There are days when you remember clearly the hard moments in your own life and in the lives of those close to you. On 31 March my grandfather Sergei Sergeyevich Dorofeyev would have had his birthday — 119 years. I have already written my childhood and youth memories of him.

It is precisely today, as they say “on the topic of the day,” that I remembered what illness tormented him all his life. The illness was called emphysema of the lungs. He smoked all his life and drank. In Soviet times it was rare for anyone not to “drink.” My story now is not about that… but about the cough that appeared in him before the war of 1941.

Mama remembers that he coughed a great deal; it tormented him; I think there was no treatment at all. He was always occupied with physical labour and, thanks to his physical fitness, he came back alive from the war. So, about his cough. At the war, for four years…. he did not cough even once!!! A paradox?! Yes. He came back from the front and started coughing again until his death at 78.

There are also medical facts of that kind from wartime: people did not get pneumonia. I learned this from a doctor-lecturer who taught at the Kiev Institute of Culture. (In Soviet times all humanities universities were required to have a department of medicine and military training, and we students were taught medicine for two and a half years! They issued diplomas as “Civil Defence nurse” and put everyone on the military register at the enlistment office. And we were liable for military service until we had children.)

One more fact from military life — pediculosis. Now we know that it is a virus, or in plain language — lice. During the war everyone had lice, but… in Grandfather’s words, I remember that no matter how hard the situation was at the front, they still provided the soldiers with a bathhouse and clean linen, whereas the Germans (in his words) were “eaten alive by lice!”

And the last thing I want to write about those hard wartime days that humanity lived through. Quite recently, in a documentary film that my Norwegian husband was watching, and that I at some point also “joined” to watch, I was shocked by the facts that were revealed. It turns out that before an important battle German soldiers were given narcotics, which secret German laboratories were producing at the time. And the Soviets went into battle “For Stalin, for the Motherland,” “half of Europe, crawling on their bellies, they marched….”