In the 1950s Sasha was still a kid, and his father, Lyonya, didn’t tell him much about fighting the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War—as the Soviets called the German invasion of Russia during WWII—the war which took full six years of Lyonya’s youth. 

It was not an attempt to hide tragedies of war from a child—streets were full of amputees invalidated out from the Army. Crutches and wooden legs were seen everywhere. In the absence of wheelchairs, some of those severely injured made use of handmade low-sitting carts with roll bearers as wheels, which made a very specific noise. The bodies were strapped to the carts by leather belts, leaving their hands free to propel the cart forward by kicking wooden pushers against the pavement. They looked as if they were dedicated to some task that seemed to be known only to them, ignoring all the pedestrians around and largely being ignored by most in return. From the height of the four-year-old Sasha, they were memorable figures. 

Later, on those rare occasions when Lyonya did talk to Sasha about the War’s battles, he did it in a way a history teacher would, unrolling the strategies from the views of The Red Army’s General Staff—not through the scope of his own heroic actions, which is what Sasha was expecting to hear. It was surely not because of the lack of bravery—Lyonya had quite a few military awards, although he rarely wore them.

Lyonya was not an exception—it was common among the veterans in the 1950s not to talk in vain about their war. They just wanted to move forward with their lives and catch up quickly on what they had missed for all those years—love, families, education, careers. So, looking back, it was not surprising that the war-related stories Sasha remembered most from his childhood were not the ones about the battles, but the ones more practical or anecdotal in nature. 

Such was, for example, the art of wearing ‘portyanki’—foot wraps—rectangular pieces of flannel, which were used with high boots instead of socks. No matter how ridiculous it sounds, the foot wraps, as compared to socks, proved to be extremely practical with military-style high leather jackboots—when worn properly. More than half a century after Lyonya’s instructions, Sasha still remembers how to do it the right way—perhaps because of Lyonya’s animated descriptions of what would happen to a soldier’s feet, if ‘portyanki’ got loose.

Among the unbelievable was a story about a silver spoon that Lyonya brought from Germany as a gift for his future father-in-law. Sasha’s mother, Lisa, always joked that Lyonya was fully accepted into the family by her father, Aaron, not because of her choice, but only because of that spoon—it had deeply engraved initials, in gothic letters, and a date of birth—both matching those of Aaron’s. The spoon, of course, did not belong to Aaron, but the coincidence was striking. 

The closest thing to a warrior-like story was the one about Lyonya’s trophy Walther pistol. Who knows why it used the standard Russian ammunition. How he got that weapon remains unclear to this day. He kept that pistol for the rest of the war. “It was my talisman,” he would often say. “I have never been wounded since the day I put it on my belt.” He was very upset when his Walther was confiscated at the time he was finally discharged from the service, despite a license, signed by a top commander, allowing him to keep it as a personal weapon. Lyonya talked about that pistol with a mix of pride and sentiment—almost as if talking about a beloved pet. 

None of those stories led Sasha to know his father better as a soldier. The understanding came from an unexpected source—Lyonya’s letters to Lisa from the front, which she kept throughout all those years. Sasha had not known about their existence until one day in the late 1960s, when Lyonya was asked to be the keynote speaker at the annual Victory Day celebration. He did not want to give a traditional Victory Day speech, over-saturated with uncontroversial citations from the Party newspaper editorials. Lyonya came up with an unusual idea. 

Together with Lisa, they assembled some of those letters into a saga tracking his movements and battles within the Special Communication Battalion, which reflected the main course of the War from his training camp in Siberia all the way to Berlin and Prague. In his speech, Lyonya just read some lines or paragraphs from the letters with the dates and places. It needed a few introductions or comments. Veterans knew the key events of the War from their own experience, and the younger generation learned them at schools—it was a mandatory part of education.

The speech was a sensation, both touching and unexpected by his audience of mostly college students, roughly of the same age that Lyonya was at the time of the War. They were mesmerized, not expecting anything like that in a formal speech. 

Overnight, Lisa and Lenya became local celebrities, and those letters eventually landed in the Archives in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. Among Lisa’s documents, Sasha found only one of the original letters, left perhaps accidentally. 

To: Frunze, Central Post station, Pick up service. Mondrus, L. A. From Field Post 47641, Berkhoer, L.D. Stamp: Reviewed by Military Censorship 06365.

“November 1944. Good day, my dear friend, Lisanka! Perhaps you’re wondering why this letter in Russian is written on a German blank. Do not be surprised—we now have so much German stuff at hand—weapons, machines, food. Trophies. To get them now is not as hard as counting them all. The Germans left everything—instead of “Blitzkrieg” and “Nach Osten”, they tried to get “Nach Westen” as fast as they could…”

Written in November, received six months later… Who could be sure that a response will find the author alive?

The quotes below are from either newspaper printouts or from selected copies that Lenya made before Lisa surrendered her letters to a museum, and which he would send to Sasha years later. Taken one by one, they were not so different from what millions of soldiers used to send to the loved ones from the front, but altogether, they became Lyonya’s diary. 

“January 1943… I’m going back to the front, to my battalion. I’m writing today to all the addresses around, but my first is to you, my darling. It was always easy to talk to you, and I know you will understand that today is the day that will make our future brighter and our victory closer, as well as our reunion after the war…” 

“May 1943… The last two months we were busy. As a group commander, I got a medal ‘For Battle Merit’, but all soldiers worked hard and each one shared a part of that award…”

“July 1943... At last, that happy, glorious day arrived—I was ready to kiss our postman to give him a tiny part of my feelings that belong to you. I never thought that it was possible to have such a sunny day at the front…” 

“August 1943… just returned from a combat mission—we recovered the results of massive bombing of some important railroad object. I never guessed how terrible it could be. Now I think with horror that if I died there, I would never receive your photo in the letter I got today, and I would never learn that our army re-captured the cities of Orel and Belgorod…” 

“Winter of 1943… Once again, I enjoyed the winter in our Republic [Ukraine], the last one that was left to be cleared from the Nazis. Our winter clothes are even warmer than needed for the weather we are used to having here, and all the machines are ready to go. Don’t you feel it? It is impossible not to win! My job is the same, on the move, relocating from one place to another. No time to read, really, but could you, please, send me a couple of books—one, which is popular today, and another from the classics of your choice…” 

“February 1944… Such a sad feeling, maybe because the postman did not bring the letter I was waiting for, or maybe because we are mired in stillness and inaction, instead being on the offensive. The only hope is that we will advance soon, which will break that boredom. And I have a small request. The area where I am now has changed hands so many times that it is impossible to find anything to read. Please send me a couple of fresh literature magazines—consider it as a gift to soldiers…”

“December 1944… Here is everything, as usual. Today, we celebrated Christ’s birthday, and mine, too—we are birthday twins. I am 23 today. An old man, not knowing the magic of young adulthood. Half bald, face wrinkled, and the soul wounded… P.S. Forgot to tell you, I got my second ‘For Courage’ medal after the Vistula River operation…“

At the time of Lenya’s speech, Sasha was attending university, and he read those letters with the skepticism of his generation—one that knew nothing of war or real suffering. That understanding partially came years later, with age… But then, in the 1960s, Sasha was uncomfortable reading the personal letters of his parents in the newspaper, not sure if such publicity was even appropriate, despite that memoirs about the War becoming a popular trend during those years. 

The casualness of the letters, whether intended or not, felt so out of place in comparison with both the heroic propaganda of his childhood and tragic family stories—there were plenty of those in Sasha’s childhood. 

Lyonya’s letters, however, projected coolness, calmness, and rationality.

“… Yesterday, the Nazis were bombing our position again. Most soldiers were lying flat at the bottom of a trench, face down, listening to the squealing of bombs before they exploded, not being able to guess how far they were from the point of impact. As a science student, I took another approach—I laid on my back, looking for where bombs were released from the planes and noting where they exploded on the ground, trying to calculate the point in the sky from where that single bomb could be dropped to hit my position, and I took all other bombs out of my mind. No planes came even close to that point…” 

At first, Sasha thought that this passage must simply be the bravado of a young man—Lyonya was twenty-one at the time—but bravado had never been part of his father’s character. 

Then Sasha recollected one conversation that he and his father had about a school assignment related to conic sections—parabolas, in particular. As an example of the real-world implications of geometry, Lyonya talked about the conservation of kinetic energy and momentum, which together dictated the trajectory of aerial bombs.

That was how Lyonya saw the world around him—a calculated view of events or processes that could be evaluated from a scientific point, while being often irrational otherwise.

The part about the bombing was just a reflection of his life, not an attempt to impress Lisa. Even deadly bombing could become a part of an unavoidable daily routine—mortally dangerous, but repetitive and tedious, transforming the wickedness of war into a monotonous limbo. What else could overcome the ever-present mantle of death?

“February 1945… I’m surprised you wrote about the fear of death. I’m not only sure of it—I see death every day. But I never imagine myself in the place of a dead body which had not been buried yet, still looking in the sky with eyes full of horror, or in the place of a soldier, screaming in agony in a medic’s car. This had happened—this is our job. It is much harder to see a dead soldier who ate dinner with you only yesterday, and danced after that, and told stories about the happy life in the Altay Mountains. But that’s how it is, because when death is everywhere—above your head, and below your feet, and in front of you—you don’t think about it. Only cowards or fresh recruits whine all the time, ‘it is my death coming, it is my bullet flying’. Soldiers that are not so inapt, look around and estimate the situation. From that, they know what to do: drop down into the very bottom of the trench or stand up straight with no concern…”

“This is our job,” wrote Lyonya. Just a job… Was it dangerous? Yes. But that was the nature of the job.

That was the quintessence of Lyonya’s character, during the War and after it—everything was “nothing special”, just another job that needed to be done. That was how he lived, how he made his decisions—a mix of cautious preparedness and intuitive fatalism. Is that what helped him survive the War?