War Photographer's Notebook

Chapter 417 The Monument Hidden in the Forest

I chatted with Vitaly about the stupid things the Poles had done, and the car drove to the edge of a forest in the afterglow of the setting sun.

What Wei Ran didn't expect was that this was exactly where one of the two sets of coordinates recorded in the metal book was located.

"For the next two or three kilometers, we can only go on foot."

Vitaly parked the car on the field dirt road at the edge of the forest, pointed to a dark forest path and said, "This forest is the land bought by the Guerrilla Village. At that time, my grandfather and many of his friends paid for it. Bought in the village. So Victor, please remind those friends of yours not to try to steal something here."

Wei Ran glanced at Diane standing behind him and Prohor, the amateur digger with a face of embarrassment, and made a promise with a smile, "Don't worry, Mr. Vitaly, I believe they will not do stupid things .”

"I believe too"

Vitali and his face responded, and then took out a double-barreled shotgun and a large flashlight from the trunk of the car, and then took out a bouquet of flowers bought on the way, and this While walking into the forest, he said, "I'm just a routine reminder, okay, let's go in!"

Under his leadership, a group of people entered the dark forest along the winding forest path.

Returning to the place where we fought together, Wei Ran found a lot of changes. Now the forest is very clean, and the pine trees in sight are covered with traces of knife cuts. Under the traces of knife cuts, some containers such as dirty tin buckets and plastic buckets are still hanging.

"The pine resin harvested in this forest every year brings a lot of income to the village"

Vitali took the initiative to explain, "When I was young, I also helped to harvest pine resin here. It was really a hard experience that people dare not recall."

"There are so many traps in this forest that people dare not recall."

Prohor, an amateur earth-digger who came over, said with a bitter face, "I remember that there were two earth-diggers from Gomel last summer, and those two unlucky ghosts were holding metal The detector has been scanning for a whole day, and even the horn of the detector is dumb, but what they dug out are all kinds of useless nails, iron pieces and the like. canning jars."

"Those traps were specially prepared for the earth-digging gangs. About ten years ago, the guerrilla villages used pesticide spraying planes to sprinkle the forest with scrap metal collected."

Vitaly said happily, "But you should be lucky, at least the people in the village didn't replace those traps with animal traps."

"I won't come here." Prohor shook his head without thinking, "Finding battlefield relics is just my hobby, but cleaning up garbage is not my hobby."

Vitali smiled and didn't say much, and led the crowd to continue along the path, and finally came to a clearing in the forest where many tombstones were buried before the sun set.

With just a glance, Wei Ran recognized this place. This open space was exactly the camp where Slava took him and the pilot Alisa to bury Teacher Jaina and the guerrilla Shura.

But today, decades later, this camp has become a cemetery in the true sense. The granite tombstones engraved with red five-pointed stars and sickle-hammer symbols are intricately distributed throughout this forest glade, but in every Next to each tombstone, there is basically a tall pine tree.

Perhaps because of the passage of time, the names engraved on the pine tree have become blurred with the growth of the tree, but the hard granite tombstones clearly record the information of the burial.

On these tombstones, Wei Ran found Teacher Jaina and the guerrilla Shula who were buried together, found the one-armed shepherd boy Vasily, found the pilot Alisa and Ivan who had realized his dream, and the sacrifice outside Berlin. female doctor Sasha.

At the same time, he also found the guerrillas Aufjay and Antip who had been taken away by the metal notebook, and also found names that he was completely unfamiliar with or even had no memory of.

In addition to these gravestones representing the familiar strangers, there was a pedestal, also of granite, in the center of the glade.

On this granite pedestal, which is five meters square but only less than two meters high, there is a FLAK38 single-barreled anti-aircraft gun that was heavily equipped by Germany during World War II.Around the pedestal, there are some bouquets that are either bright or have long withered.

On the four sides of the pedestal, the records are the roster kept by Sergey, the dreams of those children and the realization of their dreams.

In the records carved on the granite base line by line, some of those children, like the one-armed shepherd boy Vasily, did not persist until the end of the war and died. The dream of being a writer ended up being a worker at the Minsk Tractor Factory, or a projectionist at the Salute Cinema.

Also, their dreams seem to have changed at a certain time, becoming lawyers, doctors, teachers, truck drivers, or farmers in collective farms in guerrilla villages, actors on stage, and soldiers with guns.

Of course, a few, like Sergei and his wife Jania, ended up realizing their dreams to some extent.

When Wei Ran walked around to the side of the apparently spontaneously constructed monument facing away from the setting sun, there was a sentence chiseled in slightly larger red Russian on the rough granite, which was slightly sad but implied a little bit of peace and harmony. A message of hope.

"This kind of future may be somewhat different from the colorful world we expected in our hearts when we were children. But after all, this is the future we created with our own hands.

You can be disappointed, even hopeless.But for those friends and family who have no chance to see this future for themselves, maybe we should try our best to live a happier life in this slightly different future world. "

After reading this message, the only thing that comforts Wei Ran is the signature and time at the end of this message—Guerrilla Children/October 1982, 10.

"My grandfather said that this monument was erected on the 40th anniversary of the Guerrilla Village."

Vitali put the bouquet in his hand at the foot of the monument, pointed the anti-aircraft gun on the monument with the beam of the flashlight and said, "He said that when the monument was built, it was very lively and many people came from the village.

He also said that before the cannon was built, it had been placed together with various farm tools in the village warehouse, and many people didn't even know why it appeared there.

But my grandpa said that was the weapon their teacher used to fight the Germans to the last moment. "

It's the anti-aircraft gun that Miss Jaina took away.
Wei Ran secretly sighed, Sergey and the others are lucky to have a teacher like Jaina, how could it not be her luck that Teacher Jaina has a group of students like Sergey and the others?
"In this colorful future world, there are still people who remember you, and there are still people who know what you did, and there will be more people who will know what you did in the future."

Wei Ran muttered to himself, and answered the question on the metal notebook that he had never dared to answer with an unusually affirmative tone, then turned to Diane who was just bowing to the monument and said, "About those bones Mr. Sergey will definitely give you an answer to the matter, and I believe that combined with the local historical files in Liuban, the identities of those invaders will soon be revealed."

Diane froze for a moment, and after realizing it, she said, "Mr. Victor, it's about the commission."

"no need"

Wei Ran shook his head, turned around and walked out and said, "If you want to pay a commission, remember to come here every year to present a bouquet of flowers is enough."

Seeing that Wei Ran, who had turned to leave, was blocked by the trees on both sides of the forest path, Diane opened her mouth, but finally said nothing.

　Thank you Hua Bixie for the reward, add more to express your heart, and return the rest slowly.
　　
　
(End of this chapter)