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p Dear comrade,

p If you find this letter when I’m dead you must know the truth.... I fired off all my bullets and we held our ground till our last bullet. Shot many Germans. Couldn’t keep the positions any longer. Now I lay here wounded in the leg. Next to me lies Timofei Stefanishin, wounded and shellshocked. Yesterday the two of us laid from dawn to sunset in a vegetable patch, near a woodpile, trying not to be noticed. When darkness fell we found a trench. We spent the night there. January 21 is also drawing to a close. Nothing to eat yesterday or today. To rise and enter the house is dangerous. Germans are all around. We don’t fancy falling on the mercies of the Germans and being tortured.

p It will soon be night. We don’t know what’s in store. Maybe death.

p Please, comrade, write a letter to my father and my family. I have been two and a half years a prisoner in Rumania and, despite my awful mutilation after the camp, I didn’t go home when they set me free.... I wrote home and got no reply. My father, mother, wife and two sons are waiting and hoping for my return. Their address is: Mikhail Nesmelov, Galkin Village Soviet, Vetluga District, Gorky Region.

p That’s about all. I wish you all the best in finishing the war and hope you never have as much bad luck as me.

p Good-bye friend!

p Pavel M. Nesmelov

21. 1-45

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p Before the war Pavel Nesmelov was a secondary school history teacher. In the war he was a fearless fighter.

p In January 1942, he was badly wounded and taken to the Feodosia hospital. When the nazis took over the town he became a prisoner. Later he was set free by the Soviet Army. Despite his war wounds, he went out to take his revenge on the enemy. In December 1944, he was hit by a mortar shell splinter. But in January 1945, he was once more fighting at the front.

p Pavel Nesmelov’s life came to a tragic end. He was once more taken prisoner. His captors dealt with him extremely brutally before shooting him.

p Pavel Nesmelov’s mutilated body was found on January 24, 1945, at a spot west of the village of Nadivenim (on the west bank of the Danube). This was where his last letter was discovered. It was sent with an accompanying letter by Major Goryunov to Soviet Warrior, a frontline newspaper. Major Goryunov’s letter read:

“Soldiers of the Red Army, Pavel Nesmelov and Timofei Stefanishin were found near a trench. They had been tortured by the Germans. Nesmelov had had his ears, nose, lower lip and fingers of his right hand cut off. Stefanishin had had his right eye poked out and his nose cut off.”