June 22, 1941 for the bulk of the people began as an ordinary day. They did not even know that soon this happiness would no longer exist, and that children who were born or would be born from 1928 to 1945 would be robbed of their childhood. Children suffered in the war no less than adults. The Great Patriotic War changed their lives forever.
Children at war. Children who have forgotten how to cry
In the war children have forgotten how to cry. If they got to the Nazis, they quickly realized that it was impossible to cry, otherwise they would be shot. They are called "children of war" not because of the date of their birth. The war brought them up. They had to see real horror. For example, often the Nazis shot children just for fun. They only did this to watch them flee in terror.
Could have chosen a live target just to practice accuracy. Children, on the other hand, cannot work hard in the camp, which means they can be killed with impunity. That's what the Nazis thought. However, sometimes inconcentration camps were jobs for children. For example, they were often blood donors for the soldiers of the Third Reich army… Or they could be forced to remove the ashes from the crematorium and sew them into bags to fertilize the ground later.
Children who were not needed by anyone
It is impossible to believe that people left to work in the camps of their own free will. This "good will" was personified by the muzzle of a machine gun in the back. Suitable and unsuitable for work, the Nazis "sorted" very cynically. If the child reached the mark on the wall of the barracks, then he was fit to work, to serve "Greater Germany". If he didn't reach it, they sent him to the gas chamber. The Third Reich did not need the kids, so they had only one fate. However, at home, not everyone was waiting for a happy fate. Many children in the Great Patriotic War lost all their relatives. That is, in their homeland, only an orphanage and half-starved youth during the post-war devastation were waiting for them.
Children brought up by hard work and real valor
A lot of children already at the age of 12 got up to the machines in factories and factories, worked at construction sites on an equal basis with adults. Due to far from childish hard work, they matured early and replaced their dead parents for their brothers and sisters. It was the children in the war of 1941-1945. helped to keep afloat, and then restore the economy of the country. They say that there are no children in war. It really is. In the war, they worked and fought on an equal footing with adults, both in the army and the rear, and in partisan detachments.
It was common for manyteenagers added a year or two to themselves and went to the front. Many of them, at the cost of their lives, collected the cartridges, machine guns, grenades, rifles and other weapons left after the battles, and then handed them over to the partisans. Many were engaged in partisan intelligence, worked as liaison in the detachments of the people's avengers. They helped our underground workers organize prisoner-of-war escapes, rescued the wounded, set fire to German warehouses with weapons and food. Interestingly, not only boys fought in the war. The girls did it with no less heroism. There were especially many such girls in Belarus … The courage, fortitude of these children, the ability to sacrifice for the sake of only one goal, made a huge contribution to the common Victory. All this is true, but these children died in tens of thousands… Officially, 27 million people died in this war in our country. Only 10 million of them are military personnel. The rest are civilians, mostly women and children. Children who died in the war… Their number cannot be accurately calculated.
Children who really wanted to help the front
From the first days of the war, children wanted to help adults in every possible way. They built fortifications, collected scrap metal and medicinal plants, took part in the collection of things for the army. As already mentioned, the children worked for days at the factories instead of their fathers and older brothers who had gone to the front. They collected gas masks, made smoke bombs, fuses for mines, fuses for hand grenades. In school workshops, in which before the war the girls had labor lessons, they now sewed linen and tunics for the army. They also knitted warm clothes - socks, mittens, sewed pouchesfor tobacco. Children also helped the wounded in hospitals. In addition, they wrote letters for their relatives under their dictation and even put on concerts and performances that made adult men exhausted by the war smile. Feats are accomplished not only in battles. All of the above is also the exploits of children in the war. And hunger, cold and disease in no time de alt with their lives, which had not yet had time to really begin ….
Sons of the regiment
Very often in the war, along with adults, teenagers aged 13-15 fought. This was not something very surprising, since the sons of the regiment served in the Russian army for a long time. Most often it was a young drummer or cabin boy. In the Great Patriotic War, these were usually children who had lost their parents, who were killed by the Germans or driven into concentration camps. This was the best option for them, because being alone in an occupied city was the worst. A child in such a situation was threatened only by starvation. In addition, the Nazis sometimes amused themselves and threw a piece of bread to hungry children … And then they fired a burst from a machine gun. That is why units of the Red Army, if they passed through such territories, were very sensitive to such children and often took them with them. As Marshal Bagramyan mentions, often the courage and ingenuity of the sons of the regiment amazed even experienced soldiers.
The exploits of children in the war deserve no less respect than the exploits of adults. According to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, 3,500 children fought in the army during the Great Patriotic War, whose age wasless than 16 years old. However, these data cannot be accurate, because they did not take into account the young heroes from the partisan detachments. Five were awarded the highest military award. We will talk about three of them in more detail, although these were far from all, children-heroes who especially distinguished themselves in the war deserve mention.
Valya Kotik
14-year-old Valya Kotik was a reconnaissance partisan in the Karmelyuk detachment. He is the youngest hero of the USSR. He carried out the orders of the Shepetivka military intelligence organization. His first task (and he successfully completed it) was to eliminate the field gendarmerie detachment. This task was far from the last. Valya Kotik died in 1944, 5 days after he turned 14.
Lenya Golikov
16-year-old Lenya Golikov was a scout of the Fourth Leningrad Partisan Brigade. With the outbreak of war, he joined the partisans. Thin Lenya looked even younger than his 14 years (that's how much he was at the beginning of the war). He, under the guise of a beggar, went around the villages and passed on important information to the partisans. Lenya participated in 27 battles, blew up vehicles with ammunition and more than a dozen bridges. In 1943, his detachment could not get out of the encirclement. Few managed to survive. Sloth was not among them.
Zina Portnova
17-year-old Zina Portnova was a scout of the Voroshilov partisan detachment in Belarus. She was also a member of the underground Komsomol youth organization Young Avengers. In 1943, she was assigned to find out the reasons for the collapsethis organization and establish contact with the underground. Upon returning to the detachment, she was arrested by the Germans. During one of the interrogations, she grabbed the pistol of the fascist investigator and shot him and two other fascists. She tried to run, but was captured.
As mentioned in the book "Zina Portnova" by the writer Vasily Smirnov, the girl was tortured harshly and subtly so that she would name other underground members, but she was unshakable. For this, the Nazis called her in their protocols a "Soviet bandit." She was shot in 1944.
