Rank: Lieutenant. Subdivision: 173rd Rifle Orsha Red Banner Division. Once in my childhood I found a document written by my dad. I really liked his handwriting. The text told about his labor activity. I was surprised by the fact that in his ninth grade, his father was teaching Russian to a fifth-grader in his school due to a lack of teachers. Literacy helped him enroll in short-term officer courses during the Great Patriotic War. In three months the kishlak boy turned into a lieutenant and went to look death in the eye. On his shoulders lay the responsibility for several hundred Uzbek fellow countrymen, yesterday's farmers-peasants, who never left their villages. They not only did not know Russian and did not know how to write, many of them had not even seen a rifle before. During the battle, they were given one rifle for two, due to the lack of weapons in the first months of the war. My father was a Komsomol organizer of the battalion, at the same time a translator. In the course of one of the battles, an experienced commander was killed, and all this horde of "not shot soldiers" went to him. After being seriously wounded in the city of Suwalki (Poland), he was not suitable for the formation and he was sent to the rear, to his homeland, to restore the country's economy. In 1977, after his death, his front-line friend told me that when they learned in Besharyk that his father was returning from the front, many came to meet him at the station. Before he got out of the carriage, he was surrounded on all sides, and everyone began to ask about their relatives at the front. The father got on the locomotive and began to tell how their fathers and brothers heroically fight the enemy. There was complete silence, and it was already impossible to stop him, even the train had to be delayed. When he finished his speech, everyone began to cry. Women, children, men ... The whole station. My father had several military awards. After the war, his mother wore these combat medals on the ends of her hair, on her pigtails. Such a fashion was in Besharyk. Then they got lost. Only the Order of the Red Star has survived. My father did not like to talk about the war. When he was in a good mood, he would tell something about his fellow soldiers, but about himself he spoke very sparingly.