To Be Missing

Leonard Chepel

Description

It has been the darkest period in human history, when on September 01, 1939 the Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and the Soviet Union supported the invasion by attacking Poland from the east on September 17, 1939. Such was a beginning of the WWII with the Nazis fascists raiding the European countries and the USSR communists seizing the Baltic countries. My father was a pilot of an attack bomber Il-2, and he took off on 22 June 1941 to meet the Luftwaffe west of Kyiv. Then, one month later he flew a final combat sortie over Ukraine. Through the misty shades, the pilot noticed down the ground an enemy armor convoy and threw his bomber into a sharp-dive-attack, precisely hitting the target with heavy bombs. But, probably, it was too sharp, and the fuel in the tanks was very low quality to abort the inertia of such a steep descend. Ivan-pilot crash-landed on the field. The Soviets classified it as a fatal war casualty and called it “lost without news”. But he survived and was kept in a Nazi death camp, where he deceased in 1944. I have traced the father’s tragic path all through from the moment of his last sortie and then, in the manmade hell of captivity. Today, the people come to that once deadly place of Flossenburg in Bavaria and venerate the fallen in the war with hope that it will never happen again. But after 81 years, it again came to Ukraine, however, from the other side – from the east. The Russians suddenly invaded this country almost in the same way as they did it in Poland in 1939 and then, in Finland and the Baltic countries. And again, the Ukrainian life turned deadly with thousands and thousands killed and “to be missing”. The bell tolls for them all over in Ukraine. And that sad song-requiem of the 20th century about “Buchenwald alarm bells” has been resumed in the 21st century, resonating in this country, but under a new caption today – “Ukrainian alarm bells”.
* * *
, 1 1939 , 17 1939. , , . , - -2, 22 1941 , . . , . , , , . - . « ». , 1944. , . , , , . 81 , . , 1939 , . « ». . - 20- , « », 21- , – « ».

Sujets

• Histoire
• Russia
• Eastern
• History
• War
• Russie
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse UK
• Date de parution: 25 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798823080071
• Langue: English

Extrait

To be missing
 
 
 
 
LEONARD CHEPEL
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
AuthorHouse™ UK
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403 USA
www.authorhouse.co.uk
Phone: UK TFN: 0800 0148641 (Toll Free inside the UK)
UK Local: (02) 0369 56322 ([phone] from outside the UK)
 
 
 
 
 
© 2023 Leonard Chepel. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse 01/24/2023
 
ISBN: 979-8-8230-8008-8 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-8007-1 (e)
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Contents
Preface
I:On the Eve
II:Soft Black Soil
III:Road to Hell
IV:Anne’s Account
V:The Ghostly Past
Epilogue
 
For Fa ther

After graduation from a pilot military school.
(Restored from an old photograph, 1935–1936)
 
 
 
Requiem for My Father
A war … the war … the war …
And falling in attack a plane.
It was my father’s bomber-plane,
And the pilot’s feat was not in vain.
Preface
For the world, the story told here was just an insignificant episode in the distant, tempestuous past, about which so many accounts have been penned. But this is a special one about my father, a military pilot who, together with many millions of other combatants and simple people, experienced the catastrophic events of warfare almost seventy-five years ago. The people of the world called it the Second World War, while the society of one big northern country unanimously proclaimed it the “Great Patriotic War”. Such a passionate label was probably appropriate, considering the enormous costs and extraordinary sacrifice of compatriots, which was estimated by the rulers of that country to be more than 25 million human lives. It was the second Great Patriotic War for this country-empire, preceded by the war against Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, though nobody ever counted the enormous “patriotic” price of human lives for that war.
Neither the Russian tsars nor the subsequent Bolshevik-communist rulers were ever virtuous or trustworthy. The most realistic estimate of the death toll of the Second Great Patriotic War is that no fewer than 5 0 million people were dead or missing, and not only on the battlefields. The political chieftains of the country controlled not only the largest piece of the planet with 300 million subjects but also the biggest freezing prison in the world, Siberia, in which the zealot-communists hid and killed so-called disloyal elements and even true patriotic soldiers after the war. The last war destroyed the lives of many millions of people in that colossal country-empire once called the Soviet U nion.
My family has been just a miniscule part of those millions. In spring 1944, we received a message from a local military commissariat that our father had “gone missing” near Kyiv in July or August 1941. The military officials of this country have never classified such war casualties as “missing in action” (MIA), a combat casualty tag assigned in all civilized countries to combatants who have disappeared during wartime, as that would imply the individual may have been killed or captured. Instead, they acted as if my father, who at the time was a pilot of the best Soviet ground-attack aircraft, the Il-2 Sturmovik (by a Soviet aircraft designer named Sergey Ilyushin), had gone missing almost accidentally, like he had gone off course for some reason during a casual journey in the air and nobody had seen him afterwards.
It was unjust to my father and to the other servicemen lost in combat; they fought and withstood the wicked power not only on the front line but also inside of their own country. They all tragically perished or went missing, and not many truthful accounts have been written to justly honour them all. As I have already written about the father in my first book, Two Colours (2012), my father’s air brigade was stationed at a stronghold west of Kyiv, and he flew his bomber Il-2 in the first sortie to repel the Luftwaffe at sunrise on 22 June 1941. Then, nearly a month later, he piloted his last flight over Ukrainian soil. His war was short-lived. In Two Colours , I also recorded what my mother and other survivors of the war knew and included the most trusted accounts of these bygone events and about my father. I also shared the following account of father’s final flight:
“Captain Petrenko was watching his partner’s Il-2 was nosediving fast towards the ground like in an uncontrolled plunge. Then it changed; the plane showed signs of revival and began to steadily and smoothly descending. He realized that the pilot had regained the control of the gear and was attempting to climb up. However, the distance at the moment was, probably, no more than 200 -250 m to the ground, and the plane was not designed to abort such a drastic descend; most likely an antiaircraft blast had damaged the bomber’s engine … Ahead was a field of black soil, and the pilot definitely was directing his fated Il-2 towards the field … Captain Petrenko did not have enough fuel to stay over the site; he could no longer help his commander-pilot.” ( Two Colours ; pp. 315-316).
It wasn’t the closure of a pilot’s mission. The fact that they classified casualties of war as “missing” kept our hopes alive. Against the odds and pitiless time, we all waited and hoped that he had survived and could come back. We knew that many death camps in the Western Europe were liberated by the US army, and that supported our best hopes. The news did not come until the twenty-first century, when the USA opened its files on the WWII concentration camps to Ukrainian officials and we heard the name s Flossenbürg and Falkenau . We discovered father’s name on the list of casualties. He had died in a death camp in Falkenau, which was a subcamp of Flossenbürg. My mother, Anna, was 97 years old and still very strong. She had lived through the harsh twentieth, surviving a destitute life in that despondent and lost Soviet society. She had been waiting for news about her pilot for such a long time. I remembered what she said in her faltering voice after we found out about the father’s last resting place. “I felt that he hadn’t die in 1941 … He should have been alive … Now, I know where he is … was, but I cannot travel so far away to see that place … So, now, I must go soon and join him in his heavenly home.” She died half a year l ater.
My father survived his crash landing in the field of black Ukrainian soil in 1941. He was captured and incarcerated in Sokolov (Falkenau), a subcamp of the German concentration camp of Flossenbürg located in the Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). I knew that I had to write my second book about my father’s life after his landing on that Ukrainian field of black soil and to follow him all along his anguished, tragic way. This is my story about my father’s life after his disappearance from the sky in 1941 . It is an imagined account—based on everything I have discovered, heard, read, and seen—of my father’s tragic and, no doubt, heroic life after he was officially reported “missing”. And his destiny was not unique but rather a fate shared by many millions of citizens of that former, huge empire called the Soviet Union, or USSR.
People still remember that many millions of warriors and civilians of that mammoth country, or rather of its many constituent countries and nations, went missing under the former Soviet-communist system of a distorted human world and during the tragic Second World War. When I started writing this book, I thought that it would be a novel only about the events of that forever gone disastrous past, but I was wrong. The tragic past was not gone forever. It was merely hiding not far away in the obscurity of imperial power and has now come back into our present peaceful lives, and again, many warrior-defenders of their land have gone missing. This book is dedicated to my father and to all of them.
I On the Eve
On the eve of the Second World War, the whole world was surprised by an unlikely alliance between two improbable associates—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. However, those odd companions were much the same—they were the two extreme authoritarian powers in the world. In that moment, nobody could’ve imagined how far this alliance would propel the human world towards appalling consequences. In August 1939, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin announced that the two countries had come to agreement on a nonaggression pact. It was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by the two foreign ministers, J. Ribbentrop and V. Molotov. The agreement was officially known as the German-Soviet Treaty of Nonaggression. The official clauses of the treaty provided a written guarantee of peace by each party towards the other and a declared commitment that neither government would ally itself to or aid an enemy of the other.
Only a few people in Moscow and Berlin knew that the treaty, in addition to containing the publicly announced stipulation of nonaggression, concealed the most sinister skeletons in the two nations’ political cupboards. It included a strictly secret protocol which defined the spheres of influence of the two nations and outlined their aggressive plan