Rank: Senior Sergeant _x000D_ Nikolai Sirotin, a brave recon of the Rostovets partisan detachment, was born on May 24, 1924 in the village of Bykovo, Stalingrad region, Pushkin Street, 33. In the first year of the war, his father and two brothers, Alexander and Zakhar, went to the war. Only my father returned from the war. _x000D_ He was also eager to join the fight against the Nazis. They did not take him into the army, as a minor, and the seventeen-year-old boy decided to get into a reconnaissance school. _x000D_ In the fall of 1942, during heavy fighting near Stalingrad, Nikolai Sirotin achieved his dream. He was sent to the school of Partisan Reconaissance officers, the formation point was in Leninsk. Later he was sent to the Moscow Reconaissance school. _x000D_ In March 1943, he was thrown with a group of comrades into the territory of Donbass occupied by the enemy. A small group of recons began to carry out the combat missions of the command. For a long time, the detachment collected and transmitted to the Soviet command valuable information about the deployment of enemy units, established contacts with local partisan groups, derailed enemy trains, and blew up commandant's offices. Soviet aircrafts had bombed German locations on a tip from partisans. Throughout his service, Nikolai Sirotin won the attention of the headquarters leadership with his military actions behind enemy lines. He quickly advanced in the service, he was awarded the rank of Senior Sergeant. Sirotin was an incredibly brave young man. From a letter from a member of the reconnaissance detachment of the surviving Sofia Belugina, from the village of Verkhniy Balykley, Stalingrad Region. Nikolai's mother:_x000D_ "Hello, Aunt Tanya! Everything that you conveyed, I handed over to Nikolai. I will write in more detail about him. We are in the same unit from the first days. Almost all the time he is on the front line ... (crossed out in bold, apparently by military caesura) ... honestly and conscientiously carries out everything that is entrusted to him. He rarely comes to us. There is no mail where he is, and if he writes, the letter will still be in his pocket. He asks you not to worry that he does not write. Please, send the front-line address of his brother Sasha and his father, I will write them. After the war he will tell you a lot of interesting details. Greetings from him to fighting brother Yurochka, and to all his comrades. Don't worry about Nikolai. Sonya Belugina. " _x000D_ In May 1943, the Nazis nevertheless went on the trail of recons. Twenty-two people, including Vera Listopad, Roza Dzhalilova from the village of Savinka, Pallasovsky district, Maria Orekhova, Maria Krasnoshchekova from Kislovo, Natalya Shpileva, Nikolai Sirotin, Dusya Bogatyreva and others, were arrested. Here is what his friend and companion in partisan struggle Grigory Efimovich Galushko wrote about these dramatic events to Nikolai's mother, in the detachment his name was “Ded”: _x000D_ “Hello, Tatyana Andreevna! The unfamiliar Galushko Grigory Efimovich sends greetings to you. I am writing a letter to you at the request of Sonya Belugina. She asked me to write a letter about the latest whereabouts of Nikolai Sirotin. Nikolai Sirotin is my friend in conviction and in arms. I met him on March 20, 1943 at the recon group of the Headquarters of the partisan movement in the village of Lesogorka, Rostov region. From there we began to prepare to cross the front line to work behind enemy lines. On April 17, I and one of my comrades went across the front line. Nikolay with other comrades went across on April 18. We all crossed the front line, but in the enemy's rear, in the second turnout line in the Krasnoluchinsky district, we were all overfished. This misfortune was included in our calculation. We were detained in different places at a distance of 10 km. As "defectors" we were all gathered and sent to Chistyakovo to conduct an investigation ... ". _x000D_ From a letter dated August 28, 1944, it follows that some of the arrested managed to confirm the legend of the defectors, and some of the guys, including Nikolai Sirotin, subsequently suffered a martyr's death due to the fact that two traitors were in the ranks of the partisan group. On May 13, 1943, E.I. Bogatyreva, V.G. Listopad, N.M. Sirotin and others, 22 people after brutal torture were shot in Dronovskaya gully, three kilometers from the town of Chistyakovo. Eyewitnesses of those events said that when the young men and women were taken to execution, one of them sang: "Get up, the country is huge ...". _x000D_ Grigory Efimovich Galushko informed later that when the guys were going to be executed, not one of them, including Kolya Sirotin, who was the youngest in the group, did not betray him by word, look, or gesture. He managed to confirm himself the legend of the "deserter". All his life, Ded felt obliged to tell people about the heroic deeds of the partisan heroes. _x000D_ From the memoirs of an eyewitness to the execution of partisans-recons, local historian M.A. Krivoruchko: "In September 1943, in the Filippov gully, in the eastern part of the city of Chistyakovo, it was crowded. By the decision of the executive committee of the city council, three pits were opened where the corpses of the shot were laid. It was hard to look at the tortured, bloody bodies. People identified their husbands and sons. But among them there were unknown young faces of men and women. Who are they? Why are they twisted in pairs by the hands? Only the identification of Vera Listopad indicated that they were partisans from a special reconnaissance group._x000D_ “A few years later, the remains of the perished partisans were reburied in a mass grave in the center of Torez (mass grave No. 1 ZU380-05-389, intersection of Pionerskaya and Engels streets, square). An obelisk of marble has been installed. Their names will remain in the memory of descendants, as an example of courage and selfless devotion to their beloved Motherland. The name of Nikolai Sirotin bears one of the streets of Torez (DPR) and the village of Bykovo (Volgograd region). His name was added to the electronic book of memory of Ukraine ( Partisans of the Donetsk region).