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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
