Girl and front -line comrades

Every year, my mother has been getting congratulations on Victory Day from the President of the Russian Federation for the past ten years - whoever they may be. And every year hisses and spits.

Not because she does not like Putin or Medvedev (although this is also). And because each time the presidents express gratitude to her for crushing the enemy hordes and saved humanity from the terrible threat of Nazi enslavement, that she and its front -line (option - combat) comrades, having passed through the pain of loss, blood and suffering, showed an unndrined power of the spirit, survived and won.

My mother is soon seventy -eight. When the war began, she was seven when it ended - eleven. Her dad, a mathematics teacher, an early younger younger-artilleryman, lies in a mass grave on the shore of Lake Ladoga-by the road of life that he defended. He was 32 when the German bomb smashed their battery ... Her mother, a biology teacher, in a mass grave on Piskarevka. She was 39 when in April 1942, not having a little to live to green grass, she died of hunger. I remember the face of my mother, who first learned that Comrade Zhdanov was imported to the head of Leningrad with caviar and champagne.

She remembers everything: how their cat disappeared and how her mother, my grandmother, said: "Probably someone ate." She believes that they did not eat-otherwise my mother would say somehow differently. She remembers how the in the fall of the 41st they went the last with mom to dad in a training under Leningrad, and the good major allowed her to collect acorns lying on the territory of the unit. They were then cooked. She remembers slightly scraped pieces of chopped sugar, which was transmitted from training dad. She hates fish oil - in the early days of the war, her mother managed to buy at a pharmacy and fed her daughter with this fat until her death. She remembers how a mother wrapped in a blanket was taken in the frosty April of the 42nd to the warehouse: then there was no strength to bury, they simply folded the corpses with stacks.

Mom survived. But she never crushed enemy hordes. She did not and could not have front -line comrades. And she is upset each time, receiving letters from the presidents - first from one, then from the second. I tell her: “Mom, well, you understand, it is listed in the council: a resident of the besieged Leningrad, they are equated with veterans, well, they stamp ...”

She understands everything, but asks: “Well, they can see the year of birth, these that stamp? For some reason, Yeltsin did not thank me for the shed blood. ”

Can't. They can be tapped on the heads of the protesters. The center on the day of the inauguration can be cleaned so that it is scary to look at the frames of the lifeless city - they can. And this - no, cannot.