Ermizov Vasily Ivanovich Rank: Red Army soldier. He was in the Red Army since 02.1943 Place of conscription: Terter RVC, Azerbaijan SSR, Terter district. He was born in May 1924. In the Russian village of Borisy in the Mir-Bashir district of the AZSSR (in Azerbaijan). He was drafted into the Soviet army in 1943 (he said when he was drafted that the war had already been going on for almost two years). At the front, he was sent to the penal battalion for not wearing a hook on the collar of his tunic. Then penalty men were very necessary and for the slightest violation they were recruited in this way. In the beginning, they were driven into battle unarmed, almost with their bare hands – one rifle, five rounds of ammunition and one grenade for three of them, i.e. certain death. The NKVD chased them from behind, and the fascists advanced on them in the front. There was almost no chance of survival, in any case, they would kill him wherever he moved, but he miraculously survived. He said that if he had been immediately taken to the front, he definitely would not have survived. Awards for liberation: Novorossiysk, Anapa, Kerch. My dad was a volunteer, he asked to go to the front (even signed himself two years older) as soon as the war started, but he was rejected because he was the only breadwinner in the family (he had a younger brother and sister). Our grandmother and grandfather were listed as missing since 1938. But after two years of war, he was taken to the front. He really started fighting from Novorossiysk, Anapa, Kerch through the whole Crimea. There was a fierce battle for Sevastopol, Balaklava, Sapun Mountain, Malakhov Kurgan. In the Golden valley, almost all, with whom he came there, were killed. An obelisk was erected in memory of his division. He was wounded while liberating Sevastopol. He ran away from the hospital and caught up with his division. They entered Ukraine from Crimea, where they were re-formed and received the name of the First Ukrainian front. They liberated Ukraine and entered Poland, liberating the Auschwitz concentration camp. So they reached Germany, where they were turned around and sent to the Japanese war. By the time they got there, the war was over and he volunteered to serve three more years in Kamchatka in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky