The story of my grandmother Valentina Nikolaevna Tonkonogova about her father, my great-grandfather, Nikolai Antonovich Tonkonogov. I want to leave my grandchildren a little story about an ordinary soldier of the 1941-1945 war. My father talked a lot about where he fought and how it was, about his friends and comrades. I always remember these stories. When his grandchildren, my children, grew up, they also listened to grandfather with bated breath. The father was born in 1921 into a large family, was the sixth child and the fourth brother, after the elders, who went to war. Before the outbreak of the war, he graduated from an Infantry School. He began to fight on the Ukrainian front. In 1943, during the retreat of our troops, many, like my father, were surrounded and captured by the Germans. They were kept in the camp behind barbed wire, guarded with dogs. He and a group of his comrades prepared for the escape carefully, and the escape was a success. By that time, partisan detachments of the Nikolai Shchors formation were already operating in the Ukrainian forests near the city of Vinnitsa. Soviet fighters who escaped from captivity joined one of such detachments. Dozens of villages were under the patronage of these detachments, which the Germans were afraid to enter. Only special detachments of punitive forces sometimes captured and plundered these villages. The partisans always beat them back. Once they had to liberate the village of Britavka from the Chychelnik district of the Vinnitsa region from the Nazis. After the battle, our wounded, and among them my father, were gathered on carts and taken to the homes of residents of the nearest villages. It was on January 21, 1943. The wound was in the leg, my father could not walk. They left him for treatment in the village of Vasylivka in the house of the Ukrainian woman Yuzko Afiya Filppovna. She and her husband took care of him for 3 months. Once the fascists entered the village. They went from house to house and took whatever they could take. They also went into the house of the elderly Yuzko. They pointed with machine guns to the stove where my father was lying. Who, they say, is he? Afiya Filippovna replied that this was her son, and he was sick with a fever. The Germans were very afraid of any infectious diseases, so they quickly left the house. This is how a Ukrainian woman saved, treated, fed the twenty-two year old young soldier as she could. It seemed to her father that she was already elderly. And she was only a little over forty years old. His father stayed in Yuzko's house until April 30, 1944, when he was sent to the hospital behind the front line, which is confirmed by a reference certificate issued by the command of the partisan detachment. This document is kept in our family as a relic, as a memory of our father, who went through the hard and bloody roads of the war. Copy of Characteristics for a partisan fighter of the Shchors partisan detachment of the Lenin Tonkonogov Cavalry Brigade Nikolai Antonovich, born in 1921, Russian. He arrived in the partisan detachment from captivity on August 10, 1943. During his stay in the partisan detachment, Comrade. Tonkonogov N.A. participated in all operations in the fight against the German-Romanian occupiers. Comrade Tonkonogov is a brave fighter in combats, a devoted son of our Motherland. In battles with German troops, Comrade Tonkonogov January 21, 1944 in the village Britavka of the Chychelnik district was wounded. Commander of the Shchors partisan detachment L-nt / Signature / Shkhrabotsky / Commissar of the Shchors detachment, Senior Political Instructor /Signature / Parkhomenko /Verified Secretary of the Vinnytsia Regional Council of Working People's Deputies: Signature/ Kekina / April 30, 1944 Verified In the hospital, my father received medical treatment, but his leg became 7 cm shorter than the other, so in July 1944 he was discharged from the army, and he returned to his native village Loboykovo, Danilovsky district Stalingrad region. Of the four brothers Tonkonogov, three brothers returned from the war: Fyodor Antonovich, Leiutenant Colonel of the reserve; Alexander Antonovich, Major in Reserve, still fought in the Far East; Nikolay Antonovich is a Private soldier. The fourth brother, Tonkonogov Ivan Antonovich, was killed in action defending the city of Stalingrad. His name appears on a stele in his native village of Loboikovo, installed in honor of fellow villagers who fell in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. More than fifty badges of awards received by the brothers during the war are kept in my modest wooden box with accompanying documents. My children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my father always treat the orders and medals of their ancestors with awe, sorting through them and honoring the memory of the four Tonkonogov brothers who honorably fulfilled their military duty to the Motherland. P.S On December 22, 1994, my dear and beloved father, Nikolai Antonovich Tonkonogov, passed away. Our family kept in touch with the Ukrainian family of Yuzko Afia Filippovna for many years. For each Victory Day, congratulations and wishes for good and peace were sent to each other. The kind guardian angel Afiya Filippovna survived her young rescued soldier. In 1995, our family, as always, received a postcard from her on May 9, addressed to Nikolai Antonovich. My daughter, the mother of my grandson Danila, wrote her a sad letter that our Defender of the Motherland died ... I really want to believe that in our turbulent time, trouble will bypass their family and country. (great-grandson Danila Ponomarev)