The War as it is: "The Nazis poured petrol on my great-grandmother and burned her alive..."

The editorial office of Novye Izvestia received a letter from the regular reader of our newspaper Nadezhda Efimovna Petrovskaya, she wrote it specially for the Victory Day:

"For the descendants from the children of War

Dear editors, good afternoon!

I am your regular reader, Petrovskaya Nadezhda Efimovna. I live in Moscow.

Thank you for your work and interesting articles.

The 75th anniversary of the Great Victory is drawing near. For three quarters of a century, we have been living in peace.

But over the years, there are fewer witnesses and participants in those formidable front years ...

The media once sounded the idea that people who survived the war years and hardships could share their memories of those days. For edification, reminder, and warning to posterity ...

So I decided to share with you memories of my military childhood.

Perhaps someone might be interested.

It seemed so many years had passed, and everything experienced still keeps the heart.

And it seems that it was all recently. I am writing about this as a warning and a cry from the soul to future and current generations.

And I wish you to live always in peace and harmony with each other and your neighbors.

And so that neither you, nor your children and grandchildren have had the chance to experience and experience what I and my generation had to go through ...

With peace and respect to all of you! ”

Read this documentary and incredible evidence of that terrible time, this peculiar illustration for the famous song "Enemies burned their own hut ...":

“Almost 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, but my memory still preserves the events of my military childhood. Sometimes a steaming ashes suddenly appear in front of my eyes - everything that remains of our house, completely burned by the Nazis. I clearly remember how I collected colored fragments of broken dishes there to decorate the house I built of sand and clay on the ruins of our former home. And then in my childhood dreams, I imagined that we would live in a large, beautiful house, where everything will not be toy, but real: large windows, furniture, dishes. The sun will always shine brightly through the windows, and we children will play together with real beautiful toys and hearty lunch at a real table.

Next to the ruins left from our former home, there was another ashes: the burnt house of my own uncle, father's brother. And two gardens with very large, as it seemed to me then, trees. There grew apple trees, cherries, pears, whose trunks were riddled with bullets, and many branches were broken, hanging down lifelessly. It was the summer of the victorious 1945, then I was about 4 years old.

At that time, we lived in a dugout, dug near our burnt house. In the dugout there was only one small window, moreover near the ground itself, and bright sun rays very rarely looked into our dwelling, in which it was almost always dark and gloomy.

When I grew a little, my mother told me about the terrible events that occurred in March 1943. The village in which we lived was located next to the large road connecting the regional centers. Fascist troops were already retreating to the west under the onslaught of the Red Army. On the day when this terrible tragedy erupted, the partisan detachment attacked the retreating Nazis, and those, in a rage, shot everyone who came in their way and burned everything around. My mother, grandmother (my mother’s mother) and my great-grandmother lived in our house. There were four of us children: me (then I was 2 years old), a brother of 7 years old, my four-year-old sister and the youngest sister, who was then only a few months old. When the adults saw the misfortune that threatens our whole family, they decided to take refuge in the cellar, which was in the garden near our house. Feathers and pillows were thrown to the bottom of this cellar and we children were let down there. The oldest of those in the house is my great-grandmother, i.e. mother's grandmother flatly refused to hide in the cellar, saying that she would not hide from anyone in her native land. But the Nazis did not spare her either. My mother told me that from the gap in the shelter she saw how this old and weak, but at the same time decisive and courageous woman, was forced out onto the street, doused with gasoline and burned alive. Then they set fire to the house itself. Everything around us was blazing with fire, and the roof of our small cellar, which got terrible smoking heads, caught fire.

After the Nazis left the village, my mother and grandmother tried to get out of the smoke-filled cellar and save the children, but to no avail: the wooden staircase leading upstairs burned down. Then, in desperation, they made several attempts to leave the cellar, climbing onto their backs and passing the children around. But, since the cellar was deep, and caustic smoke already filled the entire space, the forces quickly dried up, and mother and grandmother, losing consciousness, fell to the bottom of the cellar. But the Lord was merciful to our family: by a lucky chance, one of the soldiers who entered the village of Red Army detachments looked into the cellar, and this saved our lives. We, already almost unconscious, were dragged from half-burnt pillows and feather-beds to freedom. It was not possible to save only the youngest of the children: she suffocated from the smoke. And I got a scar from the coals falling on us from those terrible events on my right leg. The same marks on the body remained in the mother and other children. We were all in serious condition, and we were taken to my mother’s elder sister, my aunt, who lived in the neighboring village of Medysovka. Thanks to her care, we survived. Unfortunately, besides us, few survived in this fiery-bloody drama. So, the Nazis shot the whole family of my own uncle, who lived in the house next door. Only one boy of seven years old managed to escape: he managed to jump out through the window and hide in the garden behind the trees. And from the whole family of my other front-line uncle, who was at the front at that time, only a one-year-old baby survived, whose mother managed to hide him in a haystack. The fascists ruthlessly shot her and the other three children. And after the Nazis left the village, the villagers who saw from the shelter how they hid the baby in the hay were able to save him from the already smoking stack and save his life. Unfortunately, his life was short-lived: at the age of seven he fell ill with measles and soon died.

After this bloody massacre, the remaining villagers, literally in parts, collected the remains of their deceased relatives to bring them to earth. Grief came to every family: more than 100 people were killed in the village, they were buried in a common grave. Everything was in ruins and ruins, there were almost no whole houses ...

But although the war ended and people began to actively restore life, the bloody trail of those events dragged on for a long time, taking and taking away new souls. And here's the thing. There was a forest on the outskirts of our village, in which after the war for a very long time there were wrecked cars, shell splinters, large concrete structures with embrasures. And, worst of all, the whole forest was literally strewn with unexploded ordnance, grenades and handfuls of spent cartridges and whole cartridges. And our rural boys, finding these terrible echoes of the past war, collected them, made bonfires and threw these grenades, cartridges and shells into the fire. And when it all exploded, many of the children died or remained permanently disabled. I still remember how, after such explosions, my mother, screaming and tearing, fled into the forest and went out there, sobbing, with their dead or wounded children. This trouble lasted several years. And in the village there were already not only disabled people wounded at the front, soldiers and officers, but also very young boys left without arms and legs after the explosions of these terrible finds. It is forever etched into my memory ...

I was born at the very beginning of this terrible war - on August 30, 1941 in the village of Karaina, Khmelnytsky (then Kamenetz-Podolsky) region of Ukraine. My family and I lived there until 1952. And after relocation, they moved to the Irkutsk region. After the terrible years of war and devastation, these harsh Siberian lands seemed fabulously beautiful: my friends and I walked on the outskirts of the forest, admiring the beautiful local nature. Slender and tall pines, like giant yellow candles, seemed to rest against the very sky. And the sky itself was visible from behind the crowns of trees only with clear blue islets. A carpet of needles gently spread under my feet. On the glades flooded with bright sunshine, the fragrant forest strawberries and wild strawberries blushed in bulk. Bunches of red and black currants hung over clusters of murmuring streams in the forest. A bright orange carpet of flowers adorned forest lawns and clearings. All this charm and beauty of the surrounding nature filled my soul with joy, helping me to heal and free myself from the memories of the past war that tormented my children's heart. But much of what has been experienced and seen in the terrible war years is still forever with me ...

Just as the war destroyed our families and homes, it left its blood and fire mark on our children's hearts and souls. I always have tears in my eyes when I hear the first lines of “Get up, the country is huge, get up to the mortal battle!”. And when I watch films about war or programs about military operations taking place in different parts of the globe, I mentally imagine myself there, among the whistling bullets or explosions of shells and among burning houses, as if returning to my military childhood ...

It’s always bitter to me why people don’t think that any war cripples souls, and especially children’s! And these children grow up with mutilated fates. I want to shout to the whole world: “People! Do not shoot! Dont kill! Have pity on the children! ”

Sincerely, Petrovskaya Nadezhda Efimovna..."