Although one of the brothers had a leg severed and four were seriously injured, this story can be considered a miracle. During the great patriotic war, 10 sons of the Ukrainian collective farmer Yevdokija Lysenko went to the front. And when it ended, everyone went home!
During the war - according to official data - 28 million citizens died, although historians believe that the number of victims may be as high as 40 million! It was not uncommon for one family to lose even a few of its members.
An ordinary Soviet family
The Łysenko family consisted of mother Yevdokiya and father Makar and 16 children:11 sons and 5 daughters. They lived in the village of Browachy in the Cherkassy region.
In many respects the fate of the Lysenk family was similar to that of thousands of Soviet families . In the 1920s, they owned a large farm:a house, 7 ha of land, horses, sheep and cows. But at the end of that decade, collectivization began in the USSR. Łysenków was considered kulaks.
First, they were persuaded to join a kolkhoz, and when the family refused, the state nationalized their property and gave them a small house in a neighboring village. In order to save their own and their children's lives, Makar and Yevdokiya joined a collective farm.
In 1933, my father died. Three years later, one of the sons, Jwatuch, who left for the Far East to work, disappeared without a trace.
War:triumphs and tragedies
When the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, all the brothers - except for 14-year-old Alexander - were of legal age. Feodosij was 30 years old and worked as a coachman in a kolkhoz. Stepan was a driver, Paweł a shepherd, Vasily worked on a construction site ... Even Alexander, who was employed in a forge, was not idle.
The brothers expressed their readiness to join the army. Mikhail was the first to go to the front. Before he left the family home, his mother baked him bread and gave him a handful of his native soil - This is how Yevdokiya later said goodbye to all her sons.
Mikhail fought in an infantry unit, found himself in the famous Korsun cauldron, received an award for setting fire to a fascist headquarters in one of the Ukrainian villages. He was captured near the town of Kaniów, from where he managed to escape. After reaching his own, he ended up in the hospital. In 1944, after recovering, he returned to the front.
Incredible as it seems, in August 1944, Mikhail met his brother Feodosiy during the Jasco-Chisinau operation in August 1944. . He and a few friends were about to go on a reconnaissance expedition, when he suddenly saw that Feodosij was sitting in the trench. He ran to the trench, jumped to it, and hugged him. "In an instant, the fatigue is gone somewhere" - Mikhail recalled years later.
At the end of the war, Mikhail was in Hungary. Unfortunately, he was seriously injured in the chest at that time. He came home crippled with the Order of Glory. Feodosij was less fortunate because he lost a leg. He reported:
I remember my leg being severed. I was taken out of the battlefield, I screamed in pain and fear . A doctor came up to me:“Why are you screaming? You can live and work without a leg. A soldier has lost his eyes a moment ago, he has the right to scream ”. And then I thought - indeed, someone is worse off. I didn't scream anymore (…). After that, I only cried once - when I came back from the front without my leg and my mother started to sob and hug me.
The shortest - only a month - was Nikolai at the front. The young man was seriously injured in the legs, and after hospitalization, he was considered unfit for military service. Nikolai returned home. Then Andrei came to his native village. He, in turn, first ended up in forced labor in Germany, from where he escaped and joined the Red Army, was wounded in today's Moldova, and then in 1944 he was sent home.
Paweł also ended up in Germany as a forced laborer. He was liberated by the soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front and Paweł joined one of the Soviet units. Stepan's tank was on fire near Smolensk, then the man was badly wounded in East Prussia. After he was cured, he was sent to the Far East to war with Japan.
Sons at the mother's statue. Photo:Yuri Rost.
Aleksander, deputy platoon commander, was the only brother to reach Berlin, where he left his signature on the Reichstag wall. He recalled such an episode from his stay in the German capital - one day he and his subordinates ate a meal consisting of bread and carcass. Suddenly, a skinny German girl appeared in front of the Soviet soldiers and stared at them with hungry eyes. Alexander then gave her some food and began explaining to the soldiers about his actions. The subordinates were indignant:"What are you, commander, what are you saying, are we not human ?!".
Epilogue
Interestingly, when the sons began to return home, Yevdokiya did not always recognize them. This is because the brothers physically changed a lot during the war years:they were emaciated, aged, hairy . The men, however, made efforts to return to normal life and quickly found each other wives. Their sisters also got married. Jewdokija became the grandmother of 36 grandchildren!
Soon the news of an extraordinary family and mother of 10 war heroes reached Kiev. The authorities of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic decided to award the woman with the Golden Star of the heroine's mother. When Yevdokiya was invited to Kiev, she got scared because she had never even been to the county town. The visit to the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic made a great impression on her - while receiving the award, she only cried and wiped her tears with a handkerchief. Until the end of her days, she remembered the honors shown her by party dignitaries.
Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to award Yevdokiya Lysenko the title of mother-heroine.
Yevdokiya died in 1967 at the age of 74. After her death, an article about the mother of the heroine and a photo of her 10 sons appeared in the popular Literaturnoj Gazeta. The author of the text, Yuri Rost, called for a statue of Mrs. Lysenko to be erected. In 1984, it was unveiled, and all the children of Yevdokiya appeared at the ceremony, except for Vasily, who had died not long before. Fifteen trees were planted around the monument in honor of all the woman's children.
A museum of the Lysenko family was established in the building of the village school. There are brothers' military coats, 9 pairs of military boots and one Feodosiya boot. The guests are shown by Jana, Jewdokija's great-granddaughter.