Running from the War

The tragedy of the first days of the Great Patriotic War is hard for a modern person to imagine. But you can try to feel it through the example of one specific family of civilian specialists who, on June 22, 1941, found themselves in the city of Augustów—right at the very border.

Barely managing to put his wife and daughter into the last truck rushing east under the explosions, the telephone station serviceman Viktor Bychinsky—without documents, decent things, or food—decides to reach home on foot, to Ivanovo. This is true—that is, a completely real and unique story of the ordeals of a particular person who experienced all the horrors of the German attack on the USSR.