Today marks the 100th birthday anniversary of my grandma Lidia Yefimovna Sokolik (nee Alekseeva). She was born near Dorogobuzh in Smolensk Region on October 1, 1924. Ten years later the family moved t...
My Family [This section enlists all of the Alekseev family by name, including some biographical information. – JD] I was evacuated with my father, Efim Semyonovich Alekseev (1890-1964), and my m...
The End of Evacuation, and the Victory (Autumn 1942 — May 9, 1945). My elder brother Leonid helped us to get a permission to return from evacuation in summer 1942. During a waiting period at one of th...
Evacuation, November 1941 — August 1942. When we arrived to the village called Murashi, many evacuee families went to the kolkhoz. We could not go because of our disabled mother, so we stayed in the v...
The Road to Evacuation. I had joined the medical brigade, and I was given the overalls, a hat and an anti-gas mask. On 11 October 1941 we heard that Medyn [a town to the north off Borovsk] was already...
Disclaimer: This memoire of a life during the Great Patriotic War in Russia was dictated by my grandmother, Lydia Sokolik, in 2006. I submitted this story to the BBC’s WW2 People’s War arc...
Although I don’t normally use this blog to write anything too personal, this is the day when I would like to do so. It is 9th May, and in Russia this is the state holiday – the Victory Day...