Full name: Pankratova Maria Georgievna _x000D_ PATRONYMIC: Georgievna _x000D_ Сity: - _x000D_ Date of BIRTH: - _x000D_ DATE of DEATH: - _x000D_ _x000D_ HISTORY: Maria Georgievna, nee Andrianova, was born in 1924 in the village of Slashchevskaya on the banks of the Volga. She remembers her childhood well. It was not well-fed and well-to-do, they had to work hard even when the war was not yet knocking on their doors, but Maria Georgievna never said that it was unhappy. When she was only 10, she was already doing half the work around the house, and even water could pull full buckets of a huge barrel. She also sang... She was always singing. Sings now, at 91 years old. The front line was not far from Slashchevskaya stanitsa. When the war started, everyone was working. High school students dug trenches, built defensive structures very close to the front line. Maria Georgievna says that when she and her classmates had to go to nursing courses, they not only learned how to dress the wounded and carry them out of the battlefield. They had to be able to assemble and disassemble a rifle, reload a machine gun, and dig a trench and throw a grenade. As early as November 1941. she received a summons to the military enlistment office, but almost immediately it was followed by a call to the Komsomol district Committee. In a neighboring village, located seventeen kilometers from Slashchevka, a math teacher, an adult man, was called to the front, and it was decided to send her to work there as a good student. "At first I was confused and offended that I seemed to be an evader, but the woman who recommended me for this position scolded me and said that it was no easier here than at the front, that teachers at school were needed no less than nurses at the front. And then I realized it was true." The school was located in seventeen kilometers from Sladewski. There was no transport, it was a cold winter in the middle zone. And our seventeen-year-old Maria Georgievna in light galoshes until the end of this winter walked to her work, taught math to children who were only two or three years younger than her. Then she was sent to the Institute for one year, so that she could take at least the basics of teaching methods. "I'm not so much hungry as frozen this winter. They lived in a Dorm where ice as thick as a fist grew on the window. It was draughty from all the cracks, and the girls and I went to bed in pairs to sleep at night, so that one mattress could be put on top of fur coats and blankets, and to keep each other warm. Bread was given out for five hundred grams a day, there was no other food, they drank tea without sugar, and when it was just boiling water." A year later, Maria Georgievna returned to school, to work, continuing to study in absentia. In 1945, she and her husband, Pyotr Nefedovich Pankratov, met as a married couple. He was a school principal. After the war, life was not in a rut for a long time, there were schools in dugouts, and a lack of basic clothing and food. But they did their job honestly, kept a small household, and raised two wonderful children, Olimpiada Petrovna, who became an excellent math teacher, and Alexander Petrovich, who was a very talented dentist.