In those days…
Respect to the past is a feature that distinguishes between education and savagery.
Alexander Pushkin
We remember ‘those distant times’ when in our native land the blood of innocent people were shedding, when the atmosphere was permeated with fear, sorrow and death but we honour the men who sacrificed their lives so that we could live freely.
We have been lucky enough to visit the WWII veteran Jacob Kapustin and his wife Rosalia Chernikh and interview them.
Jacob Kapustin was born in the village Antonovka, the Belarusskaya SSR in 1910 in the family of a military servant and a housewife. In 1922 the Kapustins were bound to move to Donbass because of a starvation. During the WWII his father, Miron Kapustin, worked as a bridge-builder but was taken prisoner. Fortunately, his destiny had been far luckier than thousands of other people. Due to his being a highly educated person and having mastered the German language he managed to escape with his comrades.
As for Jacob’s military career, so he is a first sergeant, a commander of the radio-technical service and a submarine-detector operator. He has been demining the Baltic Sea and the Finnish Gulf on the coastal minesweeper ‘Mikhail Martynov’ for at least 6 years. He told us a tremendous amount of interesting facts, stories and described even a couple of procedures, for instance, how to detect a mine in water by means of an ultrasound scanner (it sends a wave vibration into a water space and then a sonarman by its reflection from the bottom or a foreign object can easily find out whether there is a mine or not). These specific pieces of information aimed at a particular audience, nevertheless, were worth listening to.
Apart from his heroic past we would like to mention his present-day life. Since we have already said that he is married, consequently, we should tell you about his wife, Rosalia Chernikh. She is a teacher of physics and mathematics, who had been working at school for 45 years before retired, Soros Prize laureate. To be honest, we were pleased with her hospitality and kind-heartedness. She is supposed to be a very smart and active person in her seventy-something.
They used to work as telecommunications workers in the DonOblTelegraph. Currently these happy-together spouses are taking the Chairs of the Board of Veterans in Donetsk.
It is possible to talk about this remarkable visit for ages, but it’s time to sum up. We would like to claim that it was a great pleasure and simultaneously honour to call on such overall developed people who saw the War without romantic appeal. And we look forward to you liking this article and our carrying on this time-consuming but useful activity to open absolutely new issues and broaden the horizons of people’s outlooks.
Photo and text ©2015, Arina Barasiy and Marina Gurienko, ЮнПресса for arguments.photo
Marina Guryenko 16