Educational administration of Sukhobusimsk District
Municipal state educational institution
„Sukhobusimsk general-education high school“
Student of the 9th class – Kristina Alexandrovna Weber
Direction: L.A. Ivakina, teacher of history and social studies
Municipal state educational institution - „Sukhobusimsk general-education high
school“
Many people went to the front during the war, offered resistance to the enemy, defended their home country and gave their lives in the service of their fatherland. And they did all this to the common good of their country, of their family. The Soviet people, who remained in the rear, did their very best to help the country to getting along with this mischief, they backed the soldiers, provided them with food and treated their wounds. We have to respect such people and bear them in our minds, for it is also due to them that we exist on this world and that the firmament is peacefully arching above us. The people in the rear did heroic deeds by means of their labor.
My grandparents, Flora Alexandrovna Weber and Alexander Viktorovich Weber, belong to this kind of people, as well. They were little children when the Great Patriotic War broke out, but their parents did a lot to the good of their home country.
A short time before the war grandma was living at the Volga. In the German Autonomy, Pallasovla District, hamlet of Straßburg – and grandpa in the hamlet of Krasniy Pakhar (Red Ploughman; translator’s note.), but, of course, none of them new about the other’s existence at that time.
According to what my grandmother recalls, they lived in comfort, owned a solidly built house, quite a lot of cattle and a couple of camels. Grandpa can hardly remember his parental home, but he recalls the wonderful garden behind the building, where he and his mother used to pick berries and apples
When the Great Patriotic War broke out, their quiet life ceased abruptly. Many families had to bear great misery as they were to face political persecution at the beginning of the war. They were forced to leave all their property, all their belongings, their home villages behind and set off with practically nothing in their hands into unknown places, where they had to completely reconstruct their lives.
I the autumn of 1941 Stalin gave the order about the resettling of the Germans; they were given 24 hours to pack a few belongings. Grandma recalls that the desperate people were crying: they had no idea who to give off their goods and chattels, which they had acquired over the years. And, of course, they were terribly frightened about what would happen to the next. The people packed the things they thought were mostly needed into bundles; they roasted cutlets, boiled potatoes and filled pales with fat so that the food they intended to take along would not go to waste. Then they were asked to enter freight-cars – and the train set off for Siberia. The trip lasted a whole months; many perished during transport due to hunger and cold. Having arrived in Krasnoyarsk they were immediately consigned on board a ship, which took them to the hamlet of Atamonovo on the river Yenissey; there they changed to horses and were taken to the Sukhobuzimsk militia unit for registration; later they were spread all over Sukhobuzimskoe District. Grandma’s family got to the village of Shoshkino, grandpa and his family to the village of Irkutskaya.
Immediately after their compulsory change of settlement all men were mobilized into the labor army; the women were now forced to feed the family members by her own. Grandma’s mother began to work for a stockyard. Grandfather’s mother got a job for the vegetable cellar in the village of Rodnikova; every now and then she managed to stealthily hiding a couple of potatoes, which she then took home to feed her children. But when the vegetables, which she used to hide below her garments or in her hair, were found, the immediately took it away from her.
The fathers of my grandparents were working together for the felling area near Reshoty station. Once grandma’s father, as many other workers, was loading wood into one of the wagons, when the train started to move – and someone sitting on a horse fell directly under the wheels. The train jumped the track and slipped directly into a group of laborers. All of them were killed. Since it was impossible to bury them individually, other laborers dug a big grave, where all killed comrades were hastily buried; grandma’s father was among them.
Grandfather told us, that, soon-after, his family had nothing left to eat, his sister starved. His mother then took the children to the settlement of Rodnikovyi, where she put them in a dig-out. Grandma said that her mother and her elder sister used to sew, and that her mother took the objects to the neighboring village afterwards. She used to go there at night-time, as none of the re-settlers was allowed to leave his village; apart from this they had to go and get registered with the local militia unit once a day; in case they did not do this, this counted as attempt to escape; then they were carefully spied on and shot dead in the end.
Soon-after the war ended. Three years later grandpa’s father returned home and immediately removed with his family to the village of Tolstomysovo. In 1949 grandma’s family moved to the village of Rubtsovka, where mother and her elder sister began to work for a factory producing spare parts for tractors. Not long after grandma finished school and got a job with the same factory. In 1954 grandma’s family removed to Kirghizia. Grandmother found a job for a sewing room, where she stayed until 1957.
At that time grandpa and his father went to Kirghizia, in order to ask for a girl’s hand in marriage; they made a stopover at grandma’s house – and instead of getting married to this very girl, grandpa decided to take my grandma for wife. They immediately took her along and went back to the village of Tolytomysovo. Later they decided to remove to Sukhobuzimskoe. At first grandma worked for the House of Pioneers as a technic, then she changed to the library; and grandfather all the time had a job as a tractor driver for the state farm.
More than fifty years have passed since then. Both brought up four wonderful, intelligent children, two girls – Olga and Tamara, two boys – Alexander (my dad) and Viktor, as well as ten grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. We are on friendly terms, we see each other regularly, and, of course, we are visiting with grandma and grandpa.
I think my grandparents deserve our full respect, for they have been working for the collective good of our home country and the Krasnoyarsk Territory throughout their whole life.
Moreover they succeeded to make good patriots of their children, too , and they never ever twiddled their thumbs. I am very proud of them, and this is, in my opinion, the most essential thing.