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There were horrific occasions. It was in the winter of 1943, I guess. There was a lot of snow. We were ordered to relocate to another village near Oriol [500 km from Moscow] in Russia. So we were on the move again. There was a snowstorm and it was hard to walk. It was easier to hold on to something, a half belt of a fellow comrade or a horse's tail, which was even better. So we were walking at night feeling sleepy. There was no road, only snow around. We reached the village. We knocked on one door: there was no space left there. We came to another house and it was the same scenario there. We found a house where two soldiers were preparing for the night. They put something down to sleep on the floor. Our commissar asked them to which unit they belonged. They replied and he ordered them to get out of the house. The guys began to beg him, 'Oy, mister, it's cold, where can we go?' They were probably village boys since they called him 'mister'. They had probably just been recruited, but the commissar kept yelling telling at them to get out. 'You don't want to get out of here?' And then there were two gunshots and the commissar ordered us to remove two corpses. We took them out and dropped them in a snowdrift. That was it. Terrible!
Of course, the commissar was drunk as usual. He always had two flasks of vodka and his adjutant had two as well. Who would have dared to reprimand him? He would have replied with a bullet. These boys were probably put in the lists of the 'missing'. I saw this with my own eyes and know that this wasn't a single incident. A human life had no value at the front. They fired without warning for the most insignificant disobediences. And they were able to do it with complete impunity: the war would justify it, if one survived, of course. So many wasted lives. But one gets used to everything, including death. When we walked in a village and one of us was killed by a sniper the rest of us went on as if nothing had happened. If it weren't for such an adaptability of the human psyche, people would go mad in great numbers. Or, another example: it happened that there was an order to capture a site. A battalion goes into action and nobody returns. They send another and then another... Terrible battles. And then it turns out, it wasn't necessary to capture this site, but so many lives have been wasted...
Of course, the commissar was drunk as usual. He always had two flasks of vodka and his adjutant had two as well. Who would have dared to reprimand him? He would have replied with a bullet. These boys were probably put in the lists of the 'missing'. I saw this with my own eyes and know that this wasn't a single incident. A human life had no value at the front. They fired without warning for the most insignificant disobediences. And they were able to do it with complete impunity: the war would justify it, if one survived, of course. So many wasted lives. But one gets used to everything, including death. When we walked in a village and one of us was killed by a sniper the rest of us went on as if nothing had happened. If it weren't for such an adaptability of the human psyche, people would go mad in great numbers. Or, another example: it happened that there was an order to capture a site. A battalion goes into action and nobody returns. They send another and then another... Terrible battles. And then it turns out, it wasn't necessary to capture this site, but so many lives have been wasted...
Location
Ukraine
Interview
yakov voloshyn