Here we present three stories that convey a fraction of the suffering and sacrifice that the Soviet people had to go through during the Great Patriotic War.

No on is forgotten!
Nothing is forgotten!

Published first at our telegram channel “Beorn And The shieldmaiden”.

How I stopped collecting stamps

— A passage from the book by Mihail Ancharov “The Improbability Theory. Golden Rain”

Inmate orchestra at Yankovsky KZ, who were forced to play during hanging of other inmates.

And now I’ll tell you how I stopped collecting stamps. It happened after our troops reached Lvov. The machine gunners were told to find out where the Yankovsky camp was located. It was here somewhere, but no one knew where. Then a man with a dancing face who knew of it was found. For some reason, it is impossible to tell of this in detail, one can only tell the details. One can tell about a narrow-gauge railway outside the city, along which a train approached every two hours, and in just one day they brought fourteen thousand people. One can tell how we all walked through a soft field covered with gray sand, machine gunners and the commission, and ahead there were some birch groves, not even groves, but groups of birch trees planted in a checkerboard pattern. And a man with a dancing face suddenly ran across the gray sand to these groves and grabbed the trunk of a birch tree and began to shake it. We wanted to, but we couldn’t get him away from the birch tree, he just mumbled and swayed the trunk, and then the birch tree collapsed, turning out the roots, and we saw a bunker filled with naked people, dead and without hair.

One can tell how we walked up a soft hillock strewn with gray sand, and there was a sweet smell, and we noticed that it was not sand, but some large particles. And it turned out to be burnt and ground human bones. After all, there are fourteen thousand people every day. It smelled like burnt human fat. But the man with the dancing face was alive because he was turning a special machine with sieves that sifted through the ground bones, and in the sieves there were small gold bars melted from dental crowns that were not noticed during the search, and gold was collected — on average three kilograms per day, that is, ninety kilograms of gold per month, that is, a ton of gold per year, and if all this were still working now, imagine how much gold could be mined this way.

Otherwise, one can also tell about the warehouse, where plump paper bags with “camp number so-and-so” stamps were stacked on the shelves, and when my friend poked the blunt barrel of the machine gun into a neat bag, two braids fell out – black and gold. They were prepared for mattresses on submarines. One can also tell what kind of expressions there were on the faces the machine gunners had and what kind of expressions were on commissions’, generals’, scientists’, and employees’ faces. One can tell how the beard of Metropolitan of Krutitsky and Galitsky got wet. And it got wet from crying. The others did not cry and looked at each other with dry eyes.

There were also four mountains — a mountain of men’s shoes, a mountain of women’s shoes, a mountain of children’s shoes, and a mountain of envelopes, photographs, and passports in all European languages. I tore off a German stamp with a swastika from one envelope, because even the great philatelist did not have one, since he did not know “German with a swastika”, but only knew “German about Lorelei with golden braids”. I wrapped the stamp in paper because it issued a sweet smell. And when I came to Moscow to attend an infantry school a month later and presented this stamp to my brother (he was a schoolboy and inherited my album), I had to tear out a sheet from the album: despite the fact that I changed the wrapper three times while I was carrying this stamp, a greasy stain formed in the album, which gave off a smell.

In memory of Vasily Bugrov

Siege of Leningrad, 872 days of hell. A day like an endless nightmare. Nights filled with hunger and the sounds of air raid sirens – the sound that eats into your ears forever and make your blood run cold in your veins.
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