Every weekend, Denis Deryabkin and his friends go out armed with metal detectors and other tools of their trade. Yet it is not treasure they seek. Abandoned beneath the ground for decades lies something far more distressing: the bodies of heroes who died in a special kind of hell.
Seventy years after the battle that changed the course of the Second World War came to its bloody climax, the earth of Stalingrad is still giving up its dead.
More than one million soldiers perished in this southern Russian city after Adolf Hitler’s march into the Soviet heartland ground to a halt in a wasteland of fire and rubble. With the iron will of Josef Stalin behind them, soldiers of the Red Army died in their droves, fighting desperately to halt the Nazi assault on the city curled along the west bank of the Volga.
After five months of carnage, the Russians managed to crush the German Sixth Army, breaking the back of Hitler’s attempt to seize the Soviet Union and secure a route to the oilfields of the Caucasus.
Last weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin flew to the city — later renamed Volgograd — to join a military parade that commemorated seven decades since final victory on Feb 2, 1943. It was the day that ended the siege of Hitler’s army in the strategic industrial city — and the start of the long retreat to Berlin and final defeat for the Nazis.
Putin arrived in a wave of patriotism — 50,000 locals signed a petition in recent weeks calling for the “Hero City” to be named Stalingrad again — and a fresh attempt to identify those who died.
Deryabkin, 38, a project manager at a tobacco factory, goes out with other volunteers every weekend to search for the remains of Soviet soldiers in the wheat fields and broken steppe to the west of the city. His group alone finds 200 bodies a year.
Clothes have long since rotted away, but helmets, weapons and bones remain. Some servicemen carried a small plastic capsule containing their details on a scrap of paper.
Not long ago, Deryabkin found just such a capsule on a soldier who had been shot dead through his helmet.
“If am I killed, please tell my wife and parents,” the young man had scrawled.
Miraculously, Deryabkin tracked down the man’s 97-year-old wife, and his remains were moved to a cemetery. Until seven years ago, when Russia’s ministry of defence began to collect data on war dead, many relations were unable to find out where their loved ones fell or were buried. Now a Volgograd museum is using the data to help families track down the fallen.
Last week, a memorial wall was officially opened on Mamayev Kurgan, a Tartar burial mound that is now the resting place — in mass graves — for tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers. The names of 17,000 previously unidentified soldiers are engraved on the wall.
“I searched for him all my life,” Valentina Savelyeva, 75, said as she ran her finger along the name of her father, Timofey Ponomarev, an anti-aircraft gunner who died in Stalingrad in October 1942. “I only wish my mother could have known where he was lost.”
Gennady Dubonosov, 76, the head of a group called “Children of Stalingrad,” has written to Putin asking the president to grant people who were under 16 at the time of the battle a special status, making them a category of veterans deserving benefits and larger pensions.
“There was something unique in what happened here: it was a special kind of hell,” said Dubonosov. “The artillery strikes were appalling. There were palls of black smoke swirling overhead. We sought any place to hide ... The sound was indescribable.”
Deryabkin said the dead also deserved more attention. Despite his efforts, more than 90 per cent of the bodies he and other groups discover remain unidentified and are buried in their hundreds every year in “brothers’ graves” on the edge of the city.
“Every year down from the Soviet times, we hear this refrain, ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,’” he said. “But we should better honour the men who lie in the fields around our city. Without their sacrifice, Russia might no longer exist.”
Wednesday 6 February 2013
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/years+later+Stalingrad+still+gives+dead/7922009/story.html#ixzz2K4gzsBcs
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