A touching video tribute to all those young people, who did not return from the battlefield so that we would live today.

Backup at Rumble.

From the first military draft in 1941, 97% of the generation of 18-year-olds died…

📽 Video is by the project “To Live”, taken from their YouTube channel. Yekaterina Vasilyeva, People’s Artist of the RSFSR, plays the role of the Teacher. The author of the idea and the director of photography is Oleg Golub.

The song heard in the film is called “Cranes”, written by Rasul Gamzatov, translation by David M. Bennett.

The translation initially published at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”

“Not perished in the ground, but turned into cranes”, 2015. Painting by Eugene Shtyrov

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Cranes

Poem by Rasul Gamzatov
Translation: David M. Bennett

It seems to me sometimes that soldiers fallen,
Whom bloody battlefields have rendered dead,
Were buried not in soil to be forgotten,
But turned into white cranes in flight instead.

From that time, since their fate became a coffin
They’ve soared, and issued us a strident cry.
Is that not why we sadly, and so often,
Lift up our silent gaze when cranes go by?

Today, as evening yields to nightfall’s border,
I see the cranes in flight, their wings unfurled,
As over fields they fly in perfect order
Just as they marched, when people in the world.

They fly — their line extending to forever —
And call out names of someone to the cold.
Is that not why the song of cranes has never
Been far from Avar speech since times of old?

The weary wedge of birds on expedition —
It flies and flies through fog, towards the dawn,
And in the ranks I notice a position —
An empty space for me, for when I’m gone!

Some day in that formation I’ll be flying;
I’ll sail into the skies on my rebirth,
And from the heav’ns with crane trump I’ll be crying
To those of you I left upon the earth.

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