nazis on the local people. The plan was for 18 year old Maria, who was very pretty, to make friends with a German Lieutenant. She suggested to this man that they went for a walk in the countryside to which he naturally agreed. Outside the village, Fedor was waiting for them and came up behind the soldier and hit him over the head with an iron crowbar. Maria was arrested the next day and violently beaten during her interrogations but maintained her innocence throughout. As they could not prove anything, they finally let her go.

Several months later, Maria and her friends murdered another officer in the same way. This time the Germans arrested nearly 100 inhabitants as hostages and declared that they would execute them all if the murderers didn’t come forward. The following day Maria and her friends gave themselves up to the Gestapo and confessed to the murder. Maria claimed that she was the leader of the group. On June the 18th, 1943, Maria, Fedor Rudenko and their comrade Vasiliy Bugrimenko (both 19) were publicly hanged on the branch of an ash tree.

Three nooses dangled from the branch each with a box under it. The prisoners were made to step up onto the boxes, the executioner noosed them and then boxes were kicked out from under their feet leaving them to slowly strangle to death.

The Soviet “Home Front”

Work on the home front seemed routine, nothing out of the ordinary. No blood, no deaths. But daily heroism became part of everyday life. Peaceful life was a thing of the past. Special courage was required to preserve marks of peacetime in the trials and tribulations of war. In the autumn of 1941, when the Battle of Moscow was underway, wheat threshing continued several kilometers from the frontline. The freezing and starving residents of Leningrad, a city that had been cut off from the rest of the country for 900 days, went to work. The publishing houses of Leningrad, though in the absence of any heating, continued to issue the national newspapers “Pravda”, “Izvestia” and “Komsomolskaya Pravda”. Despite the bombardments radio broadcasts never stopped in the besieged city. The city that had come to a standstill continued to listen to music played by Radio Orchestra, the only one that had stayed on. Some musicians were starving to death, others continued to play Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. University students all over the country continued to study. Just as in the time of peace people defended their graduation papers, shot films, wrote music. And children went to summer camps on holidays.

But the war was rushing into the lives of people at an increasingly faster pace. In the capital Moscow factories were urgently reorienting to defense products. The “Rot Front” sweets-making factory began to produce concentrates and shells and to repair anti-aircraft guns. The trolley park’s compound served to produce grenades. Fizzy soft drinks factories organized the production of petrol bombs. A factory, which had used to make hair and tie pins, began to produce anti-tank grenades. A toy manufacturing plant in Odessa mastered the production of anti-tank mines. Tins bearing labels “Caviar” and “Halva”, as if coming from the remote past, served cases for the first mines produced.

Able-bodied men were leaving for the front. Factories were standing deserted. The number of workers reduced by half in the years of war. Hence, the most popular slogan among those working on the home front was “To work for yourself and for a comrade who left for the front”. A Moscow turner – Fedor Bukin – launched an initiative to overfulfil the planned output by two times. People of this kind were known as twohundreders, later on threehundreders and fourhundreders, and there were those called thousanders.

What people did for years before the war had to be done dozens of times faster in wartime. Instead of two years as planned, it took just two months to build a bridge armour transporter in Magnitogorsk. One month after the Battle of Stalingrad was over, the city razed to the ground was visited by George Davis, a US presidential envoy. As he looked at the ruins Mr.Davis doubted that the city would ever revive. A month later an American delegation was walked around a steel smelting shop in Stalingrad.

Those who had left to fight on the fronts were replaced by housewives, teenagers, men unfit for service and invalids. Women mastered men’s skills in the heavy industry: welders, wood-cutters, turners, smiths, engine drivers. Young women, who came to work as electric welders at the Uralmash engineering works, were greeted with a bitter joke by men: “You’d better keep boiling potatoes and stay away from welding aircraft hulls”. Any boy dreams of planes and cars. So higher grade students were honoured the privilege of assembling them. B.Sergeev, who came to work at the “Compressor” plant in Moscow as a 15-year teenager, recalls: “We were permitted to work 4 hours a day. But as I came in, I saw boys my age, all working on an equal basis with grown-ups. The shift lasted 12 hours. There was no heating in the shops. The lorries for carrying “Katyusha” multiple rocket launchers arrived covered in ice and snow, so to warm them up we ran to an iron barrel with burning coke… Shake fingers – and back to work. Sometimes we did not go home at all and worked until we could no longer hold the spanner for fatigue. So we just dropped asleep right on “Katyusha” covers that lay in the corner and slept for 3 or 4 hours”. They said what was the most difficult was to wake up a man who had worked 24 hours without a rest. In the nighttime the electricity was often off. After work women went to do night shifts at hospitals. “At night – near the wounded, at dawn – back to the factory”,- they remember. Men were sent to unload trains, stock up fuel.

In the countryside no men were left and the hard farm labour became the responsibility of women. One of the women recalls the harvesting time: “There were no men in the collective farm. We worked from dawn to 2 a.m. next morning. We never paid attention to the weather – rain or no rain we had to take in the harvest. 14-year-old girls worked as tractor drivers”. Farm lands reduced dramatically because of the occupation of western regions and every land plot and every ear of wheat were valued as gold. It happened that seeds had to be sorted by hand before sowing. After the crops were harvested, school students came to the fields and picked up the remaining ears from morning to late evening.

All crops collected on collective farm fields were given in to the state. The farm produce was then distributed to the people by means of ration cards. The biggest rations went to workers of the defense, fuel and chemical industries and also to builders and transport workers, who got 800-1000 grams of bread per day. In the besieged Leningrad workers received only 250 grams and blue and white colour workers, children and dependents – 125 grams. Though only one half of the Leningrad bread was wheat, it was considered a delicacy. Rural residents relied on private vegetable gardens. Since they could not grow wheat there, their second bread was potato. Meat was in short supply. And the villagers had to forget for several years about sugar, confectioneries and sausage. It was good luck if people living in the country managed to get a pair of shoes for two and half a meter of fabric a year. But those hardships were nothing as compared to the loss of their beloved ones. Grief was everywhere. But everybody who survived those days remember the overall spirit of mutual assistance, when strangers became closer than relatives or friends.

 

From The Voice of Russia

Lidia Ruslanova

‘Heavenly angel is singing’, – the nuns would say of little Lida Ruslanova, performing the solo part in the church choir. The ‘angel’ had no special musical education.

Born into a poor peasant family in a small village near Saratov town on the banks of Volga River, she went into an orphanage after the death of her mother. There, yet a little girl, she started singing on stage. Her voice impressed the local precentor: “Oh you’ve got a real contralto!”, and soon she became the soloist of the church choir. People came from Saratov and the neighborhood to listen to the splendid voice of the little orphan singer.  “Songs were my nannies. They taught me everything a person can be taught. They brought me up, educated me, helped me to better understand the world”, said Ruslanova. “What would I be without songs? When, a poor orphan, I earned my first bread by singing, my grandmother scolded me. “God Almighty, what a shame to sing and dance for bread!”, she said. But I wasn’t ashamed …” “After the orphanage, when I worked at a furniture factory, everyone would also help me for my songs. At about 17 I was already an experienced artist and was afraid of nothing: neither stage nor audience.” – recalled the singer.

She was invited to study at the Saratov Conservatoire, yet academic training was not of great attraction for the young star. Due to this fact she managed to preserve her vocal in its rare original beauty. One could only marvel at her unusual artistic intuition – so subtle and profound was her feeling of the essence of the Russian folk song and so skillfully could she convey all its infinity and fascination.

When the civil war started (the early 1920s), Ruslanova was already performing on stage as a professional variety artist in Rostov-on-the-Don. Later she moved to Moscow to gain universal acclaim among the Russian audience. Most amazing was her timbre, impossible to mix with any other’s voice. Her peculiar vocal style revived the forgotten traditions of Russian female singers that once performed at folk festivities. Undoubtedly she contributed much to preservation of Russian folk songs, a lot of which are alive in the people’s memory as performed by Ruslanova: ‘Valenki’, ‘Mezh vysokih khlebov’, etc.

For 15 years starting from 1933 she worked as an artist of the State association of musical, variety and circus enterprises. It was a hard time for variety artists when they were criticized without grounds, in most cases for quasi disaccord with communist ideology. One of the critics once wrote about Ruslanova: “Pinafore dresses and bast shoes have long gone out of fashion, along with ‘feeling of expansive liberty and heart yearning’. Ruslanova has to think hard of her position on the modern stage”. It is interesting to note that thirty years later the same critic sweetly expressed his admiration with the same image of Ruslanova.

From the very first days of the Great Patriotic War Lidia Ruslanova performed for troops at the frontline. She was a symbol of the Motherland, a symbol of home and hope for the defenders. At one of the front-line concerts she was asked to sing louder. The loud speakers were put so that the Germans could hear her, too. When she started singing, there came silence on both sides of the front. During the two hours while Ruslanova was singing our troops changed their positions and passed to the offensive.

Together with the troops, Ruslanova reached Berlin. On the steps of the Reichstag, she sang Russian folk songs to the winners.

1948 brought about a new wave of Stalinist reprisals. Ruslanova’s husband (commander of a cavalry corps General Vladimir Kruchkov whom she had met at the front) and then she herself were arrested. As it turned out later, the reason was her husband’s friendship with Admiral Zhukov, a war hero who was persecuted by the envious and fearful Stalin and his accomplices. Ruslanova was pressed to sign a forged accusation of treason against her husband, but refused and spent five years in prison on the allegations of anti-Soviet talk and anecdotes. In 1953 after the death of Joseph Stalin she was released and returned to the stage.

In 1942 she was granted with the title of the Honoured artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Republic. Ruslanova went on singing till her death in 1973.

Thanks to Russia IC

Soviet Art during the GPW

 

Red Army Serviceman, Save!
V. Koretsky

 

Motherland Calls! I. Toidze

 

The Sons of Russia Are Pushing Forward!
A. Kokorekin

The Icon of Our Lady of Kazan

This is a remarkable story from the Great Patriotic War!

The Icon of Our Lady of Kazan

In 1941, during World War II against Nazi Germany, the Virgin appeared to Metropolitan Ilya of the Antiochian Church, who prayed wholeheartedly for Russia. She instructed him to tell the Russians that they should carry the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan in a religious procession around the besieged city of Leningrad (now St Petersburg). Then, the Virgin said, they should serve a prayer service before the icon in Moscow. The Virgin said that the icon should stay with the Russian troops in Stalingrad, and later move with them to the Russian border. Leningrad did not surrender. Miraculously, Moscow was also saved.

During the Battle of Stalingrad, the icon was with the Russian army on the right bank of the Volga, and the Nazi troops could not cross the river. The Battle of Stalingrad began with a prayer service before the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan. Only when it was finished did the troops receive the order to attack. The Icon of the Virgin of Kazan was at the most important sectors of the front, and in the places where the troops were preparing for an offensive. It was like in the old times, when in response to earnest prayers, the Virgin instilled fear in enemies and drove them away. Even atheists told stories of the Virgin’s help to the Russian troops.

During the assault on Königsberg in 1944, the Soviet troops were in a critical situation. Suddenly, the soldiers saw their commander arrive with priests and an icon. Many made jokes, “Just wait, they will help us”! The commander silenced the jokers. He ordered everybody to line up and to take off their uniform caps. When the priests finished the prayer service, they moved to the frontline carrying the icon. The amazed soldiers watched them going straight forward, under intense Nazi fire. Suddenly, the Nazis stopped shooting. Then, the Russian troops received orders to attack on the ground and from the sea. Nazis died in the thousands. Nazi prisoners told the Russians that they saw the Virgin in the sky before the Russians began to attack, the whole of the Nazi army saw Her, and their weapons would not fire.

From: The Icon of Our Lady of Kazan « Voices from Russia

True, the ideas of socialism brought many people together in the war against Nazi Germany. But in case of Russia the Nazis’ obsession with the plan to wipe out this country as a nation turned the world war into a patriotic one. So it was natural that in a bid to overpower the enemy the nation turned to their imperial tradition and to Russian history. The Orthodoxy was the Russian man’s main spiritual basis. Stalin just couldn’t fail to realize this, so it is small wonder that he sought assistance from the Church during that dangerous period of time in this country’s history.

20,000 churches were opened during the war years. In spring 1942 Soviet Government allowed Easter celebrations for the first time in many years. On September 4th 1943 Stalin invited the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Kremlin to discuss the need for reviving religious life in the USSR and the speedy election of a Patriarch.

From: ROAD TO VICTORY [THE VOICE OF RUSSIA]

Soviet War Poetry

It’s not for us to calmly rot in graves.
We’ll lie stretched out in our half-open coffins
And hear before the dawn the cannon coughing,
The regimental bugle calling gruffly
From highways which we trod, our land to save.

We know by heart all rules and regulations.
What’s death to us? A thing that we despise.
Lined up in graves, our dead detachment lies
Awaiting orders. And let generations
To come, when talking of the dead, be wise;
Dead men have ears and eyes for truth and lies.

Nicolai Mayorov

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg
In February 1942 Nikolai Mayorov, political instructor of a machine-gun company, died in action in Smolensk Region.

ODESSA, CITY MINE!

We rose at dawn,
When night crept close to day.
The wind that blew was fresh and light
and fitful,

A little briny and a little bitter.
As on an open palm the sea before us lay,
With fishing boats its surface strewn,
the advent

Of morning marking….
Under foam-washed boulders
(Quite large they were and black and sleek
and shiny),

Beneath dark sea-weed, butter-soft and slimy,
The bullheads moved their bulky tops, and twisted
Their narrow tails.
The ship to the horizon
Was firmly glued.
The sparkle of the rising
Sun hurt the eyes.
The contours of the misty
Shores were a trifle vague and undefined.
We`ll not surrender you, Odessa, city mine!
Let death walk every street;
With hoarse and choking sound,
Let homes in flame go up and topple to the ground.

Let acrid smoke eat at our eyes, let bread
Give off the smell of powder and of lead -
Odessa, city mine,
My friend and comrade true,
Odessa, city mine,
We`ll not surrender you!

Vsevolod Bagritsky

1941 Translated by Irina Zheleznova
Vsevolod Bagritsky was fallen by an enemy bullet while jotting down some facts passed on to him by one of the men. This was on February 26, 1942, in the village of Dubovik, the Leningrad Region.

The Stalingrad Madonna

This is something I read about in Antony Beeovor’s book Stalingrad, which really moved me…

The Stalingrad Madonna was drawn by a Wehrmacht Senior Medical Officer, Dr. Kurt Reuber, on the back of a map, to celebrate Christmas outside Stalingrad, 1942. In his last letter home, Reuber wrote:

“Christmas week has come and gone. It has been a week of watching and waiting, of deliberate resignation and confidence. The days were filled with the noise of battle and there were many wounded to be attended to. I wondered for a long while what I should paint, and in the end I decided on a Madonna, or mother and child. I have turned my hole in the frozen mud into a studio. The space is too small for me to be able to see the picture properly, so I climb on to a stool and look down at it from above, to get the perspective right. Everything is repeatedly knocked over, and my pencils vanish into the mud. There is nothing to lean my big picture of the madonna against, except a sloping, home-made table past which I can just manage to squeeze. There are no proper materials and I have used a Russian map for paper. But I wish I could tell you how absorbed I have been painting my madonna, and how much it means to me.”

“The picture looks like this: the mother’s head and the child’s lean toward each other, and a large cloak enfolds them both. It is intended to symbolize ‘security’ and ‘mother love.’ I remembered the words of St.John: light, life, and love. What more can I add? I wanted to suggest these three things in the homely and common vision of a mother with her child and the security that they represent. When we opened the ‘Christmas Door’, as we used to do on other Christmases (only now it was the wooden door of our dug-out), my comrades stood spellbound and reverent, silent before the picture that hung on the clay wall. A lamp was burning on a board stuck into the clay beneath the picture. Our celebrations in the shelter were dominated by this picture, and it was with full hearts that my comrades read the words: light, life and love.”

“I spent Christmas evening with the other doctors and the sick. The Commanding Officer had presented the letter with his last bottle of Champagne. We raised our mugs and drank to those we love, but before we had had a chance to taste the wine we had to throw ourselves flat on the ground as a stick of bombs fell outside. I seized my doctor’s bag and ran to the scene of the explosions, where there were dead and wounded. My shelter with its lovely Christmas decorations became a dressing station. One of the dying men had been hit in the head and there was nothing more I could do for him. He had been with us at our celebration, and had only that moment left to go on duty, but before he went he had said: ‘I’ll finish the carol with first. O du Frohliche!” A few moments later he was dead. There was plenty of hard and sad work to do in our Christmas shelter. It is late now, but it is Christmas night still. And so much sadness everywhere.”

And the picture…

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: Partisan, Hero of the Soviet Union

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who was a Russian female partisan. She joined the partisan movement at the age of 17, and carried out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. She was captured in 1941 in German territory, and tortured in the village of Petrischevo. She gave away no information, and was executed by hanging. She was left hanging there as a warning to the Russians, her body mutilated by German soldiers.

Her last words were:
Here comrades! Why do you look so gloomy? Fight on, fight on!”
…and to her captors, she levelled a warning:
“There are two hundred million of us! You can’t hang us all!”

Months later, her body was taken and buried, and even later it was exhumed and buried in Moscow. On February 16, 1942, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was posthumously awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union.” She was the first woman to receive this distinction.

The Motherland, bent over her daughter’s ashes,
Sings this tender maternal song
About Zoya, the girl, who has become a legend,
Who died and was born for eternal life.

The native land inspired her with courage,
The great nation educated her with pride,
And the girl has become fine as a white birch,
Like the Russian heart, she was frank and noble.

 Dimitri Shostakovich
Song for Zoya (1944)

 

 

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ROAD TO VICTORY [THE VOICE OF RUSSIA]
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

Welcome!

Welcome to Comrade Zoya’s Blog!

This is a personal collection of thoughts, pictures, photos and poems about the Great Patriotic War, between Russia and Germany, 1941-45, named by Hitler as “Operation Barbarossa” [Red Beard], but which I will refer to as the GPW.

I will also be blogging about related subjects, such as the history of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the Cold War.

This is a personal interest of mine from a historical point of view. It is not an endorsement of atrocities on either side. Any offensive, denialist or neo-Nazi comments will be immediately deleted, and the poster banned without any discussion.

Enjoy!

Comrade Zoya