Menovshchikov Vladimir Ignatievich_x000D_ _x000D_ DATE OF BIRTH: 08/23/1925 _x000D_ DATE OF DEATH: 05/26/1999 _x000D_ _x000D_ Fragment of a letter from my grandfather to the newspaper "Krasnaya Zvezda": _x000D_ «Dear editors of the newspaper "Krasnaya Zvezda", I am a participant in the Patriotic War of 1925 year of birth. I started a war on the Dnieper and reached the Oder. I can't writewell, and I didn't know where to write about my pain and the memory of those harsh days. And yet, 45 years later, I am writing to you about what I could not share for so long. I came to my platoon in replenishment from Siberia, Achinsk. I was a young soldier who had not yet been under fire admiring my commander, the Lieutenant Loktev. We were moving forward, villages, foothold of the right bank of Dnieper. But the last days of the lieutenant's life and his cruel or terrible death, always remained in me. Even now, I still remember a small cherry garden, potatoes had already been harvested. The alley in the gardens is fenced as in Siberia. This is where my lieutenant Ivan Loktev, 1917, was killed. _x000D_ We exchanged the overcoats by his request, he gave me his new green overcoat, I gave him mine grey one with a small speck on the right field. _x000D_ We were fighting for a farm, and the farm was passed from one hand to another, but there was an officail announcement on Sovinformburo that the farm was ours! Well, we went ahead and took it again. I jumped into the garden, and on the right there was a pile of old straw, and there I found a piece of a green overcoat with an oily speck may be the size of 2 dimes. - "My greatcoat". And then I found the lieutenant and only the bottom of the body along the trouser belt. New diagonal blue trousers, new tarpaulin boots. Why new? Yes, yesterday we were honoring the lieutenant with the high award of the Hero of the Soviet Union. And at night we returned to our place and he did not change his clothes (as if he knew). We were looking for the remains in the little garden, but we didn’t find much, put the remains in a raincoat and buried him right there where I found it. _x000D_ The battalion commander wrote a paper about him and gave it the owner: "We will go ahead, father, but the Hero of the Soviet Union is buried in your garden, a monument may be erected here, or perhaps on a mass grave." _x000D_ My Leiutenant died from a direct shot from a cannon of a German armored car. I still don’t know if there is a monument to my lieutenant in that site.