107

p Late 1942

p Brothers! Black Sea sailors,

p Don’t think I was taken prisoner for nothing. I was gravely wounded but these dirty bastards patched me up to use me as their workhorse. No go. Today they set on me, broke just about every bone in my body, farewell.

Yours, Mikhail L.

p I’ll be gone today but you’ll stay behind, Black Sea sailors. Fire a few rounds for me, brothers, let’em know we won’t give in, that I’m gone but you remain.

Yours, Nikolai G.

p Farewell to all my dear ones. How I’d like to get just one more look at my sea, my Black Sea.

P. T.

p Kid brother, Kolya, dear sailor boy, Remember me, look after mum.

Your brother Oleg

108

p After the fall of Odessa and Sevastopol, a group of Black Sea sailors were taken prisoner and enclosed in the Chistyakovo prison barracks, in the Donbas. According to eye-witness reports the seamen were treated in an abominable way. In a note concealed in a stove in one of the barracks, a tank man wrote: "They were tortured, branded with white-hot irons, had their hands twisted off, and they said: ’Listen, friends, if anyone succeeds in getting out of here alive, don’t forget to tell everyone that sailors are made of steel and no force on earth can drive us down. Long live our country! Long live our Ukraine!’

p “These are the words spoken by the sailors under torture, and they were tortured before the eyes of all us prisoners so as to break down our resistance. We later learned that the sailors had strangled two German guards, but they didn’t manage to escape.. . .”

Unfortunately, the names of the Black Sea heroes have not yet been established.