Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Today, Russia celebrates Victory Day. Germany capitulated on 5/8, but it was past midnight in Moscow, and Russians, who wound up calling the war Great Patriotic, are a bit Russo-centric.
I've promised a thread about another personal connection to this long-ago horror. Here it is.

Despite the festivities, the jingoistic bacchanalia of aggressive militarism that are the hallmarks of Putin-era VD celebrations, to me, it is always the saddest of holidays. A day that commemorates an existential tragedy that left no Soviet family untouched.

Last year, I told the story of my grandpas, real, bona fide, decorated heroes, a marine and a comms specialist, who went through the worst of the meatgrinder and came back to make sure I exist.
My parents' generation are Miracle Children. It took huge luck

https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1259120591971463170?s=19

But neither of them ever told any stories, so I suspect that the luck was all my parents' and mine, not theirs. Pictures like this one tell you all you need to know. This is the Soviet painter Mikhail Kobytev before the war, as a schoolboy, and four years later.

And this is my granduncle, Lev Pokhis, shortly before he was conscripted for his mandatory military service, in 1938. This is the first photo he ever took. He was a village boy, but well-read, educated, dreamy-eyed. He wrote poetry and wanted to be a writer.

Shortly before his service term was up, he sent this picture to his parents. It was lovingly preserved by my grandma, who doted on her little brother.
Private Pokhis is trying his best to look like a hardened warrior in his uniform, but the inscription in the back is telling...

"To my dear parents, a memory, from your son Lyova. 1/27/41, Kamenets-Podolsk. Let this mute imprint remind you of my living image."
It's very touching an poetic, with a spelling error belying his provincial origins.
Germany attacked five months later.

Kamenets-Podolsk is in Western Ukraine. Germans marched through there in the summer of 1941 like a firestorm. The Soviet Army was unprepared, badly led and had no chance. Nobody counted the dead, nobody went back for the wounded.
Private Pokhis disappeared into this whirlwind...

There were no more letters, no mute imprints, no living image. There was nothing at all to acknowledge private Pokhis ever existed, until this...
I've found this piece of paper, ancient and falling apart, in my grandma's things last week.
It's a "pokhoronka", as Russians call it.

It's dated 1948. It says that private Pokhis went MIA in 1944. It's hastily written on a piece of graphing paper, torn out of a notebook and then cut in half. They had to preserve paper. There were lots of "pokhoronkas" to write.
The word means "funeral notice", by the way...

But private Pokhis didn't go MIA in 1944. It was 3 years after they last heard of him, there is no way we wouldn't write all that time. The "pokhoronka" was a formality. 1944 was the date he was entered as missing into the regimental documents.
His mother wouldn't accept this.

Her youngest son, Mikhail, wouldn't either.
This is him, by the way, in that same year of 1944. He is 18 and his war is already over. A member of an airborne unit, he broke his leg in a jump, and, while recuperating, was transferred to the HQ, to a general's staff...

He had a good handwriting, the lucky kid. This is probably what got him the lush transfer. Here is the inscription.
"To beloved mom, a memory of me. Let this bad picture remind you of my living image."
One wonders how many times he stared at the last picture of his big brother...

Mikhail dreamt of being in law enforcement. After the war, my grandma gave him all the family savings and sent him to study law in the city. He got good at it. Real good. The horrified teen in the photo became a celebrated homicide detective, then a criminal prosecutor.

But before this happened, before be wrote a manual on investigating murders with dismemberment of the body (which I found and read at the age of 11), he undertook his first investigation, into the fate of his brother.
He went looking for anyone who served with him...

Can't really imagine how hard this must've been. In the end, he only found one man, disabled veteran Lieutenant Yakov Dubin, who by that time was serving as assistant DA in Kishinev, Moldavia.
It took Mikhail a year to find him. Dubin's affidavit is dated 1949.

Dubin was friendly with Lev before the war and kept in touch with him after it started. But his account is meager, fragmentary and shows how chaotic and unreliable the veterans' memory of those events was. Dubin can't even recall were exactly he saw Lev last. Kherson? Nikolayev?

All he knew was that Lev was wounded in the side of his stomach and was on his way to a field hospital in the rear. "His subsequent fate is unknown to me. I will be accountable for the veracity of what I said", he concludes.

1941, Ukraine. There and then, MIA meant only one thing: nobody was around to retrieve the dog tag. Lev Pokhis's subsequent fate was almost certainly a mass grave with hundreds of his comrades, no marker, no honors, no memory, save for Lt. Dubin's sketchy recall.

The affidavit at least tells me where he served. He was in a recon unit (an educated kid who could read a map, of course) and a zampolit, a political commissar's assistant (an educated kid who could read and write, obviously). Nothing else.
He disappeared 2 months into the war.

Not sure how much recon he could do. The Germans weren't exactly hiding. Not sure if he had a chance to show any valor or heroism. He didn't get captured, which was lucky, considering his obvious Jewishness. But this is all. His mom and his sister would have to go on with this.

Unlike the stories of my grandpas, who fought heroically and came back with honors, Lev Pokhis's story is the most ordinary, most mundane one in the war. He was fed into the grinder, his dreams and talents with him. He had no miracle children. The mute imprint is all that's left.

To me, this, and not the ostentatious military parades in Moscow, is the real legacy of the war.
The kind that won't make anyone eager to have the world relive the experience ever again.
This is all.