Studying the history of the Great Patriotic War, analyzing individual «private» episodes of divisions, regiments, platoons and squads, sooner or later the search engine must visit the «Valley of Death»…
Having been in such a place, your understanding of what happened during the war changes… This will never be discussed in school textbooks, will not be shown on television programs, it is even difficult to understand from the documents that we re-read, study and store in our hard drives on computers and electronic media.
The horror of war, pain, fear, cruelty and hatred…craters, dugouts filled with the remains of horses, their broken bones, crushed skulls…many already empty pits, after the rise of our soldiers, which remained after the same search engines raised dozens of our fallen soldiers and officers from these black holes who were trying to get out of the encirclement…awareness of helplessness when a convoy preparing to leave the encirclement comes under artillery fire… panic, fear, horror and desire to live… February 1942…
In the evening around the fire, we often discuss what we feel there… and we almost always end our discussions with Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. This work very well conveys the feelings of people at war and their only desire — live… But that’s a completely different story….
