8/2/07
World War II from the other side … one woman’s recollections
By Konstantin Vengerowsky

KONSTANTIN VENGEROWSKY/Manning Times

Elena Milostanova shares her recollections of World War II in the former Soviet Union. In her hand she holds an official document claiming her active participation in the war, given to all war veterans in the former Soviet Union, allowing them lifetime free use of the public transportation system.

(Ed. Note: Manning Times intern Konstantin Vengerowsky is a native of the Ukraine and his grandmother is here in Clarendon County for a visit. We feel lucky to have this first hand account of World War II from someone who is not an American, a view we rarely get.)

Sleeping in a small hut with ten other girls near Stalingrad … that’s one thing my grandmother, Elena Ivanovna Milostanova, remembers the most when recalling her days in the war.

Originally from Kharkov, Ukraine, she was on a beach in Riga, Latvia, when she first heard about the invasion. Her father was a colonel in the Soviet Army and had been relocated to Riga when Hitler and Stalin signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. This pact gave the Soviets the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania on the condition that Stalin would not try to invade Poland and stay out of the war in general.

On June 21, 1941, Hitler broke the pact by launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

“I had just graduated from high school and was on a trip with my class on the gulf of the Baltic Sea,” she recalled. “We were on the beach and saw an airplane go down, thinking it was a terrible accident. Then a boy from our class came over and told us that the war had started.”

Being the family of a military officer, my grandma, her mom and her sister were allowed to travel in the back of a military truck headed east away from the front. On June 29, just as they were leaving the city of Pskov, they met a German military patrol.

“The woman with us spoke fluent German,” my grandmother recalls. “They just asked where we were going, and why. We replied that we were Russians, just heading home. They acted very politely and let us through.”

My grandmother and her family were then relocated to Kazan on the Volga River, about 300 miles east of Moscow. She would study at the medical university, and then work at a hospital helping out with the wounded during the day. At night she worked as a telephone operator at a tank repair factory. Like in America, food rationing was very strict as everything went to the war effort. People were issued rationing cards with which they could receive the minimal amount of food they needed for survival.

“Students received 500 grams (about 18 ounces) of bread per day,” my grandma recalled. “Factory workers received more, 800 grams (about 28 ounces), that is why I started working there.”

Another reason was the factory had a cafeteria which served some hot food; most other places did not.
My grandmother’s war adventures continued in 1942, when she was sent with her class to dig trenches in Stalingrad.

“We stayed in some huts on a farm outside the city. There were 10 girls in our hut and every morning we would be sent on trucks to dig trenches,” she recalled. “Two girls got to stay and help the cook, I was glad when I was one of those girls.”

Grandmother’s trench digging experiences lasted only two weeks, as the Battle of Stalingrad was soon to begin. The battle, which claimed the lives of over 2 million soldiers from both sides, is considered to be one of the turning points of World War II. It lasted 199 days and pretty much demolished the whole city with street fighting and battling for every millimeter. In the end, the Axis lost 850,000 men to either death or captivity, while the Soviets lost about 1.2 million. After the victory by the Soviets, the Germans were on the retreat for the rest of the war.

My grandmother luckily was not involved in the battle, as she and her class were sent back to Kazan before it had begun. There she married my grandfather, Vadim Nikolayevich Milostanov, who was a cadet at the Navy Medical Academy, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His father was a colonel in the Soviet Army and head surgeon of the 2nd Baltic Front, during the war. He was involved in both the Battle of Stalingrad as well as the liberation of Austria.

My grandmother clearly remembers that joyous day when the war ended, on May 9, 1945. “I was in Leningrad in my apartment,” she recalled. “My husband rushed up the stairs and with a joyous voice said ‘You know the war is over.’ There were huge celebrations on the main square and throughout the city.”

When I asked what she thought of the war in general, my grandma simply said:

“It’s good that it ended and that we came out alive. A lot of people were far worse off.”