On the Victory Stories website, you can find more than 260 stories about those who served at the front or were a home front worker during the Great Patriotic War, written by their relatives or themselves. Everything is in these stories: the difficult fighting path of the war veterans, the despair of the prisoners of concentration camps, and the deprivation of families on the lands occupied by Hitler troops - as well as courage, hope, love.
“Grandfather was shell-shocked and sent to a hospital (in what is now Russia). Grandmother, seeing him, fell in love at first sight! Then she told me that she had never seen such a handsome man in her life. She went out of it. And they randomly parted, not giving each other either an address or any data, ”writes Angelina Margaryan about her grandparents Gregory and Theodosia Margaryan. - A few months later, my grandfather gets on a medical train already in the city of Riga. And since his head was bandaged, his grandmother recognized him by his voice. And they met again and never parted. "
“An amazing story happened at the end of the war,” says Lyudmila Kraineva in a letter about her uncle Fedor Tyulenev. - April 30, 1945 near Berlin, his plane was shot down and crashed in a neutral strip. The commander Tyulenev is unconscious, the shooter pulled him and drags him, he himself does not know where. It turned out that drags towards the Germans. They are silent, do not shoot, they think that the pilots themselves will now fall into their trenches. At that time, three of our tanks stood in ambush at the rear of the Germans in a grove to support our planned attack. The tank commander, seeing such a thing, jumps out of the ambush on the tank, picks up pilots, but does not have time to leave. The Germans knocked out a tank. Burning ... A second tank jumps out, picks up pilots and tankers, but also does not have time to leave, they also knock it out. And it was only on the third tank that pilots and tankers managed to escape. Victory met all together in the hospital. They lamented that they had not reached the Victory. ”
“Just getting older, I realized how brave, courageous and brave they are with grandfather,” writes Olga Voronova in a letter with a story about her grandmother, Lyubov Tchaikovskaya, who was a senior nurse during the war.
Among the stories were stories of cases of surprising luck and tragic death. There were also stories of long searches in which families tried to understand what happened to loved ones, where they were buried so that their memory could be honored.
Most letters end with a call to remember what horrors the war brings, to remember the exploits of the people and to keep the peace.
Together with the memoirs and personal archives, we publish a unique series of sketches of the artist Peter Bankov, which he created while working on the “Endless Letter” as part of the #Pobedy Victory project. Also on the site #Stories of Victory, a unique font “May” was used, developed by the team #Pages of Victory together with the Contrast Foundry studio. The prototype of each letter in the font “May” are real symbols inscribed by the hands of Soviet soldiers 75 years ago on the walls of the dilapidated Reichstag.
Created by young people and for young people, the #Pobedy Victory project tells the history of World War II through the prism of new media and digital art. The project was launched from January to May 2020 on five platforms on social networks: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, VKontakte and YouTube.
This year, RT also launched the #Post-Victory project, which collects the stories of those who survived the blockade of Leningrad, signed on the walls of the Reichstag, and sheltered Soviet soldiers escaping from concentration camps. With the help of the project # PochtaPobedy anyone could write letters to veterans, and the editors passed them these letters. We received several hundred messages from Russia, Belarus, Germany, the USA, China and other countries.