question: “Do you feel hard done by?”
“It would be quite an underestimation to put it that way…”
“Well, Comrade Egorova Anna Alexandrovna, we will be reinstating you as a Party Member… You will have to come to the Party Board once again.”
“No, I won’t do that! There have already been two trials, a just one and an unjust one!” — and I told them about Shkiryatov’s ‘Star Chamber’.
“It’ll be a formality”, they said gently. “There will only four or five people. A verdict in your presence is required — and that will be it.”
“Alright then, I’ll be there.”
When I arrived and saw in reception the former head of the Political Department of the 197th Ground Attack Division Ivan Mironovich Dyachenko, by whose orders his deputy had taken away from me my Party membership card, I felt ill at ease. But I saw that for some reason Dyachenko’s hands and legs were trembling. I began to calm him down as best I could, and at that moment they called us to the Boardroom.
As they had told me, only five people were present from the Board, and two of us. The Chairman of the Board Shvernik asked Dyachenko to explain how Egorova had managed to preserve her Party membership card in the Hitlerite hell and then he had taken it away from me.
Ivan Mironovich stood up and began to say confusedly that a mission had been set up, that Egorova had led into action 15
Dyachenko began to talk about my sorties again, but at that point Shvernik stopped him loudly:
“Enough! You may go.”
Ivan Mironovich went out, and Shvernik, addressing the Board members, said that he had spoken to Marshal S. I. Roudenko in whose Army Egorova fought in the last stage of the war, and the latter had given me a good reference: “Egorova fought honourably!” And he went on:
“Comrade Egorova, we reinstate you in the Party. Your length of service is preserved. You will be paying your dues from the day the Noginskiy
After the meeting with my comrades-in-arms Captains Andrey Konyakhin and Leva Kabisher I began to receive letters from my regimental comrades. Our former commissar Dmitriy Polikarpovich Shvidkiy sent me a letter as well. He said he was living in Kharkov, worked at a tractor plant and was looking for the document in which he and former head of the Corps Political Department Colonel Tourpanov had recommended I be awarded the Golden Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. Then the commissar ‘reported’ that they had already written to many authorities and even to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. At the end of the letter Shvidkiy asked me if I had seen the movie ‘Clear Sky’, directed by G. Choukhray, and advised me to be sure to see it, for this movie was about my fate and that of people like me.
In those months I got many letters form my regiment comrades, and they all advised me to see ‘Clear Sky’. “What kind of movie is it?” I thought and at last went to see it. I remember watching it and weeping, and my sons, sitting next to me, were urging me in whispers so as not to disturb the other viewers: “Mummy, stop crying. It’s only a movie, those are actors…”
In those days the
And the letter Przymonowski had brought for me was from a Polish writer Igor Neverli. There was a photocopy from a West German magazine
Dear Friend!
I am hastening to forward you a document which must of interest to you. Colonel Janusz Przymonowski, when working on the literature for a monograph about the battle of Studzianki, read in a West German magazine
My best regards!
Igor Neverli
Warsaw, 5.04.1963
A former officer of Hitler’s army had written in the
Our Parachute division was relocated from sunny Italy to the pandemonium of the Eastern Front. We had a terrible experience under the hammer of Russian aviation that day. More than once I needed something at the dressing station, and there I witnessed the following:
They had brought a Russian pilot from the frontline in a medical cart. The guy looked badly maimed in his burned, torn flying suit. His face was covered with oil and blood. The soldiers who had transported him told me the pilot had bailed out of a burning plane and landed near their position. When they took off his helmet and flying suit, everyone was astounded: the pilot turned out to be a girl! All present were amazed even more by the behaviour of the Russian pilot who made no sound when pieces of skin were removed from her during treatment… How was it possible that such inhuman self-restraint had been fostered in a woman?
Thus, many years after the war, I found out a bit more about that tragic day of my life — and that was a view from the enemy’s side…
On 7 May 1965 a phone call resounded in our apartment. I took the receiver and quietly, so as not to awake my sleeping sons, said the usual: “Listening…”
“Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!” the excited voice of the poet Gilyardy flew through the lines.
I asked, laughing, “Why are you celebrating so early in the morning, Nikodim Fedorovich?”
I heard in reply: “Annoushka, turn on the radio! They’re broadcasting the Decree conferring on you the title of Hero…”
Then another call resounded… In a word, I was being congratulated by comrades-in-arms, public organizations, schools, editorial staff of newspapers and magazines, in which pieces about me and my brothers in arms had been published at different times. I will always remember the lines of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR conferring on me the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union: “For exemplary fulfilment of combat missions on the fronts of the struggle against the German-Fascist invaders during the years of the Great Patriotic War and for displays of valour and heroism during that…” I read the words of that document, and before my eyes I saw my regimental comrades who had gone forever into the inferno, roaring formations of
“What are they taking girls at the front for?” I heard the voice of Borya Strakhov, and it seemed that he stood in front of me on the aerodrome with field daisies in his hands and smiled boyishly, shyly and so brightly and joyfully. And after him the
The terrible years of the war have long gone. Our children have already become men and grandchildren have grown up. How fast the time goes by… Recalling the past battles and my frontline friends I think about their courage and nobility, their high sense of duty, contempt for death and the lofty feelings of frontline camaraderie, and more — their love for the motherland. There’s none better than her in the whole world!
I dedicate this book to those who didn’t return, and those who survived, and who passed away after the
