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St. Petersburg Times
May 8, 2003
Smiles and Sorrow as Veterans Recall End of War
By Irina Titova
STAFF WRITER

Pavel Afonin remembers it as a day of triumph, while Tamara Semyonova remembers the salutes fired from the guns in what was then Leningrad. Yury Yavloko remembers it as the day on which he learned to whistle through his fingers, while Nikolai Shashkin recalls the tears of those who had lost so many loved ones over the preceding four years.

Today, as it was in the Soviet era after 1945, May 9 - Victory Day - is one of Russia's most hallowed and solemn holidays - a day of remembrance for as many as 30 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives and a day of celebration of the country's triumph over Germany in what Russians call "The Great Fatherland War," or Velikaya Otechestvennaya voina.

While state holidays in the Soviet era meant a day off work for many people, who would just go through the motions of marking more political occasions, Victory Day remained close to people's hearts. For those who were alive at the time of the armistice, that day 58 years ago remains vivid in their memories.

Pavel Afonin was a 22-year-old captain in the Red Army fighting in Berlin itself when he heard the news that the war with Germany had ended.

"It was a triumph!" Afonin, now an 83-year-old professor at the St. Petersburg University of Military Engineering, said. "It was indescribable joy for people who had survived so much sorrow and loss."

"Soldiers and officers took out their guns and fired endlessly up into the air. They cried and hugged," Afonin added.

Like Afonin, other veterans of the war, their families and others who survived to see the end spoke as if with one voice of the day when they got the news as one of the happiest of their lives.

"It was a great day!" said Natalya Vasilyeva, now 89. "At the time, I was working as a cook in an air-force mess hall just outside Riga, Latvia. I remember how our pilots ran toward us, shouting: 'Victory, girls! It's victory!' ... There was no end to our joy."

But Vasilyeva, like many who spoke of the day, said that her happiness was only proportional to all of the sorrows that she had faced during the war. By Victory Day, it had been almost exactly four years since she had last seen her husband, Sergei, who was serving in the military, and three years since she had lost her 1 1/2-year-old son.

Vasilyeva and her son had been visiting her parents, who lived near the town of Kaluga, not far from Moscow, when the German attack on the Soviet Union began in June 1941. Unable to get back home, the two stayed in the village, which was ultimately overrun by the German Army later that year.

"The Nazis burned down the village where we were living, and wanted to kill all of the residents," Vasilyeva said. "However, one of them appeared to take pity on all of the crying women and children and left them alive."

Only three buildings survived the flames, so the villagers were forced to cram themselves into them to survive. The cramped living conditions brought with them the danger of disease and, in early 1942, Vasiliyevska's son died when there were no medicines left in the village to treat his illness. It was then that she chose to join the Red Army as a cook.

"It was hard work," she said. "We followed the pilots from base to base, cooked, cleaned, chopped wood and carried about 40 buckets of water each day."

Vasilyeva did not see her husband until New Year's Eve in 1946, as he was still serving in Germany when the armistice with Germany was signed.

For Sergeant Nikolai Shashkin, the eve of Victory Day had been an important one. Already a decorated veteran - he had been made a Hero of the Soviet Union for bravery in action in October 1943 - and wounded in battle a number of times, Shashkin celebrated his 22nd birthday at a military school where he was training to become an officer.

"We heard the news on the night of May 9," Shashkin, now 80, said. "The military students all ran outside - they were all excited. Some of us cried, because there was not a family in the country that hadn't suffered from the war."

Shashkin earned his decoration in fighting in the city of Melitopol, now in Ukraine. Badly outnumbered, he was one of a group of 13 soldiers who were ordered to storm and hold a system of trenches that were occupied by about 50 German soldiers.

"Our attack was sudden and quick, so we were successful, and the Nazis fled," Shashkin said. "Once, they realized just how small our group was, however, they counterattacked."

By the end of the day, Shashkin and one other soldier from the group were the only ones alive.

"We fixed the guns of our comrades all along the trenches and were running from one gun to another in order to maintain the fire and hold the position until our main forces arrived," he said. "And they finally did."

Because of the nature of the war with Nazi Germany, many of the most terrible memories of those four years belong not to the men who fought as soldiers, but to those who were forced simply to survive as civilians in a time of great shortages of foods and medicines.

Svetlana Pronberg, now 75, said that her most vivid memory of the war was from her childhood in the blockade, when she was 13 years old.

Before the war, her family had been neighbors with two elderly women, neither of whom had ever married. Pronberg said that the two women had a dog on which they showered affection.

"At the peak of the hungriest blockade winter of 1941 to 1942, my sister and I were almost dying from hunger," Pronberg said. "Then the two ladies brought us their dog. They said they could not eat the dog themselves, but they gave it to us so that we would survive."

"That dog saved us," she said.

In 1943, Pronberg, her mother and her sister were evacuated to a village in the Kirovskaya Oblast, 800 kilometers east of Moscow, where her father, a victim of the repression before the war, was working in a labor camp.

"I was so emaciated that I looked like an old woman. Even the boy who sat next to me in my school refused to sit too close," she remembered. "It was the little tragedy of my childhood, because the boy was very handsome and I liked him."

"Later on, though, when my body got back in shape, he fell in love with me anyway," Pronberg added.

The same class where the boy finally fell for her was where she first heard the news of the German surrender.

"We all ran outside and just shouted 'Hurrah!' endlessly," Pronberg said. "We danced, hugged and cried."

For many of those who had not been evacuated from Leningrad, their health had not recovered. But Nadezhda Samsonenko, 80, who lived and worked in the city through the 900 days, said the reaction was much the same.

"I remember that, when I heard about the end of the war, I was sick with a severe fever and was supposed to stay in bed," Samsonenko said. "But the illness didn't matter to me at the time. I jumped up and down on my bed, perhaps just a little out of my head. Then my friend and I went downtown to the Neva River embankment to join the widespread joy."

She said crowds of excited people were walking along the Nevsky Prospect until the morning. People sang songs, danced and hugged.

"Everyone was so happy that the nightmare had ended," she adds.

During the blockade, Samsonenko worked at the Bolshevichka factory, where she sewed hats and short jackets, and knitted mittens and socks for Soviet soldiers.

"Then we, young girls, would bring these clothes as gifts to the front lines," Samsonenko said.

She also remembers much more heart rending duties. During the hardest days of the siege, Samsoneko, then 22, helped to search the city's apartments for children whose mothers had died of starvation, sickness or from the bombardment.

"We brought them to special orphanages, where they were taken care of," she said.

Tamara Semyonova, now 70, who was also in Leningrad for Victory Day, best remembers the guns.

"On that day, the city saw the likes of a salute that it has never witnessed since," Semyonova recalls. "There is nothing that can compare with that day for me. We were so happy!"

Yury Yalovko, now 68, still a boy during the Leningrad blockade, remembers May 9, 1945, for a different sound.

"We were standing near Liteiny Bridge and watching the salute," Yavloko said. "Everybody was jumping around and whistling through their fingers. Suddenly, I discovered that I could make the same noise."

Yalovko lost 16 relatives during the blockade.

"My worst memory is that of my 25-year-old aunt being killed by a tiny bomb fragment during the shelling," he said. "She was running home to take her two young children to a shelter."

After his aunt's death, his grandmother and mother took the two children in to live with his family.

"I remember how each of us five children, living together, had a little knife, which we would use to cut our daily 125 grams of bread into tiny pieces, to make the eating process last longer," Yalovko said.

Tragically, both of the children that his family had taken in - aged three and five years, respectively -died of dysentery in the blockade.

Afonin, the 25-year-old sergeant serving in Berlin when the armistice was signed, said that the German capital also had much to do to rebuild.

"I think that many [Berliners] were themselves tired of Hitler and his regime and just wanted to live in peace," he said.

Afonin remained in Berlin until August that year, and one his fondest memories is not linked with the victory but with a defeat.

Not long after Victory Day, Afonin, who was leading a reconnaissance unit, was approached by a group of German men who suggested organizing a soccer match with the Russian soldiers.

"That was a little embarrassing," Afonin laughs. "Imagine, we, many already like we were in our forties, lost by an 8-0 score to the Germans."

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