June 22, 1941 for the bulk of the people began as a normal day. They did not even know that soon this happiness would no longer be, and childhood would be stolen from children who were born or will be born from 1928 to 1945. Children suffered in the war no less than adults. The Great Patriotic War forever changed their life.
Children in the war. Children forgot how to cry
In war, children forgot how to cry. If they fell to the Nazis, they quickly realized that it was impossible to cry, otherwise they would shoot. They are called "children of war" not because of their birth date. The war brought them up. They had to see real horror. For example, often the Nazis shot children just for fun. They did this only to watch how they scattered in horror.
Could and choose a live target just to practice accuracy. Children cannot work hard in the camp, which means that they can be killed with impunity. So the Nazis thought. However, sometimes in the concentration camps there was work for children. For example, they often were blood donors for soldiers of the Third Reich army ... Or they could be forced to remove ashes from the crematorium and sew them up in bags to fertilize the ground later.
Children that no one needed
You can’t believe that they left the camps of their own free will. This "goodwill" was personified by the barrel of an assault rifle in the back. Fascists “sorted” suitable and unsuitable for work very cynically. If the child reached the mark on the wall of the hut, then he was fit to work, to serve “Great Germany”. Did not reach - sent to the gas chamber. The Third Reich did not need the kids, so their fate was only one. However, at home, not everyone was waiting for a happy fate. Too many children in the Great Patriotic War lost all their relatives. That is, only an orphanage and half-starved youth awaited them at home during the post-war devastation.
Children brought up by work and true valor
Many children, already at age 12, got up to machine tools in factories and factories, worked at construction sites along with adults. Due to far from childish hard work, they matured early and replaced their brothers and sisters with dead parents. It is the children in the war of 1941-1945. helped keep afloat, and then restore the country's economy. They say that there are no children in a war. This is actually so. In the war they worked and fought along with the adults, both in the army and in the rear, and in partisan units.
It was commonplace that many adolescents added a year or two to themselves and went to the front. Many of them, at the cost of their lives, collected ammunition, machine guns, grenades, rifles and other weapons remaining after the fighting, and then transferred them to the partisans. Many were engaged in guerrilla intelligence, worked as coherent in the units of people's avengers. They helped our underground members arrange shoots of prisoners of war, rescued the wounded, set fire to German warehouses with weapons and food. Interestingly, not only boys fought in the war. Girls did this with no less heroism. Especially many such girls were 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 tens of thousands ... Officially in our country, 27 million people died in this war. Of these, only 10 million military personnel. The rest are civilians, mostly women and children. Children who died in the war ... Their number cannot be calculated accurately.
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 collecting things for the army. As already mentioned, the children worked for days in the factories instead of their fathers and older brothers who went to the front. They collected gas masks, made smoke bombs, mine fuses, fuses for hand grenades. In school workshops, in which girls took labor lessons before the war, they now sewed linen and tunics for the army. Warm clothes were knitted - socks, mittens, sewed tobacco pouches. Children also helped the wounded in hospitals. In addition, they wrote letters to relatives under their dictation, and even staged concerts and performances that caused a smile among adult men, exhausted by the war. Feats are accomplished not only in battles. All of the above is also the exploits of children in war. And hunger, cold and illness in two ways dealt 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 have served in the Russian army since ancient times. Most often it was a young drummer or young man. In World War II, these were usually children who lost their parents, killed by the Germans or driven into concentration camps. This was the best option for them, because staying alone in the occupied city was the worst. The child in this 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 were passing through such territories, were very sensitive to such children and often took them with them. As Marshal Baghramyan mentions, often the courage and ingenuity of the sons of the regiment amazed even experienced soldiers.
The exploits of children in 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 who were less than 16 years old fought in the army during World War II. However, these data cannot be accurate, since they did not take into account young heroes from partisan detachments. Five were awarded the highest military award. We’ll talk about three of them in more detail, although these were far from all, especially distinguished children-heroes in the war who deserve mention.
Valya Kotik
14-year-old Valya Kotik was a partisan reconnaissance in the Karmelyuk detachment. He is the youngest hero of the USSR. He carried out the instructions of the Shepetovka military intelligence organization. His first task (and he successfully completed it) was to liquidate the detachment of the field gendarmerie. This task was far from the last. Valya Kotik died in 1944, 5 days after he turned 14.
Lena Golikov
16-year-old Lenya Golikov was a scout of the Fourth Leningrad partisan brigade. With the outbreak of war, he went into partisans. Slender Lenya looked even younger than his 14 years (that is how much he was at the time the war started). Under the guise of a beggar, he went around the villages and passed on important information to the partisans. Lenya participated in 27 battles, undermined vehicles with ammunition and more than a dozen bridges. In 1943, his squad could not get out of the encirclement. Only a few survived. Leni was not among them.
Zina Portnova
17-year-old Zina Portnova was a scout of the partisan detachment named after Voroshilov in Belarus. She was also a member of the underground Komsomol-youth organization Young Avengers. In 1943, she was instructed to find out the reasons for the collapse of this organization and to establish contact with the underground. Upon her return to the detachment, the Germans arrested her. During one of the interrogations, she grabbed the pistol of a fascist investigator and shot him and two other fascists. She tried to escape, but she was captured.
As mentioned in the book “Zina Portnova” by the writer Vasily Smirnov, the girl was tortured severely and sophisticatedly so that she would give the names of other underground activists, but she was unshakable. For this, the Nazis called her in their protocols “Soviet gangster”. In 1944, she was shot.