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Video: How a 23-year-old teacher saved more than 3,000 children during World War II
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In August 1942, an echelon arrived at the station of the city of Gorky (today - Nizhny Novgorod), which included almost 60 heating plants, each with children. Young teacher Matryona Volskaya was able to take more than three thousand children of different ages out of the Smolensk region. She herself at the time of the operation, called "Children", was only 23 years old, and Matryona Volskaya was helped by two of her peers, a teacher and a nurse.
Hot summer of 1942
That year the situation in the Smolensk region was very tense. The villages of the Demidov and Dukhovshchinsky regions constantly passed from hand to hand, and in parallel there were active hostilities. The partisan unit "Batya" was led by Nikifor Kolyada, who learned that a serious operation was being prepared against the partisans by the Germans. This threatened not only the partisans, but also the local residents. During the secondary occupation, children and adolescents living in the Smolensk region could be deported to Germany. It was decided to save them in the first place.
Nikifor Kolyada ordered the partisans to develop a route for the withdrawal of children from the Eliseevichs to the Toropets station. At the same time, the task was difficult, because it was necessary to go through forests and swamps, through minefields, by narrow paths along the road, called the Sloboda Gate. In addition, it was necessary to agree with the headquarters of the 4th Shock Army on assistance in sending many children and determine food points for them.
The head of the partisan unit recruited Matryona Volskaya, who was barely 23 years old, to Operation Children, and appointed her assistants Varvara Polyakova and Ekaterina Gromova, a teacher and nurse.
Operation Children
The trek began on 23 July 1942. All the children were assigned to impromptu detachments, up to fifty in each, identifying children of different ages in them, so that the older children could look after the younger ones. Children had to move around at night in order not to attract the attention of the Germans. During the day they were housed in the woods and rested, and at night they walked to the station. Matryona Volskaya went 20-30 km ahead to scout the situation ahead, not wanting to endanger the children.
And her charges, despite their age, showed miracles of discipline. As soon as they heard the commands "Air", they scattered over the ravines and hollows, hiding in ditches and bushes. The most difficult thing was with water and food. The summer was very hot, and the water in almost all rivers and wells was not suitable for drinking - the Germans threw the bodies of the dead there.
Food quickly ran out, and all the participants in the hike switched to pasture: they ate sorrel and berries, dandelion and plantain, fleeing hunger. While they were moving towards the goal, the number of Matryona Volskaya's wards almost doubled - children from the settlements lying on the way constantly poured into the column.
The transition took 11 days, and on August 2 the children came to the Toropets station. After 12 days, the train arrived in the city of Gorky. There, the children, of whom there were 3225, according to the act of acceptance, were distributed to educational institutions, where they were trained in production specialties, and soon they already started work and began to help the front.
Subsequently, many of them remained in their second homeland and called themselves "Smolensk Nizhny Novgorod". She stayed in the village of Smolkovo, Gorodetsky district, and Matryona Volskaya, worked as a primary school teacher, and her assistants returned to the Smolensk region after the war. In total, more than 13.5 thousand children and adolescents were saved from the partisan lands in the Smolensk region, and Matryona Volskaya's large detachment was the first.
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