On Victory Day, remembering an ally's WWII losses

Jan Sherbin

co-owns Glasnost Communications in Cincinnati, an American/Russian language and culture bridge

American troops are among the 10,000 people in Sunday's Victory Day parade in Moscow, a month after the signing of the historic Russian-American arms-reduction treaty. "We Won Together" is the Russian slogan on this 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Although the Soviets and Americans were ideological enemies before, during, and after World War II, we were allies in fighting the Nazis.

The two nations may have won a common victory, but our war experiences were vastly different. That explains why Victory Day is a highly emotional public holiday in Russia while not even listed on many calendars in the United States. It is time to refresh ourselves on what happened during the war.

Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with the intent to annihilate it. Loss of life was staggering; about 27 million Soviet people died, half of them civilians. Thirteen million Soviet soldiers lost their lives, compared with about 400,000 American troops. "We lost too many people, and it is difficult to forget it," says Yevgeny Martemyanov, who lives in Moscow. In 1944, the Soviet army liberated his mother's village in the Ukraine and drafted all the boys in her class. "Only one of them came back, and without an eye. All the rest were killed in action."

Vladimir Sosnitskiy's mother left home in southern Russia to go to the front at age 16 as a reconnaissance scout. "She got wounded and carried to a roadside to be picked up by medical orderlies," he said. "She was unconscious for a month. When she came to, she learned that her entire battalion had been wiped out in one week."

Where fighting occurred in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, "World War II is a living memory because in practically every family someone was killed in that war," says Larisa Nikitenko of north-central Ukraine.

Death occurred in residential areas as well as on the battlefield. Germans bombed and set fire to thousands of cities and villages, often with the residents still in them. They hanged civilians and left their bodies dangling on apartment buildings. In a rural village in occupied Belorussia in 1943, Vladimir Holubev's grandparents were shot to death. "The saddest thing is that my mom's infant brother was killed with them," he said. "My mom, 1 year old, survived, miraculously, hidden by her grandmother."

The Germans burned crops and livestock and confiscated food from homes. People ground up tree bark and boiled weeds to survive, and many died of starvation. Hunger persisted after war's end.

These memories, passed by survivors to children and grandchildren, haunt the collective Slavic soul. Tears flow on Victory Day, says Natalia Golovanova of Kupyansk, in eastern Ukraine. "Men, children - everybody - when they hear a speech or a song about the war or watch a movie about those who defended the Motherland or speak with veterans."

As in the United States, living memories of the war are disappearing quickly in Russia. That is why, on this 65th anniversary of Victory Day, cities are paying special attention. The authorities will give veterans a bowl of cooked grains and a shot of vodka, symbolic of wartime rations, and children will give them flowers. People will flock to war monuments to place flowers in remembrance of soldiers killed in the war and veterans who survived it.

Holubev, who lives in Minsk, Belarus, but visits the site of his grandparents' death annually, knows why Victory Day does not generate the same emotional intensity in the United States: "Americans will never understand what it means to lose people by the millions."

"We do not want this kind of horror to happen ever again," says Valeria Rusyn of Uzhgorod, in western Ukraine.

We do not need a treaty to agree on that.