The Prelestnoye village near Prokhorovka, the epicenter of the terrible battle 80 years ago, has its own memory of the events of 1943 and its own monument. Not monumental, majestic, but in human growth. She is not taller than us with the head of the Prelestnensky rural settlement and the director of the rural school, Vladimir Buzanakov, a bronze grandmother in a headscarf, standing by the table, on which there are two portraits of Red Army soldiers, two whole piles. and black bread. According to local legend, a woman whose husband and children died once brought such a table outside the gates of the house, put a photo of the deceased on it, a snack and invited neighbors to commemorate their men. Then another family set up a table in the street, followed by another, a third…
Veterans sat at tables, talking about what they saw with their own eyes. Only passers-by sat, listening to these stories. “Something like an annual commemoration of the whole village was organized,” says Buzanakov. “Every house had someone to remember: out of six hundred Pre-Lesnenets who went to war, about fifty returned home.” They came and saw charred pipes and coarse, black Belgorod earth crushed by tank tracks and soaked in diesel fuel, which, as the inhabitants of Prelestny recalled, gave birth to shortly after a few years.
But the village recovered and fell into disarray, there was a collective farm with a millionaire, the farm survived the 90s, it fit into today’s realities. Along the main street of the village, Vladimir Buzanakov and I passed the post office, the club, the library, the family medicine center, the school, which is currently undergoing extensive repairs… The Memorial of the Military Glory and a common grave. The bodies of the dead were brought here on July 12. They also carried Red Army book bags from soldiers buried on the battlefield. The 95th Guards Poltava Rifle Division lost two-thirds of its personnel here. Veterans from all over the USSR (Uzbeks, Tajiks, Ukrainians) came to Charming on July 12 for a long time … They were given beds in a school, a library, a first-aid post. July 12 began with a demonstration at the mass grave, then the veterans walked through the village.
“Some on crutches, others without one hand, would come to each table and tell stories,” recalls librarian Anna Antsiferova. Today in the village of those who saw the war, only 96-year-old Vasily Latyshev, on the eve of July 12, left the village with his mother through the swamps on a cow. Of the veterans of the 95th Guard, only Masha the Little Red Hood is alive – nurse Maria Rokhlina, who knitted berets in front of her to develop the muscles in her wounded arm. But the chairman of the Veterans’ Council of the division invariably brings delegations of teachers, descendants of military leaders to Charming … Vladimir Buzanakov erects an awning near the house and sets a table, central in the village, which is covered by his wife , who learned this from her grandmother in the 70s.
