The younger brother of Alexander Matrosov

The younger brother of Alexander Matrosov

     The battles for the Dnieper had gone on for twenty long days and nights. But here they were on the right bank at last! They were resting now, after those terrible twenty days and nights.

     A tall thin boy is lying on his back in the sun-lit grass. His face is rather pale, his eyes are both merry and a little sad. This is Tolya Komar? The youngest soldier in the division. Turning on his elbow Tolya looks around and sees for the first time how beautiful everything is: peaceful orchards turning golden, broad fields,  birds gaily hopping around… For some reason Tolya begins to remember the quiet, pleasant evenings at home, in Slavvansk. How long ago that was!

     When the little ones, Vasilko and Boris, were already in their  beds, he often sat at the table with his father and mother. All of them were busy: Tolya was getting ready for school for the next day, his parents were looking through their pupils papers (they were both teachers). Tolya was always very proud of his parents because they knew such a lot of things.

     Bu how little and silly he had been them! One fine summer morning he took some of his things and disappeared without saying a word to anybody. He decided to become a famous traveler. Very soon, however, he lost his way and had to spend a night out of doors. He slept under an old tree. At dawn he began to look for a path and was lucky to find one. There were many many mushrooms by the path. He picked some and at last found his way home. Everything looked very quiet when he got there, and he thought there might be just a chance that nobody had notised his absence. But he was mistakes. His father and mother hadn’t ever gone to bed. They had already been almost everywhere looking for Tolya. 

     In September, 1943, when our troops entered the village, Tolya saw his chance at once. He simply could not stay away from the struggle any longer. He went straight to the colonel and said that he wanted to join the division. He said that he was sixteen already. The boy was very tall for his age, so the colonel believed him.

Vasya Korobko, the young standard-bearer 

     In summer of 1941, our troops were fighting at Pogoreltsi, a village  near Chernigov. The shooting began in the morning. The villages hid themselves in their houses and the place looked completely dead.

     Only one villages was out on the street that morning. This was Vasya Korobko, a strong, a dark-haired boy of thirteen. Early in the morning when he heard the shooting, he ran out into the street to see what was what happening. Our men did not realize when that boy had appeared among them; it seemed as if he had always been around, bringing ammunition and helping them with the machine-guns.

     “Won’t you take me with you?” he asked when the soldiers praised him. “I want so mush to join the Soviet Army.”

     “You’ll have to grow a bit more, young man,” they said smiling. The sun was already high in the sky, and it was nearly  one o’clock when one of the men asked Vasya to bring them some water. Everybody wanted a drink, heexplained. The boy ran off to get the the water. Soon he was back. But there was nobody there now. The detachment had gone.

     “They didn’t want to take me with them,” he said sadly to himself. And he ran back home trying to draw as little attention to himself  as possible.

     Later that day the nazis entered the village. Vasya saw them throught the window marching along the village street, their tanks and trucks looking powerful and terrible.

     “It’s likes a bad dream,” thought Vasya. He remembered school and them the holidays. There would not be anything like that now.

     “It’s like a bed drem,” he said to himself again when he saw the Nazis shouting and running after the pigs. “I wish I could wake up from it,” he thought. Only it was not a dream. Vasya suddenly fierce hatred for the nazis.

     “That’s the end of school and my pioneer group!” Vasya thought again. Vasya was the Standard-Bearer of his school pioneer group. How proud he felt when he marched at the head of the group and carried the standard!

     And then Vasya was struck by a terrible thought: what would happen to the standard? It was usually kept in the pioneer room at school, but now with the nazis there… Vasya’s eyes narrowed. He wouldn’t let the nazis have the standard!

     The members of the Obol youth underground organization got together near a tall watch-tower in the forest about five hundred metres away from the small village of Ushuli. This was their usual meeting-place; they felt they could talk freely here.

      Suddenly one of the members, who was on guard duty not far from them, saw a strange little girl walking towards them and said:

      “Look, she’s coming over to us. Who is that girl?”

      Fruza Zenkova, secretary of the underground committee, only smiled and answered:

      “That’s Zina Portnova. I’ve heard a lot her already. She wants to join us”

     Some of the members knew the girl, but many never seen her anywhere before, and they fell silent as she came towards them.

“I’m afraid we’ll have a lot of bother with that girl,” the secretary said in a low voice, as looked at the girl’s slender figure. “She looks too young to work with us.” Indeed, she seemed no more than a child. Then Fruza asked the girl to tell them about herself. The young patriots wanted to know more about her and her parents. They were all very interested to know what she had done before she came to them. And this is what she told them:

     “I’m from Leningrad. I came to Byelorussia during the school holidays to see my grandmother. With my sister. When the war began, we couldn’t get back home to Leningrad. I live in the village of Zuyi. I have passed into the the 8^th form.” She paused: it seemed as if she was thinking about something. Then she went on:

      “You may wonder what has brought me here to you. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking. You think I’m too small and can’t do anything useful. But that’s a mistake. I see and understand everything.”