Author: Tatiana Vladimirovna Tokareva
Municipal school of general education, Lebyazhe.
Project leader: History teacher Liudmila Romanovna Kovaleva.
Municipal school of general education, Lebyazhe.
Lebyazhe 2005
1. Life before the war
2. Military service
3. At the front (Great Patriotic War)
4. War captivity, concentration camp
5. The first decade after the war
6. In commemoration of the teacher
7. Literature
In my exposition I would like to tell you about a remarkable man – Ivan
Franzevich Buchinskiy, who worked as a teacher for the secondary school in
Lebyazhe and was one of the participants of the Great Patriotic war. I made use
of Ivan Franzevich’s memoirs (which are being kept in our school museum), the
memoirs of his wife – Aleksandra Konstantinovna Buchinskaya, and of several
teachers and students, i.e. of all those who knew Ivan Franzevich very well, who
worked with him or lived next to this man, who had suffered such an
idiosyncratic fate.
Ivan Franzevich was born in the hamlet of Idra, Idrinsk District, in 1914. There he went to school. Having finished the 7th term he continued his education attending the technical school in the city Minusinsk. After the war he took correspondance courses and finally graduated from the faculty of physics and mathematics with the Institute of Pedagogics in Abakan. Later he worked for the school, but this was already after the war.
Early in 1940 he was called up into the army (till 1939 teachers did not have to do military service). At first he was serving not far from the city of Novosibirsk; in May he was transferred to the south-west of the Ukraine (to the Romanian border). Later, the troop unit in which Ivan Franzevich was serving, was committed to the city of Lutsk. On the 20 June 1941 they reached the frontier, which was about 2-3 kms away from the river Bug. On the 22 June, at 4 o’clock, they got into a combat. Fascist airplanes were approaching at minimum altitude, and the soldiers did not immediately realize that what was happening here in this very moment was, in fact, war. The army command had tried to convince them that it was no true combat operation, but mere provocation. Many were killed instantly like the commander of the company – Prudnikov. The encircled and ambushed soldiers were then forced to march towards Kiew practically unarmed.
In October 1941 Ivan Franzevich became a prisoner of war. He was deported to Germany, at first to the city of Munich and then to some concentration camp on the river Ruhr. There were about 1000 prisoners of war. They were acommodated in caserns and had to sleep on plankbeds. They had to work for a stone pit carting stones all day. The camp prisoners were treated with utmost cruelty and inclemency – they were beaten and battered very often. The prisoners weakened from day to day. They were exhausted. They did not receive enough food, and what they received was of poor quality. The were ill-nourished and were permanently suffering from hunger. In the mornings they were not rationed out anything at all, for lunch they got a warm meal and in the evenings some kind of a watery soup.
20 prisoners were watched over by 1-2 guards. The prisoners of war knew that they were in Germany; nonetheless, some of them tried to escape. They exchanged their rags into plainclothes and ran away into the fields, where they tried to hide away in sheaves. However, they were tracked down by the Germans and their well-trained watchdogs.
The fascists shouted: “Russians – get out of there!” – for they had already recognized us by our shaven heads. Thus, they were taken back into the concentration camp. In 1944 the prisoners were set free by the Americans, who also gave them new clothes.
They were supplied with foodstuffs and then taken to the nearby river, where the Soviets took command on them. Their native country met the prisoners in an entirely unfriendly way. Having been freed from war captivity just a short time ago, Ivan Franzevich was now put under command once again. He was assigned to work for one of the pits in the Kuzbas (Kuznetsk Basin; translator’s note), in Prokopevsk, where he stayed four months.
He only returned home in 1947 and was then assigned to work as a teacher of mathematics in the village of Moiseevka. In 1954 he removed to the hamlet of Sorokino. There he became acquainted with his future wife Aleksandra Konstantinova. All the rest of his life is closely connected with the river Yenisey and with Sorokino-Lebyazhe. Everybody remembers Ivan Franzevich as a strict and very ambitious teacher, who had a brilliant command of his teaching profession. He understood how to impart his knowledge to the children. Former teachers recall that he was once sent to a sanatory. During his absence they assigned a teacher from Krasnoturansk to fill in for him. When Ivan Franzevich returned from vacation he had to go through the whole subject matter once again. Everything had to be repeated and explained again, for the children had learned nothing from the new teacher, because he had been unable to teach them and they had somehow missed the point.
Legends were even told about Ivan Franzevich’s proverbial strictness. When he asked a pupil to respond to a question and the pupil did poorly, he would force him to cram the subject matter, until he would be able to do it standing on his head. “If you do not know the answer the next time I ask you, you will be marked by a “2” for having missed to learn the lesson (a “2” equals the meaning of “hardly sufficient”; translator’s note).
It would occasionally happen that the school was closed down, since a flue epidemic had broken out. In such cases it was also strictly forbidden to go to the movies or the dance floor in Sorokino. Nobody dared to defy such orders. Daredevils, however, went to the club in the neighbouring village of Birya and amused themselves there.
Ivan Franzevich also worked as a pedagogic director and as headmaster of the 8-years’ school in Sorokino. In 1978 Ivan Franzevich grew critically ill and died.
Ivan Franzevich Buchinskiy suffered one of those fates, which many young people in the 1940s were forced to meet. Just due to people like Ivan Franzevich, we, the generation of the 21st century, had the chance to see the light of day. This remarkable man passed away a long time ago, but teachers, students, long-time residents, all still remember him very well.
Everybody has been keeping this man in good memory; everybody is grateful that he existed. He was a prominent man. One of only very few of his generation, who returned from the war.
To complete this exposition I would yet like to mention that we, the representatives of the young generation of the 21st century bow low before people like Ivan Franzevich, that we try to learn our lesson, be courageous and able to bear up with our convictions and deeds, that we strive to learn more about the fates of our countrymen. I have not yet finished my research work yet, but will continue to study our history in the future.
1. Book of Memory
2. Memories of his wife Aleksandra Konstantinova Buchinskaya
3. Memories of his former students
4. Archive of the school-museum
5. Photographs