From the heroes of bygone days
Sometimes there are no names left
Those who have taken mortal combat
They became just earth, grass.
Only their terrible valor
Settled in the hearts of the living.
This eternal fire,
We bequeathed one,
We store in the chest.
E. Agranovich
Sometimes there are no names left
Those who have taken mortal combat
They became just earth, grass.
Only their terrible valor
Settled in the hearts of the living.
This eternal fire,
We bequeathed one,
We store in the chest.
E. Agranovich
Human memory is a strange thing. She does not allow us to forget many things that are somehow connected with our stay in this world. But sometimes it brings us, leaving for the time being beyond the threshold of our consciousness the events that have long passed. We recall them only when these separate private events are tied into a tight knot of general memorable dates. In May of this year, the whole world celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Victory over fascism. Among those who saw this holiday, there are very few living witnesses and participants who survived the difficult war years. And more and more left in another world and carried with them the memory of the war. The farther the wartime time moves away from us, the brighter it is the heroic faces of that hard times. They were reliable, strong, courageous, kind people — adult men, very little beardless boys and funny girls, yesterday's schoolchildren and students. It was with their hands that great things were built, they carried out an unheard of war on their shoulders. And maybe the best memory of them today is saved letters and photos. As invaluable relics they are kept in family archives and passed down from generation to generation. It is a pity that my contemporaries, representatives of the new generation of the XXI century, often do not show interest in the old albums of their “ancestors” with yellowed black and white photographs of unfamiliar people. I confess, and I did not like them. I did not understand that the memory of my ancestors. Photos were gathering dust in the farthest boxes of our trendy secretary. Until one day my grandmother, a lover of the TV show “Wait for Me,” did not suddenly want to write a letter there asking her to help her uncle Darzhan find traces of the missing person during the Great Patriotic War. And since this letter of request represented me, her grandson, had to get acquainted with the source material. They were old photos and a short front letter.
From the old pre-war picture, three young men look at me - my great-grandfather Tashmagambet and his two younger brothers, Anzhan and Darzhan. They are ridiculously serious. All three were to go one by one to the front in 1942. Darzhan, the youngest and funniest who served in cavalry before the war, in the first days of the war, along with other cavalry wars, most likely became “cannon fodder”: with his bald swords against a well-armed fascist army. But I will not express this thought to my grandmother. She still does not want to believe it. She still hopes that his tracks were lost in the vast expanses of the Universe, and not in the Leningrad Region narrowed to the size. Anzhan, according to the recollections of his grandmother, was tall, slender, handsome, the first guy in the village. He would love to turn the girls' heads around, but the train took him to the west, where his military unit had been part of the many days ’difficult defense of Moscow. With the battles she went to Poland, and there Sergeant Mukanov Anzhan left his painting on the walls of some half-ruined small town of the Guard. A soldier from Kazakhstan in a distant Polish town ... He returned home alive and for many years then unsuccessfully tried to find out about his younger brother. So he passed away in the late sixties, left with unfulfilled hope and pain in his heart. My great-grandfather Tashmagambet is also no longer alive. He was the eldest among the brothers. A man of amazing fate, was simple and laconic in life. The son of a major bai, in tsarist time, was a graduate of the cadet corps in St. Petersburg. He witnessed the capture of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution 1917. To survive, he changed his name and surname, was lost in the vast expanses of the Soviet Republic. It would seem that he, the Bay child, who lost everything, the construction of a new life, and then the defense of his renewed Motherland ?! But my great-grandfather from the first days of the war joined the ranks of those who defended its north-western borders. The last bridgehead for its part was a city with the German name Königsberg. The war ended for him in the Far East, where Soviet troops smashed the Japanese militarists. In the photo he smiles a little noticeably through his mustache; his smile seems kindly clever to me, as if my great-grandfather realizes that sooner or later his restless, ever-busy great-grandchildren will find a moment and open an old album. Letters from the front rarely came from the front, but to this day only one of them has survived, quite short. “How are you there without us?” Here it is very hot here, but we are used to it. We chase the reptiles to the west. The enemy is not the same, but wants to live. Resists scary. We will defeat him and return home. Wait, dear ones, with a victory, ”he wrote from near Konigsberg. A yellow triangle of soldiers' letters with a half-worn text. Live echo of war. The lines of the remarkable poet I.Utkin from his poem “You write a letter to me” (1943 year) come to my mind:
We'll be back soon. I know. I believe.
And the time will come ...
………………
And one evening with you,
To shoulder leaning shoulder
We will sit down and letters, as the annals of battle,
As a chronicle of feelings, list.
And again the feeling of regret that none of us - his grandchildren and great-grandchildren - did not sit down once for soldiers' letters and photos, did not bother me, did not bother to ask the old soldier about his former everyday life. My mom and my aunts regret this.
"Chronicle of feelings" reached our souls and hearts just now, when he was gone. And only now, even if late, I am holding in my hands old photos and front-line writing, and the past is getting closer and clearer to me. I involuntarily entertain respect for my distant ancestors, who managed to rise above their worldly concerns, joys, offenses, and in an ominous hour for the Motherland to join the ranks of its defenders.
Heroism extra words do not need,
But every day and every hour
They lived near death with death
To protect us from death.
To make our world more wonderful
That silence reigned in him ...
And they had to relatives and friends
Write under enemy fire. (A.Surkov)
Sixty-five years is our land without war. Is it a lot or a little? And how long will it be? On whom the already familiar to us, but such a fragile world depends? From those who got the long-awaited Victory in the terrible forties; from such as my great-grandfather and his brothers, and more from the millions who perished in the fiery furnace of the war?
Maternal field of Ch. Aytmatov appeals to us, who did not know the terrible war years:
“Hey, people are far away, beyond the seas! Hey people living
in this world, what do you need-land? Here I am the earth!
I am the same to all of you, you are all equal to me ...
... I am infinite, I am limitless, I am deep and high,
I have enough for all of you!
... whether people can live without war ... It's not from me -
it depends on you, on people, on your will and intelligence. ”
From us, our will and mind ...
The world bequeathed to us by the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. I close the old family album. Carefully I spend my hand over its velvet cover and put it in a prominent place. He is the place there, in sight. As a reminder of the past, without which there can be no future. [/ B]
From the program "Wait for me" came the answer that Anzhan (Andrew) was married. His wife's name was Ekaterina Savelyevna.