Posted on 05/01/2005 1:40:58 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Just out of university Lev Mishchenko was sent to the Soviet front where he was captured and clung to life at a series of brutal camps including Buchenwald, little knowing 10 years hard labor in a gulag awaited him on his return home.
``As the war began the authorities announced the formation of volunteer militias. We organised in the universities and factories and around 100,000 of us Moscovites signed up,'' said Mr Mishchenko, who was 24 when the Soviet Union entered World War Two in June 1941. ``We thought we'd be trained and then led by career soldiers but they sent us straight to the front unaccompanied by professionals,'' said the frail but spirited Mr Mishchenko recently at his apartment on the outskirts of Moscow.
He explained how he was given the rank of sub-lieutenant. As one of the few officers in the battalion he had his own weapon, a pistol with seven rounds of ammunition. The volunteers were poorly armed and had no uniform for some time, he said.
When the battles started in the west on Oct 4 that year the war, or the fighting part of it, was swiftly over for young Lev as the Nazis launched a devastating attack on the rear of the Soviet front.
``When Viazma-Yelnia was surrounded more than a million of the Red Army were either captured or killed,'' remembered the veteran.
So began Mr Mishchenko's real battle, that of survival as a prisoner of war at various Nazi camps. He recalled Smolensk where ``hunger, typhoid and sadistic guards'' took their toll. In Leipzig people perished of cold _ and many other horrors at other wartime camps. In 1944 he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was tattooed with ``number 64109'' and where the least act of defiance meant death.
His university sweetheart Svetlana waited 13 years for his return home, and looks on tenderly as Mr Mischenko pulls yellowing photos from old envelopes and places them on his desk to help him remember the tales of all those years ago.
He speaks mainly of those who helped him survive. The ``anti-Nazi'' German officer who befriended him and who he met again in the 1960's, or the guard who was ``full of benevolence'' at the gulag where he was held after the war.
Tellingly, he remembers the Russian prisons as being particularly dreadful.
``Stalin refused to sign up to the Geneva Convention. `There are no prisoners, so there are no treaties', he said. So there were no inspections and no-one to speak up for us,'' he explained. In the spring of 1945 the Allies were approaching and the Nazis evacuated his camp.
``Those who could not keep up were shot,'' Mr Mischenko remembers.
He then managed to escape and was taken in at an American garrison, from where they sent him and others like him back to the Soviet Union.
``The Americans put flags on the transport trucks that read `Happy return'.''
``But there was no welcome committee awaiting us on the other side,'' he said.
The homecoming ex-prisoners then began a long march east, after six weeks of which Mr Mischenko was arrested by a counter-espionage faction of the Soviet military. He suffered two months of ``swearing, humiliation and sometimes brutality''. The suspects, he explained, were made to sit still in permanently lit cells. During the day they were not allowed to walk or lie down and the interrogations almost always took place at night.
No-one cared for Mr Mischenko's protestations that he could not have been a spy as he had spent the whole war in prison or that he could provide names and addresses to back up his story.
He was sentenced after a 20 minute trial to 10 years in a gulag for ``anti-Soviet propaganda'' as at Leipzig, because of his fluent German, he had worked as a translator. Mr Mischenko was shipped to Russia's north to the Pechora Gulag in a goods truck, where he was incarcerated until June 1954, and finally cleared of all charges two years later.
Germany honours Soviet war dead
German Defence Minister Peter Struck honoured Soviet war dead on Saturday at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the last great battle before the fall of Berlin. Up to 60,000 Germans and Soviets died in the fierce Battle of Halbe in a pine forest, just days before Adolf Hitler committed suicide.
Mr Struck and Russian ambassador Vladimir Kotenev led a solemn ceremony at Baruth Soviet War Cemetery, where 1,200 of the dead lie. The Red Army and the western Allies liberated Germany from the Nazis, Mr Struck said, adding that Russians and Germans had changed from being against one another to partners.
Mr Kotenev praised Germany for confronting its past. This had been the means to reconciliation.
When we forget history, we are doomed to repeat it.
That had to be a bitch to fight for your country, spend years in a concentration camp and then be sent to another concentration camp after you returned home. But Stalin did this to thousands of Russian soldiers because they had made contact with the west and might be dangerous to the communist when they returned home.
Let's note that Stalin considered anyone who failed to fight to the death to be a traitor--including members of his own family, several of whom he let die at the hands of the Germans. There's no one more self-centered than a Communist, hm?
Speaking of which, note my tagline (and I'm serious, folks)...
naw
/sarcasm
Too bad Mr. Kotenev, Mr. Putin and the former Soviet Union don't confront their past.
It's Bush's fault.
Great Post!!!
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