Branch of troops: Armored and mechanized troops _x000D_ _x000D_ Nikolai Fedorovich Pronkin was a soldier of 273rd Separate Battalion of 8th Tank Army of 1st Belorussian Front. He was born in the village of Vezovka, Penza region on December 22, 1925. When the war began, he volunteered for the front. In the unit where the sixteen-year-old boy got to, they took pity on him, left him as a front-line cook. _x000D_ In 1943, when he turned 18, they took Nikolai into a reconnaissance group, and then into an anti-tank platoon, issued an anti-tank rifle, and he was number one there. In the veteran's questionnaire, which is kept in the "Book of Memory" in the Savinsky Museum of Local Lore (Arkhangelsk Region), his hand recorded the facts of his military biography: the crossing of the western bank of the Vila, participation in the combats for Poznan and Lublin and terrible lines about the liberation of the Majdanek concentration camp on July 22, 1944, that is near Lublin (Poland). _x000D_ It was difficult with heavy fighting that the war rolled to the west, while crossing the Oder in 1945 in a terriblecombat, Private Pronkin was wounded in the leg and was sent as a medical train to Moscow. The injury turned out to be serious and the soldier lay in the hospital until the very Victory. _x000D_ There Nikolay met the guys from Kazakhstan and went with them to the geological party "Isaporovskoye". In the Kazakh steppes, the young hero met his betrothed, charming milling worker Nina, whom he later married. Nikolai Fedorovich worked as a driller in the Plesetsk exploration expedition, in the drilling crew until his retirement, until he was promoted to the title of "Veteran of Labor". _x000D_ Nikolai Fedorovich passed away on July 25, 1991.