Nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten: 602 fallen soldiers, found by volunteers, rest near St. Petersburg

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

On the eve of May 9, a group of volunteers reburied the remains of 602 World War II soldiers they had found on the banks of the Neva River. About 200,000 Soviet soldiers died in those parts, and many of them remained where death overtook them, and were never properly buried. And only now, seven decades later, the victims were finally able to find peace, and the relatives finally learned what happened to their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

The remains of the soldiers were found by volunteers in the Leningrad region. In that war, Russia lost about 11 million soldiers and about 20 million civilians, four million of whom have never been found. This is a huge number of people who simply went missing, about whom neither relatives nor former colleagues know anything, and it is this fact that prompted the volunteers to independently search for the remains of the dead soldiers in order to bury them properly.

People gathered in Sinyavino, near St. Petersburg, to pay tribute to the fallen soldiers. Unfortunately, it was not always possible to find completely preserved skeletons; from some fighters only individual bones remained. It was decided to bury the soldier in 41 coffins, upholstered with bright red cloth.

During excavations, one of the search groups found a pendant with a preserved name inside, written on a piece of paper. Despite the fragility of the find, the volunteers managed to read the name of the deceased soldier - it turned out to be Ivan Shagichev. The volunteers contacted his relatives and informed them about Ivan's fate, giving them the opportunity to finally bury him properly. “I cried and cried, I don't even know how to describe it, - says Ivan's daughter, Tamara Zhukova. - I have never seen my father, but for me it is so important that he was finally found and that now there will be a place, where can I go and talk to him. Tamara's father went to the front even before she was born herself (September 1, 1941). All her life Tamara did not know about the fate of Ivan, and only now it became clear that he had died only two months after being drafted.

Photos of military correspondents from the fronts of the Great Patriotic War can be seen in our selection "We brought this day closer as we could."