Graves of Soviet soldiers neglected and desecrated in Europe

Old cemeteries continue to exist till people who come to see them are alive. When nobody else comes there, these cemeteries are ploughed up again and the ground is once again ready to become a new cemetery.

Soviet boys and men who died at the end of WWII when liberating Eastern Europe from fascist troops were buried in the valleys of the Bug and Elbe rivers, in the fields across Vistula and Danube. Under the Soviet regime, pioneers of these East-European territories took care of cemeteries where Soviet soldiers were buried and placed flowers on their graves. Today, many of martial cemeteries in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechia are razed to the ground. Instead, more parks and residential areas appeared where cemeteries used to stand.

The settlement of Kistelek in Hungary has a cemetery that is over one hundred of years old. Hungarian Pap Pall, 76, the manager of the private churchyard, likes his job. It is said that cemeteries often look very much like people buried there. This quiet cemetery is situated in the outskirts of the settlement close to a Catholic church, deep in the gardens. Tablets on the graves tell that people buried there were born in the very beginning of the past century.

People of the settlement live a happy and long life. They have the opportunity to buy a personal cemetery lot even when they are alive. People just want to make sure that they will be properly buried and have a nice grave.

Right at the entry to the cemetery there is a grey square lot covered with wild grass where 200 unknown Soviet warriors were buried at the end of WWII. Once a year when lilac begins to blossom in May, one and the same old lady comes to the cemetery to see the abandoned grave. Cemetery manager Pap Pall has already got accustomed to these visits and looks forward to them every year. Honorary citizens of the settlement continuously besiege Pap Pall with requests to sell the privileged lot right at the cemetery entry at a good price. But the man would not agree to sell the lot where hundreds of Soviet soldiers are buried. He does it because of respect to the old lady who comes to see the grave every year.

Maria Mamzurina-Volkova, 76, is the only Russian woman who still comes to the grave on the quiet Hungarian cemetery. She says she comes there to see the grave where her brother Vladimir is buried. The woman was just 12 when the brother joined the Soviet army fighting Fascist troops. When the war broke out the young man was working at an aircraft factory that made spare parts for bombers and thus could stay on the home front. But he preferred to take an active part in the fighting and abandoned the works for the front.

This is astonishing but the woman remembers perfectly well one strange detail about her brother that later made her look for his grave. Before the war broke out, Vladimir used to sing one sad song about a man who died and nobody knew where his grave was. His mother insisted that he must not sing the sad song but the young man said the song was just haunting him. The old lady supposes that her brother probably had a foreboding of his future tragic fate.

Tankman Vladimir Mamzurin died at the end of December 1944 after the Soviet troops marched across Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and the war was drawing to its close end. He died at the age of 21 during severe fighting for the liberation of Hungary. In January 1945, Vladimir’s brother-soldier Ivan Odintsov wrote a letter to his relatives and indicated where his friend died. He said that was a little town 80 kilometers away from Budapest, but Vladimir’s family could not even find the place on the maps as it was too small.

When the war ended, Vladimir’s sister Maria began to search war archives to find out the exact place of her brother’s death and burial. Unfortunately, nobody could say where remains of Vladimir Mamzurin could be buried. But the woman would not stop the searches.

It is known that 200,000 of Soviet soldiers were buried in Hungary during WWII but today only the names of 20,000 of them are known for certain. It took Maria Volkova thirty three years to find her brother’s grave. At the end of the 1970s, the woman got a letter from the International Red Cross saying that remains of her brother had been removed to the cemetery in Kistelek, Hungary, and that relatives of the buried soldier could come to see the grave.

In the Soviet epoch, Soviet troops stationed abroad traditionally took care of communal graves of Soviet soldiers tragically killed during WWII. In the 1960s, mothers and widows of soldiers killed during the war used to come to those cemeteries to see the graves of their relatives. As a rule, those were warm receptions organized by Soviet officers stationed in East-European countries friendly towards the USSR. Maria Volkova says that when she visited the brother’s grave together with her mother they planted young plants of thuya there, and now these are very big trees.