Tag #154664 - Interview #103914 (Rita Vilkobrisskaya Biography)

At that time something terrible happened. After finishing the aviation school in Magdagachi town near Chita in the Far East a group of young pilots and Ilia were sent to Kamchatka Peninsula in the Pacific Ocean in the east of Russia, 12500 km from Moscow. My father was at the front at that time. Ilia came back in June 1943. He must have had a premonition since he was very reluctant to go where he was assigned. He asked grandmother to ask our father to take him from Kamchatka when he returned home My grandmother wrote my father to the front, but mail was slow and my father probably didn’t receive this letter and couldn’t help. He was even ready to go to the front instead of going to Kamchatka. Ilia was in the town of Elizovo near Petropavlovsk-in-Kamchatka. In November 1943 he died in a crash during a training flight. His plane got into spin and Ilia failed to catapult and perished. We received a letter from his military unit and later they sent us a picture of the monument on his grave: a pedestal with a star. My mother and grandmother couldn’t stop crying: they didn’t know how to tell Ilia’s father about his death. They decided not to write him to the front. My father heard about his son’s death when he came to us in Voroshylov in 1945 after the victory. He returned home in joyful excitement with all orders on his jacket, but when he heard about his son’s death he had a heart attack – the first one in his life. It took him a while to recover from this tragedy. Many years afterward I wrote letters to Elizovo requesting them to find my brother’s grave, but it was never found.