This story was told to me by Dmitry Yakovlevich Friger, an artist of the Khabarovsk Regional Theatre of Musical Comedy and an Honored Worker of Culture of Russia. In the past, he was a sergeant-intelligence officer who was awarded the Order of the Red Star and two medals "For Bravery" during the war. "It was in 1943, near Konotop. The commanders urgently needed a "prisoner of war." At night, we sneaked up on the German positions and captured a large, red-haired man. He started calling for help, but we had a tried-and-true method: we shoved a handful of dirt in his mouth and hit him on the head with the butt of our rifle. They dragged him across the no-man's-land, but just as they reached our positions, the German came to his senses, and before anyone could react, the prisoner grabbed the locket with his teeth and fell dead. It was poisoned. We got a reprimand from our superiors: they said we couldn't do a damn thing, that we were lazy, and that we called ourselves scouts. So the next night, we went back. We crawled up to a Nazi bunker and threw grenades at it. Sergeant Major Kutmin pushed me in the back, telling me to go first. I jumped in, and there were only corpses inside. They had killed everyone. There wasn't a single living person, and I was furious. Suddenly, the beam of my flashlight caught a movement. (Unlike the Germans, we didn't build bunkhouses; we slept on the ground with straw mats. The Germans, on the other hand, built bunkhouses.) As I looked closer, I saw a boot under the bunk, slowly disappearing under the boards. Overjoyed, I exclaimed, "He's alive!" I pulled the German out, and he didn't put up much resistance. They took him to the commander, and it turned out that he was a musician. And not just any musician, but the conductor of the Berlin Opera, a celebrity, in fact. And they took him into service right from the conductor's podium. Apparently, the Germans were already facing difficulties with recruitment by that time. He turned out to be an i ... Читать далее