p 22 June 1941

p Ass. Com. Border-Post, Junior Lieutenant Nikolai Sinokop. Bobrik village, Romensk District, Sumy Region.

_p I’ll die for my country. The enemy won’t take me alive.

22.6.41.

p Nikolai Sinokop was born into a peasant’s family on June 5, 1918, in the village of Bobrik in Sumy Region. In 1938, he was called up to serve in the Red Army. Two years later he was commissioned to Junior Lieutenant and appointed assistant commander of a borderpost on the western frontier of the Soviet Union.

p At the outbreak of war, the border-guards were the first to bear the brunt of the nazi attack. Many fierce battles took place between the men guarding the frontier and the leading German units. The enemy had immense advantage and was supported by tanks and artillery. The dauntless border-guards had nothing to repulse the assault with but machine- and submachine-guns and rifles. Despite the heavy odds the guards put up staunch resistance to the tanks.

p Like thousands of his frontier comrades, Komsomol member Nikolai Sinokop found himself in the heat of the battle in the very first hours of the war. It was then that he vowed to fight to the last breath and not let the enemy through. He took off his medallion  [20•*  and wrote the words of his pledge on the same paper as his name and place of birth.

p After stubborn, bloody and grossly unequal pitched battles with the enemy, the surviving border-guards had to retreat eastwards. Combining in a foot-column of about two hundred men they made their way along the Zhitomir-Kiev highway.

p On July 13, 1941, somewhere between 10 and 11 a.m., the column, which had left the town of Skvir and was heading for the village of Popelnya, was overtaken by 16 nazi tanks. On the outskirts of Paripsa (some 3 miles from Popelnya) the guards decided to engage the enemy. At a signal from their commanding officer the soldiers quickly fanned out over the village vegetable plots and dug in. One group under Jun. Lt. Sinokop lay in wait on a small hill to the north-west of the village. Without any anti-tank weapons, the border-guards fearlessly battled it out on the open ground with the black-swastika’d tanks for an hour and a half. But the odds were too great.

After the battle, peasants from neighbouring villages picked up among the deserted and burning tanks and buried 136 dead borderguards. Among the papers discovered on the dead men was this note folded inside Jun. Lt. Sinokop’s identification cylinder.