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"Victory Parade: Stories and Faces"
MINSK, 27 February (BelTA) - Veteran Fyodor Zhogol witnessed and participated in the main events of the last century: he saw the Victory Banner being hoisted in the center of Berlin, signed on the wall of the defeated Reichstag, walked across Red Square during the 1945 Victory Parade.
Fyodor Zhogol was drafted to the Great Patriotic War in mid-July 1941. He started to serve as a gunner, but very soon the soldier was sent to a short-term course for military commanders. Having finished them, he entered the battle as a gun commander. He fought first on the Kalinin Front and then the Baltic Front.He took part in the Battle of Rzhev. On 2 November 1942 he was wounded near Rzhev, but did not leave the battlefield and continued to fight. When the platoon commander died, he took over from him.
The artilleryman sustained another wound in Latvia on 29 October 1944. He was lying on the battlefield for almost the entire day until a local family saved him: they picked him up and nursed him for several days. In the Latvian hospital he came across a childhood friend Iosif Braim who was from the same village of Pilipony, Petrikov District. The two Red Army soldiers took a joint photo: none of them knew whether they would ever see each other again.Today this picture, the only image left from the war years, is kept by Fyodor Zhogol’s family. The fighting was fierce in Latvia. Winters were especially hard. The Red Army soldiers had to dig trenches in -40C. In the postwar years the veteran always wondered how they all managed to survive then.
Fyodor Zhogol was the only brother out of five to return home from the war. He celebrated the victory in Berlin. The war veteran signed the wall of the Reichstag and witnessed the Banner of Victory being hoisted in the center of Berlin. He also took part in the Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow.
Fyodor Zhogol was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War Second Class and the Order of the Red Star, Medal for Bravery and Medal for the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. As a graduate of the Dnepropetrovsk Artillery School, after the war he served in Borisov for more than ten years. In 1957 he retired to the reserve. Returning to his hometown, he worked as a chairman of the Brinev village council.
In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the Belarusian news agency BelTA together with the 7 Days newspaper is running a large-scale project. During the year we will be narrating the stories of the Belarusians who took part in the legendary Victory Parade in 1945. These men fought at Rzhev and Odessa, won the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, liberated Belarus, and took Berlin. On 24 June 1945 they marched triumphantly through Red Square in Moscow. They are the faces of our Great Victory!
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