Читать книгу Inside the Rzhev Meatginder - Геннадий Федорович Русаков - Страница 6

And from afar, the sound of war could already be heard. Soon the retreating units of the Red Army began to pass through the village, first in groups with commanders, with weapons. Then in groups, and alone with weapons and without weapons. They said we were coming out of the encirclement – the Smolensk cauldron.

At the end of August, the retreating Red Army soldiers cautiously entered the village – they were afraid that there might already be fascists in the village, and then, they asked what we knew about their presence. The village did not know much about the situation in the district, but if possible, they tried to help with everything they could: clothes and food, if they asked for it. They explained how to go through the forests, bypassing large settlements and roads.

I remember very well one of the last groups, there were 7 people in it. Among them, the sergeant stood out, he was armed not with an ordinary rifle, but with some other, the barrel of the rifle ended in a thickening, similar to a basket. As I found out later, it was a semi-automatic ten-shot Simonov rifle. And I remembered this because by this time it had already become known: the Nazis had taken Volokolamsk. Fighters from this group decided to go to the front without weapons, dressed in civilian clothes. They changed into the old clothes of my father and his brothers. The weapons were buried in a sheepfold, in dry manure. The sergeant was not Russian, it seems, as I understand it now, Turkmen or Tajik, but he spoke Russian well. He refused to change clothes and did not leave the rifle, said: “I will go as it is, lucky – I will get there, I will not be lucky – I will take the fight.”

It may seem like I’m making up the details, since I haven’t had eight yet. But I remember everything verbatim, even the fact that his comrades persuaded him to leave their documents here in the village, and even more so – the party card, but he refused. I already knew about the party card then, my uncle, my mother’s brother, had a party card, he was a participant in the war with the Finns, there he joined the party and was proud of it.

Whether they got to theirs or not, I don’t know, but everything happened before my eyes. I myself was a participant, because I took out of the pantry, at the direction of my mother, these clothes, in which they changed. A neighbor threatened my mother: “The Germans will come, I will tell you that you are helping the Communists, they will hang you!” Why she did not love our family, I do not know, maybe because we let into the house the same Gypsy family that left the camp, the Roma in the villages were not very fond of.