Tkachenko Maria Mikhailovna (worker in the rear) was born on December 4, 1930 in the village of Bolshie Ozerki, Baltai district, Saratov region. She studied at a local school. When the war began, the girl was ten years old. She had to go to work on a collective farm, and work on an equal basis with adults. “At first I was just an assistant, fulfilled orders of elders, and after work I went to school. Then I worked on the farm, in the field, planted and weeded vegetables on the plantation. Often there was nothing to eat, so we gathered spikelets in the field, ate grass, bark of trees. And everyone hoped for a quick victory ”-recalls Maria Mikhailovna. After the war, she graduated from 7 school classes, but only a year after leaving school she entered the medical college in Volsk. According to the distribution, she was sent to work in the city of Kaliningrad, as a nurse in a polyclinic. She got married there. After a short time, Maria Mikhailovna and her husband moved to the Saratov region, where their daughter Elena was born. So they lived their whole lives together in the Saratov region, where she worked as a nurse at a local paramedic station. She was awarded the medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945."