Barabash (Protchenko) Nina Ivanovna was born on the 25th of March, 1923, in Belarus in the Gomel region, Dobrushsky district, the village of Vylevo. She grew up and was brought up in a large Belarusian peasant family where they loved work and respected their elders. She completed a full course of a high school. While studying at school, she graduated from nursing courses. After school she entered the Gomel river technical school. In 1941 she graduated from the first year of technical school and was sent to summer practice on the self-propelled barge "Marxist". The first day of the war was met by the trainee Ninochka off the coast of the city of Rogachev. Then there were: returning home, repeated visits to the military enlistment office with a request to be called up to the army. In July 1941 she was called up into the army as a soldier of medical service, the place of service – the mobile field hospital no. 1162 formed in the Bryansk region. In 1942 she was assigned as a nurse to the 11th paratroop brigade. In the battle of Stalingrad during the next landing in the rear of the enemy Nina Ivanovna was seriously wounded - from the received concussion she lost her hearing, vision and speech. At the end of 1942 she was discharged from the army for health reasons and sent to work in the village council in the village of Kazinka near Ufa. In 1944 after the liberation of her native Belarusian land from the Nazi invaders she returned home. Nina Ivanovna's father was in the partisans during the war and her mother cooked food for the partisans and wounded Soviet soldiers who were held captive by the Germans. The Germans took her mother out to be shot twice. In her parents' house she met her future husband, a young sergeant Vladimir Barabash, who was staying with his soldiers in a partisan house. In September 1945 second lieutenant Barabash Vladimir Venediktovich (Ukrainian by nationality) and Protchenko Nina Ivanovna got married. Then began the nomadic life of an officer. Wherever the military service threw their family – to the Caucasus, Ukraine, Belarus, East Germany. Nina Ivanovna was constantly plagued by severe headaches from a military concussion and for this reason she was not accepted for work. She found her happiness in taking care of the house, in the children who were born and there were three of them – two sons and a daughter, as well as in the social work of the women's council of military units. In 1960 the family moved to the new place of service of the spouse in the city of Kuibyshev (Samara). In 1972 they left the army. Vladimir Venediktovich was a deputy chairman of the public organization of veterans for a long time in the Industrial district of the city of Samara. He died in 2007. Nina Ivanovna is a member of the Council of veterans of the Second World War in the Industrial district, the Regional Council of women veterans, an Honorary member of the Samara regional public organization of Belarusians "Russian-Belarusian Brotherhood 2000". In the local council "Volgar" of the Industrial district she is the senior in the multi-storey building in which she lives. All these and other duties were imposed on her not by chance – for her persistent, punchy character. She does a lot of work on military-patriotic education of children in secondary schools №2, №49, №155, №139 etc. Nina Ivanovna Barabash (Protchenko) was awarded the order of the Patriotic War and medals.