Signatures of War

Signatures of War is about people and their destinies.

It is about destinies that were forever changed by World War II.

These people gave the best years of their lives to the War. They went through the War, lost friends and relatives, and returned to empty houses to start their lives all over again, from the beginning.

These people should be remembered as heroes.

The main impetus for this project was the death of my grandmother. She was a veteran of WWII, and I missed her funeral. For a long time I thought a great deal about the people of her generation, about how to keep the memory of our veterans alive, how to create a strong story about their contribution to our history. Because my other grandmother was still alive, I decided to pursue a project on veterans. So I visited her, Galina Kondratyevna Bondar (right), and asked her to tell me about the War. She related many horrible things about the period and gave me her letters, in which she described her wartime life in great detail.

German solders came to my grandmother’s village of Ivangorod (in present-day Ukraine) in 1941. During the German occupation, she continued to work, plowing the fields with horses and cows.

At the beginning of 1943, the Germans lost the Battle of Kursk. After that, they started expatriating young Soviets to Germany, to serve as slave laborers. It was July. My grandmother was nineteen years old. The Germans warned the villagers that they would torch the village if no one agreed to come with them. My grandmother felt she had no choice.

The Germans transported my grandmother to Wiedniz, a small town near Dresden. She was small, and her work was to clean and paint the presses at a peat factory. In April 1945, after an attack by Soviet bomber planes, my grandmother and her friends escaped the town and hid in a cave. When the Red Army came, she joined them, helping to build a military airport and working in the military canteen. On September 5, 1945, she returned home.

When I started this project, I did not choose specific regions to focus on, like Russia or Ukraine. All the veterans were born in the USSR and fought for the USSR, so I considered them all citizens of the former Soviet Union. I met veterans from different countries who stayed in Ukraine after the war: Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs, Belarusians, Moldovans, Jews and others. I started the project in Ukraine and worked there for three years, after which I thought the project was finished.

Yet after I moved to Moscow and the events in Eastern Ukraine began to unfold, I understood that I needed to do something to unite people. I needed to say something about peace, and not about war. So I resumed the project in Russia and have been shooting here for two years now.

I want to show that we are all the same. People suffer on both sides of the front lines. There is no single truth in this present war and there will not be a victor. We will all be losers because we have lost the friendship and trust between our two nations.

Many veterans are very confused by the current situation. They say that for them this is the country’s greatest tragedy since the War. One veteran noted that Russians and Ukrainians fought against the Germans in the same army, in the same regiments, and in the same trenches, but today they kill each other. It is a disaster.

While working on this story, I have tried to tell the truth and to be as human as possible. I have met veterans at different celebrations, like Victory Day or the Day of Liberation, or just on the street. I have visited disabled veterans in their homes, in both villages and cities. Communication between veterans is very strong. In Ukraine, the government does not offer many services to veterans. In Russia, the situation is a little bit different. But in both countries the people who surround veterans are their war comrades and relatives.

Many veterans enjoyed being photographed and were happy that someone was paying attention to them and was curious about their life. All of the veterans suffer from insufficient interaction with other people. Sometimes, however, veterans did refuse to be photographed. This seemed to me an absolutely normal reaction. We should respect their wishes. And of course their sacrifices.

It is hard to tell the stories of veterans in just a few words, because every veteran’s story is so unique. That said, the following quotes from various veterans may help readers better understand what kind of people they are.

Nikolai Salantiyevich Skripnichenko (fought 1941-1945, as a sniper) I lied about my age, saying I was two years older, in order to be recruited as a front-line sniper. On April 15, I was heavily wounded by artillery fire. For the next two days I lay buried under rubble. Only then was I dug out by my first love – Galya. I spent the next five days in hospital, unconscious, recovering from my severe wounds.

Valentin Fyodorovich Kolonichenko (fought 1941-1945, 323rd artillery division, Western front) I was heavily wounded, and, while I was lying unconscious in the battlefield, my legs were badly frozen. After I left the hospital, I was labeled as partially fit for battle, and was sent to work on the home front. However, at a secondary medical commission I was able to prove that I could still fight and went back to the front lines. I have been surrounded on the retreat as well on the offensive. I have experienced everything.

Vyacheslav Andreyevich Valitsky (fought 1943-1945, 2nd Belorussian front, 218th frontier regiment) We were taking over Königsberg. I remember hiding behind the corner of a building as it was hit by a shell. We were all thrown back like matches by the blast. We lay there for about 15 minutes, got up and pressed on with the assault.

I remember walking out onto the battlefield after the battle and seeing it covered with bodies of German and Russian soldiers. They lay there like logs, like felled trees… But who would look at them back then, there was no time to look.

Maria Mikhaylovna Rokhlina (nurse 1942-1945, Stalingrad, 5th tank army near Rotmistrov) I nearly froze to death in Stalingrad during the transportation of the wounded. After 70 years I met my friend, who was wounded and who I had carried from the battlefield.

Nikolai Ostapovich Stanishevsky (fought 1941-1945, infantry) It was very hard in the beginning; we had a single rifle between two or three soldiers. But the Soviet Army was good, strong. And there was such a sense of camaraderie. The brightest memory is, of course, the Victory…

The veterans are as short-lived as a Polaroid film. They fade and disappear year by year. It gave me great pleasure to see their eyes sparkle when they told me their short life stories, looked at their Polaroids, and signed them, leaving a trace not only on the photo, but also in my memory.

I saw that all of them were still the young men and women they were during the War. Because the soul does not age. RL

To purchase a copy of Arthur Bondar’s book with his veteran images, visit arthurbondar.com