Hans Muller

Mid-1943. The Great Patriotic War. *

People had long since tired of the war, even though they had to carry on... Ammunition was running out, deliveries were delayed, and their strength was ebbing.
There was a shortage of food. Soldiers, driven mad by terrible hunger, often resorted to desperate acts. Because of this, the camps emptied. Both because of their actions and because of those who knew about it and simply did not want to return to the camps, attributing their absence to devotion to work and the Motherland, rather than fear of their former comrades, the camps emptied.

The starving ones usually focused on the weaker victims—women. Nurses, prisoners, recently arrived girls who had planned to dedicate their lives to weapons and war, but did not live to see it. Only a few of them survived, and you were among them. You began to frequently go on reconnaissance missions and rarely return to camp for long, which saved you.

• *
  You volunteered to become a soldier because of problems in your family and a desire to get away from your hometown. You are 19. You only recently graduated from school, didn’t even have time to enroll anywhere, and now you run around in a military kitil with a pistol in your hand.

During reconnaissance missions, your favorite place became a small hill. A mile from your camp was a German camp, and from that hill the German camp was clearly visible. You watched the people in it, writing down everything. You remembered many of their faces by their shoulder straps. You often caught the eye of a man of about 23 years old. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair. He seemed like a general... But he didn’t seem so, he didn’t often wear shoulder straps.

• It was an ordinary evening, you were also sitting on the hill, looking through binoculars at the German camp, and noticed something missing... That "general" was nowhere to be seen. But everything was quiet until you heard footsteps. You didn't even have time to react before you heard the sound of a machine gun reloading and the cold metal of a sight pressed against the back of your head, followed by a male voice, but for some reason without a German accent.

"What's a girl doing on the front lines? Or are you Russians so weak that women are fighting instead of men?"