The war began, my father wrote a statement to the front. He was sent to a sabotage detachment of the NKVD.
They were thrown into the near rear to carry out sabotage acts, but they were almost immediately ambushed. Someone betrayed them. They were chased through the forest, and he survived because he sat in a swamp for several hours and breathed through a reed.

Moreover, he heard German soldiers passing by, dogs barking. I was brought a file on this group from the Defense Ministry archive. Of the 28 people, four crossed the front line back to ours. 24 died.

And then they were sent to the Nevsky Pyatachok. It was probably the hottest place during the entire blockade. Our troops held a small bridgehead, it was supposed to be a bridgehead for breaking the blockade. There are dominating heights all around it, it was shot through. It is still solid metal there.

And my father told me how he was wounded there. He lived his whole life with shrapnel in his leg: they never took them all out. His foot never straightened out afterwards. He and a friend made a sortie behind the German lines, crawled and crawled... And then it was both funny and sad: they got close to a German pillbox, a big guy came out of it, looked at them... and they couldn't get up because they were under the sights of a machine gun. "The guy," he says, "looked at us carefully, took out a grenade, then a second one and threw these grenades at us." Life is such a simple thing and cruel.

It was already winter, the Neva was frozen, and he needed to get to the other bank somehow. There were few people willing to drag him to the other side, because the Neva was in full view there and was under fire from both artillery and machine guns. There was almost no chance of reaching the other bank. But by pure chance, his neighbor in Peterhof happened to be nearby. And this neighbor, without thinking, dragged him. They both crawled there alive. The neighbor waited for him in the hospital, made sure that he had been operated on, and said: "Well, now you will live, and I will go to die."

And he went back. And I later asked my father: "Well, did he die?" They got lost, and my father still believed that the neighbor died. And somewhere in the 60s, he suddenly came home, sat down on a chair and cried. He met this savior of his. In a store. In Leningrad. By chance. He went into the store for groceries and saw him. Imagine that they both went to this store at that very moment. One chance in a million...

And my mother told me how she came to visit my father in the hospital. They had a small child, he was three years old. And there was hunger, the blockade... And my father gave her his hospital rations. Secretly from the doctors and nurses. And she hid it, took it home and fed the child. Well, and then he began to faint in the hospital, the doctors understood everything and stopped letting her in.
And then they took her child away. They did it on purpose, with the aim of saving children from starvation. They gathered them in orphanages for evacuation. They didn't even ask the parents. He got sick there and didn't survive. And they weren't even told where he was buried. And then people I didn't know worked in the archives and found documents on my brother.

And this is indeed my brother. Not only the address from which he was taken matched. The first name, last name, patronymic, year of birth matched. And the burial place was indicated: Piskarevskoye Cemetery and even a specific plot.

And the father, when the child was taken away and the mother was left alone, and he was allowed to walk, stood up on crutches and went home. When he approached the house, he saw that the orderlies were carrying corpses out of the entrance. And he saw his mother.
He came up to her, and it seemed to him that she was breathing. And he said to the orderlies: "She's still alive!" - "She'll get there on the way, she won't survive." He said that he attacked them with crutches and forced them to lift her back into the apartment. And he nursed her back to health. She stayed alive. And she lived until 1999. And he died at the end of 1998.

And there was no family where someone did not die, but they did not hate the enemy, that's what's amazing. I still can't, honestly, fully understand this. Mom said: "What kind of hatred can there be for these soldiers? They are ordinary people. They were just driven to the front." I remember these words from my childhood.