The Invisible Soldier

My father was born in Crimea. After the revolution, when the Joint Society helped the orphans survive, he could be in America, but escaped from the ship with his little sister, the only close person left of his family.
The young Soviet authorities gladly gave him, like all the blinds, a wide choice: to die of hunger, cold or disease. But the father, after studying two classes in the church-parish school, and somehow reaching adulthood, left his sister to distant relatives and went to Moscow.

After studying at the Dosaaf courses and obtaining the title, the father recruited as a driver to the Belomorcanal. In 1938 he was summoned to service. The Finnish War extended the service for another year, just before the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

At the beginning of the war, the father was the senior of the mortar calculus, but when on the order of Stalin, who needed at least a few competent fighters who could control the equipment, the father failed, his career went sharply in the mountain. He was given a half-fourth on which he spent the entire war, capturing in addition several post-war months.

When I was a kid, my dad didn’t seem like a hero to me. Is it heroism when during the Finnish time a sniper shoots at you and bullets pass from you in a couple of centimeters? Is this heroism to go out of order after reading the order of Comrade Stalin to identify technically competent fighters, despite the threat of shooting from the commander, who saw in this practical desertion? Is it heroism when a piece of the head takes off a young lieutenant sitting next to you? Is it a heroism when another lieutenant, having decided to show the master class on getting out of the dirt of the half-turn with the attached anti-tank cannon with a four-cylinder, breaks the differential and gives three days to repair? No food, no water, no spare parts, no tools. Fear of not obeying orders. Heroes are not afraid. Is it heroism, when the projectile carries the earthquake, in which you were supposed to sleep, but scared of lice, went to sleep in the cabin half Tuesday? Is it heroism, when in the morning, almost under the wheel, you see a mine, which has not reached a few centimeters? Can this be called a courage when you drive at night along the Ladoga with broken headlights, glasses and a broken stove? Is it a routine to get bombed every day on the road of Life to the besieged Leningrad? And what about the threat of shooting for sabotage, when you are given half an hour to overturn the Landlyzovsky Willis engine! They did not shoot!

He was not awarded with orders or medals, except for the anniversary. He was not even hurt. He just served like millions of other soldiers! He was just lucky to be alive! And only as I grew older I realized that there are the same invisible soldiers as my dad, and there are real heroes. They did not talk about duty, honor, love of the Motherland, patriotism, but simply did their job, fulfilling impossible orders, freezing, starving, cracking and not counting on medals or orders.

He died 39 years after the end of the war. On the Day of Victory. When he was buried, it was raining. I looked at him for the last time, and it seemed to me that he was crazyly tired of this mess and just wanted to wrap himself up, like in a half-wheeled cabin, which would finally take him to a place where there was eternal silence and where there were already millions of unseen soldiers like him.

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