Reply #26: Great story, Zuni, thanks for sharing it

[DivinBreuvage]

From what I've read of how the Soviets treated their own army and how the Germans treated eastern prisoners, it's amazing that he survived. I can't imagine what he must have gone through. And from what I've read of how the Soviets treated returning POWs, he and perhaps your grandmother too probably both would have died if they'd gone back to the USSR.

Of all the sad and tragic stories from that war, one of the most heartbreaking, I guess second only to the holocaust, is the way that the almost superhuman sacrifice and achievement of the peoples of the former Soviet republics in ridding their homelands of the Germans was repaid not with the greater freedom they had dreamed of but with a return to repression and terror. There's positively no question that Hitler was a monster, but the more I read of Stalin the more I believe that Hitler was the weak sister of that duo.

I also think it's a disgrace that the people of this country don't have a greater awareness of the debt of gratitude we owe to those people. This is not at all to make light of, or to discount, the sacrifice and achievement of American and British Commonwealth veterans and all the resistance fighters of occupied Europe, but if the Soviet Union hadn't spent two years bleeding the German war machine to death there never would have been an Alamein, there never would have been a D-Day, and there never would have been a liberation of France.