Rank: Red Army. An article from the newspaper "Prizyv" (Tuesday, May 9, 1990, №№57-58 6065) "Bow to you, Zakia-apa". For everyone who was a direct participant in the hostilities of the last world war, it was his own war. Someone fought with the enemy in the air, someone at sea, someone in the mountains or in the rear of the occupiers. Each fought in his own way, but they were united by one goal - to destroy the invaders, to free the Motherland and the whole world from the brown plague. And no matter where you fought back then - in the very heat or in the silence of the general staff - you, a veteran, did one common thing - you saved the Motherland. And an earthly bow to you from grateful descendants ... Zakia Khusainovna Erzina was nineteen years old when in 1942 she and eight other girls from Lyambir were drafted into the active army - to the searchlight regiment. “How scary it was in the first days of the war - we were standing in Saratov then,” Zakia-apa recalled, she even cried with fear when she was bombed for the first time. But then I got used to it. I just couldn't get used to seeing death. ” "Have you often seen the death of your friends?" “The war went on, and mowed down everyone indiscriminately: relatives, loved ones, friends. In Saratov, under the bombardment, I lost my friend - my countrywoman for the first time. We were summoned together from Lyambir, and there she, Kh. Yanglyaeva, was killed by a shrapnel.And so many friends I left on the military roads! " "Did you have to go a lot?" "The path to Victory was not close. I visited Warsaw and other liberated cities." "What military operations did you have to participate in?" "Can you remember everything! But the last one stuck in my memory: the storming of Berlin." "And your searchlight regiment took part in it?" "So even in the film about the capture of Berlin there is such an episode: the night, and only the flashes of shots give a short-term light. And suddenly thousands of powerful searchlights simultaneously began to blind the enemy defense. The Nazis were stunned, and to some extent we facilitated the storming of enemy positions by our troops. ". Zakiya-apa also told a lot about her stay in the war, how terrible it was, but how, overcoming the horror of death, she did her job. And I looked at her and thought: "A small, fragile woman. How could she bear all the horrors of war on her shoulders? Amazing!" After the war, Zakia Khusainovna Erzina worked on the Pobeda collective farm. Now on a well-deserved rest. But this does not mean at all that she has retired from communication with a wide range of people. But would this be possible when the younger generation yearns to know where the grandmother got the order and eleven more awards? A. Beloglazov.