Part three “Thank you, Grandfather, for the Victory”!

9 May, 9 in the morning. Putin is delivering a speech; I seem to be listening attentively… they did not capitulate, they held out, they won… and in my head only one thought: they flooded the country with blood.

Mama recalls: at the Bolshevo school the boys of the tenth graduating class of 1941 went to the front… All perished. Grandfather used to tell: it was very important to be strong, well physically prepared, to be able to “protect yourself in field conditions, and that meant — dig in quickly,” that is create around yourself a “fortification” of small mounds of earth with a small sapper’s spade. Whoever could not do this became a direct target for the enemy.

I cannot fail to write on this Day about my father. Aleksandr Mikhailovich “was lucky.” He was called into the Red Army in 1938. His education was incomplete secondary, which meant 8 or 9 classes of secondary school. In the Army he received the specialty of optics technician, and so he served in the artillery, was head of the optical section of the repair workshop of the 62nd Army of the First Far Eastern Front. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class. Fate was kind to him; he finished the war in the Far East and continued to serve after the war.

But his two brothers — no. In the first days of the war they found themselves in the thick of events near Smolensk. One brother went missing, and the other died in a bombing on the railway while loading equipment.

To my shame, I thought for the first time now about Papa’s mother, my grandmother Polina Vasilyevna Vukolova. How much she had to live through!!! The thing is that I never knew, and never asked Father about, my grandfather. Only now did I ask Mama about him. She said there are suspicions that he fled, disappeared without a trace in 1937, sensing the danger of arrest.

My grandmother, Papa’s mother Polina Vasilyevna, lost her husband before the war, two sons at the beginning of the war, remained under occupation, was chair of the collective farm and was sentenced by the fascists to execution by hanging, remained alive thanks to partisans who arrived in time. Only a few words have I written now about the kin thanks to whom I live, and it turns out that behind these “few” words is the tragic life of more than one generation of people close to me! Blessed memory to All!