Поисковый материал к 70-летию Победы Юность за колючей проволокой

Заявка

на участие в научно-практической конференции школьников

« Иркутск и Иркутская область:

70 лет победы в Великой Отечественной войне 1941-1945г.»

ФИО участника Машкова Юлия Игоревна

пол – женский________________________________

ФИО науч. руководителя Демидова Светлана Степановна

Секция______«Иностранный язык»__________________

Название работы_____«Непокоренные узники концлагерей»

/ The invincible – the prisoners of the concentration camps”./

Город___Иркутск ________________________________

Образовательное учреждение МАОУ СОШ № 63__класс 8д____

Тел.сот______8 908 663 0765_______________________

e- mail [email protected]__________________

J.I.Mashkova

The invincible – the prisoners of the concentration camps

1941-1945 were the four terrible years of the Great Patriotic War.

According to some data, 20 million people perished in this war. People perished not only in battles, a lot of peaceful citizens were burnt down: women, old people, children. The Germans incinerated villages totally, driving people into sheds. Only shafts were left of villages and hamlets.

Many human lives were murdered in the star-chambers of concentration camps.

When studying the material of the Great Patriotic War gathered by our school’s students of local lore, I decided to include a memory story of Vera Stepanovna Rossova, my mother’s grandmother, who during the war years, being a teen-age girl, got into the star-chambers of a concentration camp. Her story touched my hart, so I wanted to learn more about what’s a concentration camp like, how many they were and on what territories they were located, which ones were considered to be the biggest.

That’s why I have chosen the topic of my paper for myself: “The invincible –

the prisoners of the concentration camps”.

The history of formation of concentration camps

Death camps

The concentration camp is a place for keeping people, which is fenced by the barbed wire. For the first concentration camps any vacant premises were used, later the construction of special barracks began. Concentration camps were many in number, and each of them had its own intended use. During the first years of their existence they were utilized as a place to keep criminals, then as a place to liquidate the inferior subject races, as camps of ideological battle, labor camps, camps of elimination.

The convicts were assigned line numbers. Later, political opponents were marked by red triangles, criminals wore green triangles, politically suspects wore black triangles.

The first concentration camps appeared in 1895 in Cuba. In Germany concentration camps appeared in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Mostly, concentration camps were located on the territory of Germany, Poland, Latvia, Holland, Spain. According to official data, 18 million people had gone through them. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany officially recognized 22 concentration camps, but, in fact, they amounted to more than 14 thousand camps. The biggest, most dangerous and notorious were Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Auschwitz presented an overall net of fascist camps with a territory of more than four hectares, homing about 600 various dwelling and office premises. These were big towns- crematoriums. Four millions people had been eliminated in Auschwitz, 52 thousand people in Buchenwald. Prisoners-of-war were brought to Auschwitz as near as from the whole world, with 22 nationalities languishing here. Jews and the Romany were subjected to mass elimination.

In 1943, during the period of mass elimination, four crematoriums were constructed and equipped. Each of them burnt away about five thousand corps every day. But the throughput capacity was insufficient for fascists, and then they forced the prisoners to dig out deep trenches with underground blowers, built huge fires and cremated in them about 10 thousand people daily. Sometimes, living people were thrown into the fire.

The camps had special hospitals-laboratories, where mass experiments were carried out on healthy people: they were artificially infected with cancer, with typhus, their blood was tapped and liquid injected.

Up to December 1, 1943, 2,500,00 victims were poisoned in gas chambers and cremated, 500,000 perished with anger and diseases. Among the executed, there were about 20,000 Russian prisoners-of-war. The main mass of people were cremated straight in gas chambers. Children were eliminated immediately as they could not work. When gas was in short supply, people were burnt alive.

Besides those who had fallen on battle fields, Germany ruined more than 26 millions of innocent human victims. “In October, 1943, a group of hungry and knocked-up women were brought in open lorry-loads. Some of them had gone mad: they were laughing hysterically, the others were damning Hitler. Three lorry-loads arrived. The living people were led straight to the crematorium. Few of them, who had tried to escape the camp, managing to survive, so they were caught again and hung within sight of those alive”.

Auschwitz had huge barracks which kept children up to the age of 12 years. The elder ones looked after the kids. No children’s laughter was heard in there. And the children were crying gently as if being afraid of their own weeping. Tens of kids were daily dying of hunger and diseases.

Youth behind the barbed wire

In the village of Tabuk of Irkutsk region lives Vera Stepanovna Rossova who had spent the years of war behind the barbed wire. Vera Stepanovna was born on the 23-d of July 1926 in Kuban, then her parents moved to Donbas, the both worked in the mine. Vera Stepanovna remembered on her past: “At the moment when the war started, I was already 15 years old. Since the first days I watched the retreating of the Soviet soldiers.” The Germans strived to occupy Donbas – they needed coal, and already in October 1941, the German troops had occupied the place where Vera Stepanovna lived. During the first months the Germans fagged them in labors to procure coal stock. Many were enrolled in the labor registry office. In April 12 they got the youth together totally and transported them to Germany. They carried them like cattle-stock, in open cars and sold them in German towns as labor power. She got into a camp located in West Germany near the Belgian-Holland border. There she worked at a metal factory in an ammunition shop 12 hours a day. The clothes were poor, a good thing the winters were warm. Closer to the end of the war Germany was increasing bombed by the allies. The Germans never let them into the bombshelters, so they were sitting under the bombs in their barracks. Once a bomb fell right on the camp territory, hit the barrack, they were overwhelmed by the collapsed walls.

When they were informed about the camp evacuation, Vera Stepanovna and other seven people were bent on breach of prison – they had cut a hole in the barbed wire, had prepared arms. She was a contact. There were vast flower plantations behind the camp which they used while escaping the camp. Then they had to get over a few bridges which the Germans had prepared for explosion, being wary of the allies’ arrival. Somehow, they managed to run over. And during three days they were lying low under bombing in a tube under the mound. After the firefight they walked out to a town into the allies’ camp, were transferred to the special department in a filtration camp where they were interrogated about who was who, where from and what everyone did on the territory of Germany. Everybody was seen as a public enemy, a traitor, a deserter. They also worked in the camp: did the laundry for soldiers.

When they learnt about the Victory, their joy knew no limits, they dreamed of being back home as soon as possible, to get to know about their parents’ fate, but only in 1946 Vera Stepanovna made it into Russia. She got married, brought up children, worked as a postwoman for a long time. Now Vera Stepanovna enjoys a well-earned rest. She recollects the years spent behind the barbed wire as a terrible dream that one wishes to forget as soon as possible.

I’d also like to narrate about another prisoner of concentration camp:

Kochetova.Olga Mironovna

Olga Mironovna was born in the Ukraine, in a collective farm Medvina located not far from Kiev in the family of Miron Sarapukha. The village was occupied by fascists, and police raids began. During the first raid her elder sister Agafya was gone, during the second one her brother Nikolay vanished, too. And when the fascists started ransacking the houses and homesteads for the third time, she sheltered herself from it. Yet, the fascists grabbed Olga’s fifty-year-old mother – Ulyana Nikiforovna Saparukha - as a pawn. Mum had to be bailed out, and Olga left her shelter. She and many other residents of this village and of many other ones were shepherded onto a train and forwarded to the west.

Only at a transit point, where she met her fellow villagers that had been interned before, where she saw them being hungry, frozen in the autumn wet wind, where, almost unconsciously she unwrapped her tiny bundle with miserable edibles and gave all to these people, she understood eventually that a great disaster had come. What was to be done? What was to be done? Suddenly she saw her girl companion jumping off from the other truck. Now the small resolute girl already knew the answer. And a moment later she was winging her way down the track slope… It was at the station Pepel. She impulsively jumped to her feet and broke into a run. A burst of machine-gun fire arose.

-Down!

The command sounded in Russian, and she, obeying it, pressed herself into the ground. She never knew how much time had passed, then steps were heard. She opened her eyes. In front of her there was a German standing, a soldier from the custodial guard of the Russian prisoners-of-war. It was someone from them who had shouted to her: ”Down!”

-Schnell! Schnell! –cried the soldier making her understand with his boot. She had to rise and the soldier showed her to step aside. Almost nearby her a woman friend was lying, with her hand twisted under the body in an unnatural way and her head thrown back… Olga Mironovna was not shot, she was carried away to Fastov town and sent to prison.

In the ward, with a bare iron bed and a heap of ashes in the corner, Olga saw a woman.

-Don’t cry, - she said strictly, - This isn’t time to cry now. We have to cheer up. We have to make a search for the way out.

“Can I ever get out of here?” – Olga was thinking all night and the next day. A day later she was sent to the Kiev camp where again there were a lot of people driven together for transportation to Germany.

She got into a leaky barrack where it was as cold as outside. The Germans had been keeping Soviet citizens in this shed while it was late autumn already.

How much time was she to stay there? She never knew, and she fell ill. One day she felt a little bit better, and nearby she saw a teen-age girl who gave her a smile. They became friends.

One day the girls paid attention to a young police guard. He looked somewhat like of the kin, regardless of the police arm band. There was something about him that gained her good feeling. And she, together with her barrack friend, ventured on. The guy appeared to be yielding, and his prompt regained their freedom. Late at night he “didn’t see” how they rolled a chock up to the barbed wire, how they chucked old clothes onto the iron barbs, how, getting abraded, they got over the hateful fence. The girl knew where and how to hide, most likely being a local. Olga safely got to the railway station, and there almost clinging to each little hump, to each box for lubricants and waste cloth standing between the rails, sheltering herself by each post and indicator, she picked her way to a German freight train with tanks on it. There were guard forces on it. She was incredibly, inexplicably lucky but she guessed its direction, managed to get on a platform and shelter among boxes with either equipment or something else. On this troop train she returned home.

The first, most difficult winter under occupation passed. In spring people were driven to the fields - the fascist army also needed to eat.

In 1945 the Great Victory came. Her sister and brother returned from Germany. Only her father, who was enrolled to the active army straight after evacuation of the major facilities of his collective farm, never came back. He defended Stalingrad and perished at the approaches of the city.

Olga Mironovna finished school. After liberation she decided to become an agronomist, following the labor way of her parents. After graduation she was sent to Siberia. That was how Olga Mironovna found herself in the collective farm “Rossiya”. Olga Mironovna Kochetova worked both as an ordinary agronomist and also as a chief one, as well as an agronomist-vegetable grower. She had great victories in her working biography, and she also had misfortunes which she tried to overcome. But every time, when telling her children her life story, she recollected the occupation, the chattering of the car wheels and the question: where and why, where and why?

Now Olga Mironovna is no more with us, but the narration of her life searing by the horror of war is strongly kept in the memory of her daughter Svetlana.

[link] Data on the author

Mashkova J.I.- pupil 8 “D” cl., Sc. No.63, 664029, Irkutsk, 38, Tereshkova str.,

e-mail: Demidova- [email protected]

Data on the scientific adviser

Demidova S.S.- teacher of English, Sc. No.63, 664029, Irkutsk, 38, Tereshkova str., e-mail: Demidova - [email protected]