Rank: Senior Sergeant. My grandfather - Makar Evmenovich Goncharenko - died in 1943. He was left with a widow - my grandmother Martha Afanasyevna - and three very young sons (two more died in childhood). Neither my father, born in 1939, nor his younger brother, who was born shortly before the war, remembered his father. In memory of my grandfather, only a few front-line photographs and a couple of letters - "triangles", densely blotted out by the censor, have survived. But after the death of my grandmother, these letters were also lost. According to the family legend, my grandfather had front-line awards, but we, grandchildren, did not see them. During the war years, my grandmother had to travel with small children around the country, it seems that they disappeared during these journeys. And my uncle Fedya, at that time a boy of about ten, burned the “death notice” for my grandfather in the stove. “I didn't understand what I was doing,” Fyodor Makarovich laments now. - I only noticed that the mother, as she reads this piece of paper, so then everything cries and fills, and decided to destroy it so that she would not cry anymore ... "In general, we, his grandchildren, knew very little about grandfather, but, of course, we wanted to know more. Father and uncle sent inquiries to the military archive, but received no response. Quite by accident, I stumbled across the Internet on a publicly available electronic document bank "People's feat". On this resource, the Russian Ministry of Defense posted documents on the progress and results of the main military operations, exploits and awards of all soldiers of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. The sources of information are the funds of the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (CA MO). I learned that on this resource there is an opportunity to find information on almost every front-line soldier who was awarded during the Great Patriotic War. I typed the name and surname of my deceased grandfather - and found it! In May 1942 he was awarded the Medal of Courage. It turned out that he was a platoon commander in the famous Panfilov division and participated in the battles for the village of Koblyaki near the town of Kholm (now the Novgorod region). It was embarrassing, however, that in the award list the patronymic of the grandfather - Yumeleevich was incorrectly listed. Apparently, the military office got it wrong by writing down the rare patronymic Evmenovich by ear. All other data coincided completely - the year of birth, and the place, and the time of the call, and the rank of sergeant. Here is what was written on the site: “In the battles for Koblyaki, the platoon of com. Goncharenko M.Yu. in 15 people repeatedly repulsed enemy attacks, went ahead during offensive operations as part of a company. In these battles, a platoon of comrade. Goncharenko killed up to 120 fascists. With fire from his machine gun and grenades, he personally destroyed 29 enemy soldiers and officers. " To say that our family was delighted to find this record is to say nothing. The stingy lines of the description of the feat for which the grandfather was presented for the award excited each of his grandsons and great-grandsons. As if through the thickness of decades such a long-awaited hello came to us from him! After all, we knew practically nothing about my grandfather: where and how he fought, how he died. And from the lines in the order, describing only one of the stages of his front-line biography, it follows that our grandfather is a brave and brave warrior who did not hide behind the backs of fellow soldiers in battle, and we have the right to be proud of him. Now this record is stored in our family archive, and we do not give up hope of getting more complete information about the feat of arms of Makar Evmenovich.