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Who and why is looking for enemies of the people among our children

Three high school students from Novy Urengoy, together with their peers from Berlin, spoke at the German Bundestag and shared their thoughts on World War II. I will quote one of the speeches in full. The author, by the way, is a winner of the All-Russian Olympiad in History.

That's what he said.

“I was offered to participate in a project dedicated to the soldiers who died during the Second World War. This interested me very much, since I have been fond of the history of both my country and Germany since childhood. I immediately started looking for relevant information. First I visited the city archive and library. Then I tried to find the stories of German soldiers on the Internet and other sources. However, later, in cooperation with the German People's Union for the Care of War Graves, I learned and studied in detail the biography of Georg Johan Rau.

He was born on January 17, 1922 in a large family. Georg went to the front in the rank of corporal and fought as an air defense soldier in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943. Georg was one of 250 thousand German soldiers who were surrounded by the Soviet army in the so-called "Stalingrad cauldron". After the cessation of fighting, he ended up in a prisoner of war camp. Only 6,000 of these prisoners of war returned home. George was not among them.

For a long time, the relatives of the German soldier considered him missing. And only last year, Georg's family received information from the German People's Union for the Care of War Graves that the soldier died from the harsh conditions of captivity on March 17, 1943 in a prisoner of war camp in Beketovka. He may have been buried among 2006 soldiers near the camp. George's story and work on the project touched me and pushed me to visit the burial site near the city of Kopeysk.

This made me extremely sad, because I saw the graves of innocent people, among whom many wanted to live peacefully and did not want to fight.

They experienced incredible difficulties during the war, which my great-grandfather told me about, a participant in the war, who was the commander of a rifle company. He did not fight for long, as he was seriously wounded. Otto von Bismarck said: "Anyone who looks into the glassy eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think twice before starting a war." I sincerely hope that common sense will prevail throughout the Earth and the world will never see war again. Thank you for your attention".

This is the text that caused the storm. Moreover, some quite official Russian publications were not satisfied with emphasizing the really embarrassing words about “innocently dead people”, but also brought their own interpretations to the headlines: “A schoolboy from the Russian Federation apologized for the dead Wehrmacht soldiers” - and even used the word “repented”. Although he did not repent and did not apologize.

It has already been established that the boy's mother helped to write this speech. But the teacher is also suspected - the vocabulary, they say, is not a teenager. The most vigilant suggested that the German wrote the text in general, and then translated it into Russian.

The boy from Yamal is blamed for the fact that in his two-minute speech he did not remind the German parliamentarians of either the besieged Leningrad or the 5,000 burned Belarusian villages. The list of what the boy did not recall is long. He did not say a word about the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, he did not list all the crimes committed by the compatriots of these parliamentarians, he did not brand them. But for nothing else, as it seems to some, it was not worth it to rise to the rostrum of the Bundestag.

Therefore, the boy, who said only what he said, has already been accused of "justifying fascism." Moreover, a columnist for a large newspaper fears that "at the most crucial moment, such a reprogrammed schoolboy from Novy Urengoy will stand up and stab his homeland with a knife in the back."

The Federation Council Committee on International Affairs has already asked the government of the Yamalo-Nenets District to check the curriculum of the gymnasium where the boy is studying. And more resolute comrades with the same request turned (well, where else, of course?) to the prosecutor's office and the FSB, so that they would sort out in detail from where abstract humanism, alien to us, mortally dangerous for the very existence of the state, leaked into the gymnasium. And even those who do not call for immediate intervention in the educational process of the state security agencies remind: “Obviously, you need to work with children: take them through the Piskarevsky cemetery or take them to Khatyn. But after all, adults, parents or teachers put all this dregs into their heads.

Not everyone got lost in an angry flock. The head of Novy Urengoy, Ivan Kostogriz, said that "the student shared his discoveries that not all Germans wanted to fight, many just wanted to live in peace."

And another quote from the internet:

“Mother told how, shortly after the war, in the year 1948, in Leningrad, they went to feed the captured Germans who were paving the Universitetskaya embankment next to our house. The sight of the Germans was terrible and caused nothing but pity in a normal person.

Only now, finally, it turned out that those who fed in this way, and mother among them, justified fascism. What are you bastards trying to do with us, and what has been done to all of you.

I wish the boy from Yamal and the boys from Berlin would never kill each other.

For this, it is necessary not only to plan trips to Khatyn and the Piskarevsky cemetery. We must try so that hatred does not blind our eyes, does not interfere with seeing people as people, so that the memory of the terrible past brings up unquestionable determination: “We can repeat it!” - but also horror, and understanding: "Never again!"

P.S.

Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov told RBC that “the speech of our Russian student hardly requires a reaction from the presidential administration. But exalted persecution is incomprehensible. Peskov also noted that “one should not accuse a student of malicious intent and“ mortal sins ”, since it is obvious that he did not mean anything bad. Understandably, he was worried. Any high school student would be thrilled to perform in such a respectable venue.”