The Great Patriotic War – a fatal war of extermination – is over since long. Those who stayed alive were showered with marks of recognition and benevolence from our state. Many a person received both a high pension and a big apartment, etc. However, most of the people killed during a war come from among the peaceable population, having not served as soldiers and officers. Would did the children of war receive, who were lured on to destruction, as well.
No, in Siberia they were not struck by bombs and projectiles. In Siberia children died from debilitation, hunger and diseases. For everything was destined for the front – for the capture of victory! And state officials would repeat one sentence again and again: „Front and rear are Hinterland form – a unity“. The whole country was suffering.
Many children from the Baltic States, Poland and Germany were deported to Siberia with their parents. We, Russian children, made friends with them. And we were all confronted with exactly the same facts of live, – we were all walking about in inadequate clothes, bar-footed and with a growling stomach. After the war they began to rebuild the destroyed economy.
Now we are no longer children, but entirely grown-up and even aged people. Admittedly, German children of war obtained an unambiguously defined status which secures them material support. The Russian children of the Krasnoyarsk Territory did not receive anything. The deputees of the legislative assembly and the government of Krasnoyarsk Territory have no money for children of war. And I believe – they have no conscience.
These deputees never learned the hard way what it means to live in times of war, they never experienced the nightmare called “war”. At the most they have a vague imagination, which they received from firing a salute or from movies. For them, the deputees, the Great Patriotic War, quite honestly, did not exist at all. And each time when senior officials congratulate the people on Victory Day, I would be only too pleased to say to them: „Pop your felicitations into … your breast pockets, so that they may warm your patriotic hearts“.
When they began to build up economy again after the war, everybody was obligated to collaborate. And those, who tried to avoid labor, were called slackers, and they were deported to Siberia. I would like to give an example. We were just loading saw log and timber for repair work in the school building, when one of the exiles said: „In the summer I will have served my sentence and then I will go back to Moscow“. The former head of the kolkhoz farm, Piotr Mikhailovich Tyurin began to laugh: „Volkov, and what do you think when our internal exile will end?“ – I replied: „We are eternal settlers, this is the status we have, after all.“
V. VOLKOV, Kulichnikovo, Sayan District
„Krasnoyarsk Laborer“, 26.04.2012