![]() This year marks 73rd anniversary of the victory of the allies over Nazi Germany. Soviet soldiers celebrating victory (picture from Ministry of Defense of Russia) Genetic Memory “There are still veterans - very few of them left - but when they parade on the 9th of May… I look at them… and inside it’s just… Thank you! Thank you for saving us from what could have happened.” “You know, Victory Day in Volgograd is very beautiful,” he continued. I was sitting in the back seat of his car completely awestruck. I have sinned a lot in my life, but I think this one deed will be counted as a good one.” But this good deed was done accidentally. I did a good thing by finding those boys and helping identify and rebury them. Turned out, they had gotten married just before the war started, on the 19th of June 1941. There was a wife of one of the soldiers, she was an old lady by that time. We reported it to authorities and the bodies were reburied on Mamaev Kurgan. “All of the soldiers had documents on them. If before this point of our conversation I was trying to memorize a few of his lines to write down later, at the mention of a dugout I frantically started searching for recorder on my phone. They knew it was like being trapped on a submarine, that nobody will ever find them, save them.” The soldiers were essentially buried alive. During the Battle of Stalingrad it was bombed and covered by a thick layer of ground. It was built in September-October of 1942. “Once we came across a dugout shelter with six skeletons inside. They were digging out anything of historical value to sell to history buffs and even to the descendants of the deceased in the battle, on occasion. When I was seventeen, my friends and I were diggers,” my Uber ride was promising to be an interesting one. I blanked for a moment and then it dawned on me. ![]() “Did you know that even today you can find the remnants of the battlefield there? If you dig a little, you can discover shell casings, medals, documents. My parents, myself and our friends in front of Motherland Calls monument in Mamaev Kurgan. The statue is taller than both Statue of Liberty in New York and Christ the Redeemer in Rio-de-Janeiro. “Motherland Calls is my brightest memory of that trip,” which is unsurprising given that the memorial depicts a fierce woman with a raised sword in her hand, representing Motherland calling for her sons to defend the land. “I’ve been to your city once at the age of ten,” I recalled the road trip with parents to see Mamaev Kurgan, a height overlooking the city of Volgograd. ![]() Once the Germans have been thrown back from Stalingrad, once they’ve lost that battle, the war was never the same again.” ![]() Laurence Rees in his article “What Was the Turning Point of World War II?” quotes a British historian Max Hastings: With almost two million people killed, wounded, and captured on both sides, it is considered the single largest and deadliest battle in the history of warfare. The Battle of Stalingrad was, both figuratively and literally, the turning point in the course of Second World War. You know Volgograd, you might not know that you know it, but you do. “From Volgograd, moved to the Urals one and a half years ago.” An Uber Ride to Remember “Well, if it seems that bad for you, Ural people, imagine how I, a southerner, feel!” “What in the world is this weather!” I complained to the driver. Not completely unexpected, but it’s definitely an “oh, common!” moment.Īfter half an hour outside, a one-inch layer of wet heavy snow was on my head and shoulders, getting inside my shawl and unpleasantly tickling the bare skin of my neck. Even for hardcore Russia snow in April is a little too much. With a little over a month left till summer, I walked around the city center of Ekaterinburg under a snowfall like I haven’t seen in years. ![]()
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