‘My breathing mom was among corpses’: Putin recalls his parents’ WWII ordeal
Published time: April 30, 2015 11:21
Vladimir Putin has written a column (something he very rarely does),
recalling the stories of his parents who survived the hardships of the
Leningrad blockade, his dead brother and World War II with very personal
details.
‘My dad was breathing
via a reed in a swamp while the Nazis passed by, just a few steps
away’
Putin’s father, Vladimir, joined a small sabotage group under the
People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), whose mission
was to blow up bridges and rail lines near St Petersburg (then
Leningrad), the Russian president recalled in his column in the “Russian
Pioneer” journal. Of the 28 members in the group, 24 died in
battles with the Nazis near St Petersburg.
One day, German soldiers were chasing them in the woods. Putin’s
father survived because he hid in a swamp for several hours.
“And he [Putin’s father] said that, when submerged in the
swamp and breathing through a reed, he heard German soldiers
passing by, just a few steps away from him and he heard dogs
barking.”
His father recalled how he sustained an injury, which invalided
him for the rest of his life because he had to live with parts of
a grenade in his leg.
Putin-Sr was making a sortie behind Nazi lines together with his
fellow fighters. However, they suddenly encountered a German
soldier.
"The man looked at us carefully. He took a grenade, then
another, and threw them at us,” Putin recalls his father’s
words.
"Life is such a simple thing and cruel,” the Russian
president concluded.
When Putin’s father woke up, he couldn’t walk and there was
another problem – he had to reach his group stationed on the
other bank of the vast Neva River which was frozen.
“The Neva was constantly monitored and exposed to fire by
artillery and machine guns. There was almost no way of reaching
the opposite bank.”
However, by chance Putin-Sr met his neighbor, who despite enemy
fire managed to get him to a local hospital. The fragments of the
grenade were lodged in his leg and the doctors preferred not to
touch them in order to save the limb.
The neighbor waited for him [Putin-Sr] in the hospital, and after
seeing that his surgery had been successful he told him: "All
right, now you're going to live, and I am heading off to
die."
However, they both survived the war, though Putin’s father
thought his savior had been dead for a decade. In the 60s, they
met by chance in a shop and there was a tearful reunion.
‘My brother died from diphtheria during the Leningrad blockade’
Putin’s elder brother was born during World War II. To support
his little son, Putin’s father secretly passed his own hospital
rations to his wife. But when he started to faint in the hospital
“doctors and nurses understood what was happening,” said
Putin, recalling his parents’ stories.
The child was taken from the family by the authorities and put in
a foster home from where he was set to be evacuated.
“He fell ill there [the foster home] - my mother said it was
diphtheria - and didn’t survive. And they were not even told
where he was buried. They were never told.”
It was only last year that Putin managed to find information
about his brother and where he was buried.
“And this was my brother,” wrote Putin. “Not only
the address where he was taken but the name, surname, and date of
birth all matched. He was buried in Piskarevsky cemetery [in St.
Petersburg]. And even a specific area was mentioned.”
‘Among the bodies my dad saw my mom’
When Putin’s mother was on her own – her son was taken and her
husband was still in hospital – she got sick. The medics
considered her almost dead and were transporting her with other
bodies for burial. As luck would have it, Putin’s father made a
timely return from the hospital.
“When he [Putin-Sr] came to the house, he saw the medics were
carrying corpses. And he saw my mother. He came closer and it
seemed to him that she was breathing. ‘She's still alive!’,"
he told the medics.
They insisted she would soon die, but he refused to listen to
them, and instead attacked them with his crutches.
“And he took care of her. She lived,” the Russian
president wrote. His parents died at the end of the 90s.
‘My parents didn’t harbor any hatred for the enemy’
Every single family lost loved ones in this war, Putin said.
“But they [Putin’s family] had no hatred for the enemy,
that's amazing. To be honest, I still cannot fully understand
this.”
He remembered the words of his mother, who said she didn’t hate
the German soldiers as they “were common people and were also
killed in the war.”
The Lies Grow More Audacious — Paul Craig Roberts
June 6, 2014 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
The Lies Grow More Audacious
Paul Craig Roberts
If there were any doubts that Western “leaders” live in a fantasy
make-believe world constructed out of their own lies, the G-7 meeting
and 70th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landing dispelled the
doubts.
The howlers issuing from these occasions are enough to split your
sides. Obama and his lap dog Cameron described the Normandy landing on
June 6, 1944, as “the greatest liberation force that the world has ever
known” and took all the credit for the US and Britain for the defeat of
Hitler. No mention was made of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which for three years prior to the Normandy landing had been fighting and defeating the Wehrmacht.
The Germans lost World War II at the Battle of Stalingrad, which was
fought from August 23, 1942 until February 2, 1943, when most of the
remnants of the powerful German Sixth Army surrendered, including 22
generals.
Nineteen months previously the largest invasion force ever assembled
on planet earth invaded Russia across a one thousand mile front. Three million
crack German troops; 7,500 artillery units, 19 panzer divisions with
3,000 tanks, and 2,500 aircraft rolled across Russia for 14 months.
By June 1944, three years later, very little of this force was left.
The Red Army had chewed it up. When the so-called “allies” (a term
which apparently excludes Russia) landed in France, there was little to
resist them. The best forces remaining to Hitler were on the Russian
front, which collapsed day by day as the Red Army approached Berlin.
The Red Army won the war with Germany. The Americans and the British
showed up after the Wehrmacht was exhausted and in tatters and could
offer little resistance. Joseph Stalin believed that Washington and
London stayed out of the war until the last minute and left Russia with
the burden of defeating Germany.
Hollywood and popular writers have, of course, buried the facts.
Americans have all sorts of movies, such as “A Bridge Too Far,” that
portray insignificant events, however heroic, as turning points in the
war. Nevertheless, the facts are clear. The war was won on the Eastern
front by Russia. Hollywood’s movies are fun, but they are nonsense.
Russia is again on the outs with “the world community,” because
Obama’s plan to seize Ukraine and to evict Russia from its Black Sea
base in Crimea has come a cropper. Crimea has been a part of Russia for
as long as the US has existed. Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, stuck Crimea
into the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in 1954 when Russia and Ukraine
were part of the same country.
When the Washington-imposed stooge government in Kiev recently
declared that it was abolishing the use of the Russian language and
arresting Ukrainians who had dual Russian citizenship and began tearing
down Russian war memorials consecrated to the liberation of Ukraine from
the Nazis, the people in Crimea used the ballot box to disassociate
from Washington’s stooge government in Kiev, first voting their
independence and then voting for reunification with their mother
country.
Washington, and the other G-7 countries following Washington’s
orders, described this Crimean act of self-determination, which is
exactly comparable to the act of self-determination declared by
Britain’s American colonies, to be a case of “Russian invasion and
annexation.” Similar efforts to disassociate from Kiev are underway in
other former Russian territories that today comprise eastern and
southern Ukraine. Washington has equated self-determination in eastern
and southern Ukraine with “terrorism” and has encouraged its stooge in
Kiev to use military violence against protesting civilians. The reason
for branding separatists “terrorists” is to make it OK to kill them.
It is extraordinary to any learned person that the President of the
United States and the titular heads of state of the Western European
countries would publicly declare such blatant lies to the world. The
world has historians. The world has peoples whose knowledge vastly
exceeds that of the “mainstream media,” a.k.a., the Ministry of
Propaganda, or, as Gerald Celente brands them, “the presstitutes.”
Whatever name we use, the Western media is a collection of well paid
whores.They lie for money, dinner party invitations, and speaking
invitations with large honorariums and book contracts with large
advances.
I know. They tried to recruit me.
Notice how narrowly Washington defines “the world community.” The
“world community” consists of the Group of 7. That’s it. Seven
countries make up the “world community.” The “world community” consists
of six white countries and Washington’s puppet state of Japan. The
“world community” is the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy,
and Japan. The other 190 countries are not part of Washington’s “world
community.” In the neocon doctrine, they are not even part of humanity.
The “world community” doesn’t have the population of single excluded
countries, such as China or India. I haven’t done the calculation, but
probably the land mass of Russia itself exceeds the land mass of the
“world community.”
So, what is this “world community?”
The “world community” is the assemblage of US vassal states.
Britain, France, and Germany were important on the 20th century scene.
Their histories are studied in universities. The populations had a
decent standard of living, although not for all citizens. Their past is
the reason for their present importance.
In effect, these countries were propelled forward by history, or by
the history important to the West. Japan, being an appendage of
Washington, has tried to become “western.” It is extraordinary how such
a proud, war-like people became nothing.
As I have finally stopped laughing at the presumed non-role of Russia
in the defeat of Hitler, let’s return to the G-7 meeting. The Big
Happening of this meeting was Russia’s exclusion and the shrinkage of
the G-8 to the G-7.
This was the first time in 17 years that Russia was not allowed to participate in the meeting of which Russia is a member. Why?
Russia is being punished. Russia is being isolated from the 7
countries that the White House Fool thinks constitute “the world
community.”
Obama is angry that his National Security Council and the morons he
appointed to the State Department and UN were so poorly educated that
they did not know that much of the Ukraine consists of former Russian
provinces inhabited by Russians. These ignorant Obama-appointed morons
thought that they could grab Crimea, evict Russia, and leave Russia
without access to the Mediterranean, thus unable to hold on to its naval
base in Tartus, Syria, the easier for Washington to invade Syria.
Crimea has been part of Russia since Russia completed the reconquest
from the Tartars. I remember the Tarter, or Tater, ethnics from my visit
to Tamerlane the Great’s (Timur as he was also known) tomb in Samarkand
53 years ago. Today Tamerlane’s city is refurbished as a tourist site.
53 years ago it was a desolate place in ruins, overgrown with trees
growing out of the tops of the minarets.
As Obama’s plan to seize Ukraine failed, like every one of his other
plans has failed, Washington’s spokesmen for the vested private
interests have seized on the opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia
and to restart the Cold War. Obama and his Group of 7 puppets or
vassals used the occasion to threaten Russia with real sanctions, in
place of the present propaganda sanctions that have no effect.
According to Obama and his British lap dog, Putin must somehow prevent
the Russian populations of eastern and southern Ukraine from protesting
their subservience to a neo-fascist government in Kiev backed by
Washington, or else.
Putin is supposed to embrace the Oligarch, a former minister of the
government that Washington overthrew, put in office by a fake vote in
which turnout was a small percent of the population. Putin is supposed
to kiss this corrupt Oligarch on both cheeks, pay Ukraine’s natural gas
bills and forgive its debts. In addition, Russia is supposed to
repudiate the Crimean people, evict them from their re-unity with Russia
and hand them over to the neo-Nazi Right Sector to be eliminated as
retribution for Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany, for whom some
Western Ukrainians fought. In exchange, Washington and NATO will put
anti-ballistic missile bases on Ukraine’s border with Russia in order to
protect Europe from nonexistent Iranian nuclear ICBMs.
This is supposed to be a win-win deal for Russia.
The Obama regime used its well-paid NGOs in Ukraine to overthrow an
elected, democratic government, a government no more corrupt than those
in Western or Eastern Europe or Washington.
The political morons who have England, France, Germany, and Italy in
their hands are wagging their fists at Russia, warning of more, this
time real, sanctions. Do these morons really want their energy
supplies cut off? There is no prospect, despite the propagandistic
claims, of Washington supplying the energy on which Germany industry
depends and on which Europeans depend so that they do not freeze in the
winter.
Sanctions on Russia will wreck Europe and have little, if any, effect
on Russia. Russia is already moving, with China and the BRICS, outside
the dollar payments mechanism.
As the demand for dollars drops, the dollar’s exchange value will
drop. Initially, Washington will be able to force its vassals to
support the dollar, but eventually this will become impossible.
What the White House Fool, the neoconized National Security Council,
the presstitute media, and subservient Congress are doing is to support
and uphold the policies based on hubris and arrogance that are leading
the US into the abyss.
An abyss is like a black hole. You don’t get out.
Washington’s lies are so blatant and transparent that Washington is
destroying its own credibility. Consider the NSA spying. Documents
released by Snowden and Greenwald make it completely clear that
Washington spies not only on government leaders and ordinary people but
also on foreign businesses in order to advance US commercial and
financial interests. That the US steals Chinese business secrets is not
in doubt. So what does Washington do? Washington not only denies what
the documents prove but turns the charge around and indicts five
Chinese generals for spying on US corporations.
The only purpose of these indictments hyped by the US attorney
general is propaganda.The indictments are otherwise totally meaningless,
not merely false. China is not about to turn over five Chinese
generals to the liars in Washington. For the presstitute media the
story is a way to move the NSA’s spying out of the spotlight. China is
substituted for the NSA as the guilty party.
Why doesn’t China, Brazil, Germany and every other country issue
arrest warrants for NSA’s top officials, for Obama, and for the members
of the congressional oversight committee? Why do other countries always
allow Washington to control the explanation with propaganda first
strikes?
Americans are very susceptible to propaganda. They seem to have a
special taste for it. Consider the hate whipped up against Sgt. Bowe
Bergdahl, a US soldier just released by the Taliban in a prisoner
exchange with the US. The hatred and bloodlust that the presstitute
media have whipped up against Bergdahl has caused his hometown to cancel
the celebration of his release. The press engineered hatred of Bergdahl
has spilled over into threats against Hailey, Idaho.
What is the basis for the attacks on Bergdahl? Apparently, the
answer is that Bergdahl, like pro-football star Pat Tillman who turned
down a $3.6 million contract to join the Army Rangers and go to defend
freedom in Afghanistan, came down with a case of doubts about the war.
Originally Pat Tillman’s death was attributed to his heroic action and
enemy fire. Then it emerged that Tillman was a victim of “friendly
fire.” Many concluded that he was murdered, because the government did
not want a sports hero speaking out about the war. As Bergdahl is off
the battlefield, he has to be murdered in the press–like Russia, China,
Iran, Putin, Assad, Crimeans, and the Russian-speaking population in
Ukraine.
In America hate and the cultivation of hate is alive and well. But not a single moral virtue is.
