Somehow I survived the worst two years of the war, the Leningrad Front, and then I almost didn’t survive. One foolish misstep got me captured, although it should have cost me my life. Would it be better to have been killed than captured by the Germans? After being a soldier, would it be better to be dead or be a prisoner of war, with the big letters SU—Soviet Union—painted on the back of my military coat in indelible white paint? We were marched west, hundreds of prisoners, in our torn boots and uniforms infested with lice, until we arrived in a prison camp somewhere in Germany. It was as bad as you can imagine: yellow drinking water with stains of machine oil, dysentery, rotten turnips, routine beatings with a gun barrel, and yet I only grasped at one thing, life. I would have never known, even after three years at the front, how fiercely we claw for life, even life in a German prison camp.

We escaped just before the camp was liberated in April of 1945, those of us who were still alive, everyone ecstatic and free, no longer prisoners of war. We were ready to go back home. Or were we? There were fifty-six nationalities in the camp, but I only made friends with two men. Yura was from Pinsk and slept on the bunk below mine. He was captured just as I was, on a reconnaissance mission, stalking through the woods right into the enemy position. My other friend from the bunk above was John from Saint Petersburg, America, who was captured in Normandy. Saint Petersburg, can you imagine? We were born on different sides of the world and yet our cities had the same name. He taught me some English, and I taught him some Russian, so he called me Nick and I called him Vanya. Yura didn’t trust him, accusing him of being a capitalist spy. But one look at John’s face—freckles and a gap between his front teeth—made me laugh off Yura’s warning, despite Yura being a veteran and having served in the Finnish War.

Yura told me stories about that war, about him witnessing how our prisoners were exchanged for captured Finns. He saw them marching in columns toward each other, the Finns reaching their comrades first, embracing and kissing them. When our captured soldiers reached our side, Yura and thirty or so other soldiers were ordered to encircle and escort them to a nearby barrack behind rows of barbed wire. One of the released soldiers tried to embrace Yura, who fought off the soldier’s hug as if he were contaminated. The lieutenant’s command was clear. ”Freeze!” he yelled. “One step and we’ll shoot.” Those prisoners of war, so happy to be back on their home soil, were now our enemies. We all knew what Stalin said: “Soviet soldiers do not surrender. There are no prisoners of war. There are only traitors.”