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Political officers [36] were constantly inculcating others that those who surrendered to the enemy were betrayers and traitors. They were deserters. I always got perturbed about that. I knew that orderlies didn't always manage to take all wounded from the battlefield. Is a person guilty if he was wounded and captured by the Germans? And what if the person lost consciousness? What if the entire squad was besieged? There were different circumstances. I think those people are worth to sympathize with. I could speak my mind only with my bosom friends. I understood that I should be reserved in general. When we left the boundaries of the USSR, our division liberated camps, where both military and civilian captives were held. SMERSH took the military captives and sent them immediately to the Gulag. They didn't look into the circumstances of captivity. They merely thought if the soldier had been captured, it meant he was a traitor. Once I was the witness of a terrible scene - the execution of military captives. The execution was ostentatious, for everybody to see what would happen to those who came to Germans. The political officer ordered, 'Fire!', there was a shot and the captives fell dead. I saw very many deaths at war, but those deaths seemed to me uselessly ruthless.
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Interview
Eva Ryzhevskaya