SHE DEFENDED HER MOTHERLAND |
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By Olga Troshina Six decades have passed since the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. That war, which lasted four long years – from June 1941 to May 1945 – was the bloodiest in the history of mankind.
“In the early days of the war everyone, and residents of Moscow too, were so patriotic,” says a war veteran Anna Kuzmina. “They couldn’t wait to get to the fronts to defend their Motherland.” A well-known Soviet wartime poetess Yulia Drunina wrote about herself: “I stepped from my childhood… to leave for a medical platoon.” Anna Kuzmina’s case was a similar one. She left for the front in July 1941, when she was just sixteen years old. She went straight into the hell of the war, having covered the path from Moscow to Koenigsberg as a medical instructor. A few years before the war broke out Anna Kuzmina did a training course to be a nurse – she knew that this profession would soon become a must for her. “That was in 1938, and the situation was a critical one,” Anna Kuzmina
recalls. “Everyone felt that a war with Hitler was imminent. There were
thirty-six of us, girls, all from the same school, who signed up for a
nurse training course and finished it eighteen months later.”
Anna’s first reaction was as clear as day. She’ll fight the enemy at the frontlines. She could think of nothing else. In the local registration and enlistment office, where she came together with other girls, Anna was reassured that she would be sent to the front. She only had to wait a little, she was told. So, she waited impatiently, avidly listening to every single news bulletin from the fronts. And the news was disconcerting at first, to say the least. Her heart ached as she listened to it. Anna Kuzmina recalls the summer of 1941: “There were many sleepless nights. The Nazi planes soon broke through into Moscow’s air space and began bombing the city. We did shifts on the roofs, threw off fire-bombs. Such was the Moscow of the summer of 1941 I’ve remembered.” In July 1941 divisions of people’s militia began to be formed in Moscow. Anna Kuzmina joined one of them. She was enrolled as a medical instructor with an artillery regiment. Attacked by an outnumbering enemy force, the volunteer force was retreating at first. But even while retreating, they were doing their utmost to hold back the advancing Nazi troops and prevent the enemy from reaching Moscow. “The guys seized on every opportunity to hit the enemy. The Nazis were
moving along a highway, and we were retreating on its side. Whenever we
spotted a convenient place on the wood’s edge, they rolled up a gun and
struck at the enemy point-blank.”
After the liberation of Naro-Fominsk in late December of 1941 the division launched an offensive. “We headed in the direction of the city of Vyazma and liberated many villages and towns on the way,” Anna Kuzmina recalls. “We sustained heavy losses too. Our division was part of the 33rd army under General Mikhail Yefremov. He died a hero’s death right there, near Vyazma. He said, “I came here together with my soldiers, and I’ll either leave with them or die with them.” And it so happened that he was buried by the Nazis, buried with honors. They knew he had been an army commander, so, the Nazis wanted the burial to serve as a good illustration of how one must love and defend one’s homeland. “When we approached Vyazma, the city was surrounded. Our division had lost many staff killed, and we were waiting for reinforcements. The battles were horrendous. When we finally entered Vyazma, we discovered several German cemeteries there that occupied quite a large territory. So, either side got its share near Vyazma,” Anna Kuzmina said. For the capture of Vyazma the division, in which Anna Kuzmina served, was awarded the honorary title of a Guards’ division. In the summer of 1943 the division was engaged in fighting near the town of Khotynets in the Oryol Region. Anna Kuzmina recalls one such battle: “The artillery preparation lasted a whole three hours. Targets were set, and our artillery fired at them for three hours. The rumble was deafening to an extent that you could hear absolutely nothing. So, I was ordered to run from gun to gun and pass the commands from the observation post.” The supplies of artillery shells ran out very quickly, and Anna had to fetch them along with the men, in spite of the fact that they were too heavy for such a young girl. “I had no other choice,” she says, recalling that battle. “The guns had to go on firing, the artillery preparation wasn’t over yet.” That battle left her incapacitated in the medical unit for a whole week. The doctors feared she would never recover from the strain, which had really been beyond human endurance. But she was lucky to pull through. Fierce battles were accompanied by incessant bombings. “The Nazis were rampaging,” Anna Kuzmina recalls. “They were bombing our battery non-stop. One of the bombs hit the division’s headquarters killing sixteen people, including the staff commander, and leaving many wounded. The two of us, the officer in charge of transport and me, were ordered to take the wounded to hospital. On our way there we were caught in artillery fire. A shrapnel went right into the carburetor, setting it on fire. While my companion was struggling to put it out, I, an 18-year-old girl, was carrying the wounded out of the car in my arms. Some of the wounds needed redressing, but I had no dressing material with me. The fire was put out at last, and we took the wounded back into the car and traveled on. Soon the carburetor caught fire again, and that was it. But the wounded had to be delivered to hospital quickly. So I went out onto the highway and began to signal frantically for a lift. I was pleading, with tears in my eyes, to take the bleeding wounded. We eventually sent off all the wounded and stayed on the highway, by the broken car. We thought we’d better wait until morning, but at night we found ourselves under such heavy artillery fire that I still believe we survived by a sheer miracle. No sooner had we rolled into a roadside ditch than our car was smashed by a direct shell. For half the next day we went to the battery on foot. I remember arriving at the battalion feeling nothing but dumbness from exhaustion. I sat down on a small hill, which turned out to be… a fresh grave. One of our soldiers had been buried there the night before. He was alive when we last saw him. I cried so long over the grave, the pain was unbearable.” Then there were the fierce battles for the city of Karachev in the south-west of European Russia, where the division suffered huge losses once again. Nevertheless, the town was cleared of the enemy, and the division moved to the west, to Belorussia, and then continued fighting beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Anna Kuzmina fought her way through to Eastern Prussia with her division and took part in the capture of Koenigsberg. The war was over in the spring of 1945, and Anna returned to Moscow, to her home-town. “Moscow was overwhelmed with joy”, Anna Kuzmina says. “The war, which
had inflicted such irreparable damage, had finally come to an end. Victory
was everywhere, in people, their smiles. Soldiers and officers were honored
on Red Square, where people carried them in their arms. The city was decorated
with flags and the skies – with fireworks. Everything bore a solemn mark.”
When she left for the frontlines, Anna Kuzmina was hoping that she would
devote herself to medicine and enter a medical college after the war. But,
after witnessing so much blood and human suffering during the war, she
changed her mind.
“There were thirty-six of us, when we signed up for a nurse-training course. Only thirteen came back from the war. Some were killed, others were crippled. Now it looks like I’m the only surviving member of the group.” Years after the war Anna Kuzmina and a group of war veterans visited the site of the fierce fighting that raged in the Moscow region back in 1941. While recalling her wartime experiences, Anna remarked bitterly: “There were so many wounded here, I remember this as if it were yesterday!” A general standing nearby looked at her and said: “And I was among them…” It turned out that during the war Anna saved his life. Members of the unit she stayed with called her lovingly by a diminutive, Anechka. Many of them owe it to her that they survived, and this is something she may rightfully be proud of. But, Anna Kuzmina says sadly, there were some she couldn’t save. “It sometimes happened that a soldier died as I was dressing his wounds. I cried over each of them. And I remember there were shell-holes near our battery, and the wounded hid in them. I tried to reach out to each of them, crawled in the direction of moans and dressed the wounds. But the worst moment was to see the wounded die in my arms. This was unbearable, you’ll never reconcile yourself with it.” The horrors of war haunted Anna long after it ended. In the first postwar years she used to jump out of bed at night and scream with horror tormented by the dreams of wartime nightmare. It became easier year after year, but recollections of the war are still vivid in Anna’s memory. “It was hard to retreat, hard to be under siege,” she says. “Especially near Vyazma. We were undernourished, we went through every kind of suffering there. When on the offensive, we felt much better, of course, though life was not easy then. In my letters home, however, I never wrote of that. Instead, I tried to console my parents, writing that I was well and everything was OK”. After the war Anna Kuzmina’s life went on smoothly. She graduated from a chemical technology institute, had children, then grandchildren and has a great-granddaughter now. Apart from that, she was a part-time guide for a tourist agency in the Moscow region. Her route was called “The Road of Two Patriotic Wars” – the war of 1812, in which the Russian army defeated Napoleon, and the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, which she fought in from the start to the end. “I’m a lucky person,” Anna Kuzmina says about herself. She believes she was lucky because the survived the war and returned home when Victory came, and also because she was given the chance of defending her Motherland. Those were hard days, but the generation was heroic enough to go through them with honor.
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In those harsh
times those who rose to defend their Motherland included many women, who
demonstrated unprecedented courage fighting at the frontlines and stood
out against the ordeals life had in store for them.
