October 26th

If you click on the photo it enlarges, I believe. This particular photo, I feel, is quite impressive and haunting. It's a statue from the massive war memorial in Volgograd, described earlier.

One of our teachers, Raisa Andreevna, is an older lady who speaks perfect French and Russian (it’s always priceless when she tries to define a word we don’t know in French, as if that will help. Every once in awhile, it’s a cognate, but it’s usually just ridiculous). One day we randomly got on the subject of her family and it turns out she’s got quite a story. She was born in the late 1940’s when her mother was 50 and her father was 54. She was, to quote her, the “whoops” baby. Her older brother had been killed in the war on the drive to Berlin, but it’s her father’s story which is so incredible. He was serving in the Red Army when the Germans came pouring over the border in summer 1941. He was almost immediately captured and sent as a prisoner of war to Buchenwald, the camp better known as a concentration camp for victims of the Holocaust. There he worked as a slave laborer in the fields around the town of Buchenwald. He would tell stories of days when it would rain ash from the nearby crematoriums. Finally, in 1945 the camp was liberated by the horrified Americans and the skeletal Russian POWs who had miraculously survived four years of captivity were sent immediately to American medical facilities behind the front lines. This would prove most unfortunate for Raisa’s dad and his comrades. Comrade Stalin, terrified that those Soviet soldiers who’d a) been cowards enough to surrender in the first place, and b) had seen the decadence beyond the Iron Curtain, decided that those who’d interacted with the Western Powers needed to be “rehabilitated.” So, sure enough, Raisa’s dad, two months out of a German slave labor camp was on his way, on foot, up the Great Siberian Road to another slave labor camp. There he toiled for three years, unable even to let his family know that he was alive. He was eventually released and returned home to Voronezh. It’s these stories, experience nearly first hand by so many of the older generation here that reminds me of why people still feel so passionately about the “Great Patriotic War.” Anyways, while I’m on crazy war stories, the Ambassador’s father’s is another incredible one. This man, an American, was an junior LT in the 82^nd Airborne. He jumped into Normandy and in the ensuing battle, was wounded and captured by the Germans. He was taken to a camp in western Poland and used as slave labor. Miraculously, this man made his escape, but went east to the fast approaching Russians, hoping to be sent back to the front lines with his unit in France. He was indeed sent back to the front lines, only as a Private in the Red Army. The Russians he ran into refused to believe his story and, rather than shoot him as a spy, used him as a rifleman in one of their depleted units. So, not speaking a word of Russian (not uncommon, as the units of the Red Army were filled with the hundreds of minorities from the fringes of the USSR) he fought as a rifleman for four months, taking part in the Battle of Berlin among others. Upon the completion of the war, he was immediately shipped to Moscow and was subjected to intense “questioning” as to his story and background. After several months, he was finally returned to a surprised America who’d thought he was dead for quite some time. Naturally, the current Ambassador to Russia has quite a bit of cache right off the bat simply because his father took part in the drive for Berlin.