A SOVIET HERO’S DAUGHTER
A SOVIET HERO’S DAUGHTER
Description
Berlin, the night of April 30, 1945. Amidst ferocious gunfire, two Soviet soldiers scale the roof of the Reichstag and raise the red Victory Banner. The daughter of one, Meliton Kantaria, has been living in Greece since 1997 and tells her family's story.
Part of Collections
12 Podcasts
THE 1940S
Tags
Credits
Interviewee
- Tsiala Kantaria
Interview by
- Stayros Blaxos
Podcast Producer
- Stayros Blaxos
Sound Designer
- Iasonas THeofanou
Sound Editor
- Spyros Lymperopoulos
Video Director
- Stefanos Mpertakhs
Translator
- Dhmhtrhs Mosxos
I was born in Abkhazia, in the region of Krourtsalsk. My childhood years were normal, I had two older brothers and I was the youngest. Wherever we went they’d all say, “Look, there are Meliton’s children, the children of the hero!”
In 1940 they called up our father to go to the army. A year later, while he was doing his service, the war with the Germans began and they sent all of them to the front. In 1942 he was wounded, a bullet struck him in the palm of his hand, going in one side and coming out the other, and for a while they sent him home. That was when my second brother was born and my father didn’t want to go back to the war.One day, when he was with some neighbors and they were out digging with a hoe, the representative of the collective farm comes up and says: “Varlomovits, they’re calling you back to the war.” And just as he was he looks and him, puts down his hoe, and wraps a piece of cloth around his wound. And he says: “if that’s how it is, I’m going to bring you Hitler’s head.”
He made it all the way to Berlin, but he never recounted, from the beginning to the end, what actually took place. It was too difficult for him. He told us: “We had nothing to eat, we had nowhere to sleep, we didn’t even have water.” “There where the horses slept,” he told us, “that’s where we slept, as well. When it rained, that was the water we drank.”
When he reached Berlin, the war was already ending. “We got to Berlin and they gave me, along with Yegorov and Samsonov, the flag, for us to put it on the Reichstag. I thought about refusing. I didn’t want to climb up there because there were bullets falling all around, and people were dropping like flies.” But then he thought: “I should refuse, but if I refuse, they’ll kill me here on the spot. Better to get killed up there, than to die here shamefully.”
When they gave them the flag, Yegorov took it, but they couldn’t climb up, they were taking a long time, they couldn’t find a way through, all of the staircases in the building had been destroyed. They went up to the first floor, and then to the second, but there Yegorov got wounded in the leg and fell. So at that point my father took Yegorov and the flag and they climbed up to the roof. He raises up the flag and turns around to see if Yegorov is OK, but the flag falls. So then he takes his belt out of his trousers, and he ties the flag to it and raises it up again.When the gunfire stopped for a little bit, they were able to go back down. Back down, the commander of the battalion started cursing them: “Why did you raise the flag tied to the belt?” And he told us that he didn’t know how to answer him, what to say to him. They were thinking to themselves, “We managed to raise the flag in the midst of this burning pyre, and he is cursing us? Why?” Later on, he learned that there was a regulation that forbade you from securing the flag with a trouser belt. But since they didn’t have any rope, what were they supposed to secure it with?
The photograph with the flag was taken later. They staged it and took it later.
When the war ended, my father returned to Moscow. He stayed there for a little while, and then he came back home to us. Of course, he didn’t bring us Hitler’s head, but he did raise up the flag. Yes! He brought us freedom!
All kinds of people gathered around, and they asked him, but never, to the best of what I remember now that I’ve gotten old, he never once told the story from the beginning to the end. My son, when he was about to start first grade at school, we went to Sukhumi [Sochi], and we met up with my father, he asked him: “Granddad, tell me how you got there, how you left again, how you put up the flag?” And he started to tell him, but then he broke down sobbing. He stopped and said, “That’s enough. I can’t say more than that.”
A different time, a long time ago, he wanted to ask Stalin for a favor. He got as far as the leader’s residence and the guards ask him: “You, where are you going?” And he answers: “To see Stalin.” “Ha! What are you saying, you fool! C’mon, get out!” That's what he said they told him. And so he goes like this with his jacket and he showed them his medal. Then they say to him, “Please forgive us, please, please come in!” And then Stalin gave him a car, a Zhiguli.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the Victory, they went to Berlin. They had invited my father along with Yegorov and they gave them an award. The flag that they raised is still in Moscow. But he didn’t like that kind of thing, he didn’t take to it. A long time earlier that used to say to him, “Meliton, come so that we can make a bust of you,” but he didn’t want stuff like that. He would say: “As long as I am alive, I don’t want that kind of thing.”
He had a really good character; I can’t remember him ever denying anyone anything. If he ever saw someone who didn’t have anything to eat, he’d get something out and give it to him. I don’t ever remember him bragging or saying that he was a hero. I remember saying to him: “But you’re a hero.” And he would answer: “There, everyone was a hero.”
It’s much more often now that I’ll say that I’m Meliton’s daughter, than it was when he was alive. I studied Biology at the University of Sukhum, and then I worked as a schoolteacher. When I was studying at the University, the Dean’s daughter used to say to me: “Tsiala, how can you compare yourself to these little kids? You’re the daughter of a hero!” And I would answer her: “I’m the same as all of you. He was the hero, not I.”
In 1992 the war between Georgia and Abkhazia broke out. We are one people, we have lived alongside the Abkhazians for centuries, like siblings, we were bound together by a shared fare, shared tribulations, never would someone ask you if you were Abkhazian or Georgian. But afterwards, as my father always used to say: “When it comes to politics, I have no idea and can’t understand what they are doing.” He worried a lot and would say: “Five years we were fighting, and we were fighting enemies. Now, amongst ourselves – this is a fratricidal war.”
Then my son went to the war as well, and he said to my father: “You were at war for five years and nothing happened to you, is something going to happen to me now?” And then, boom, on the 21st of February of 1993 – they killed him. Yes, he was twenty one years old. They buried him there and in 2018 I managed to bring him back to Georgia, and I buried him in the Cemetery of the Heroes.
My father was aggrieved and extremely worried about the war, and finally got driven out and had to go to Moscow. He has high blood pressure and he died of it. He died as a refugee in Moscow.
I also left Abkhazia to go to Moscow, when my son was killed – I was frightened for my other son. And my daughter got married to a Pontian Greek, and they left as well. Papandreou sent a ship to take them, all of them left.
My daughter brought me here as well, in 1997. I got a residence permit and I worked in a restaurant in Palaio Faliro for twelve years. As a cleaning lady and in the kitchen washing dishes. Then I had to have an operation on my legs and I couldn’t work. It isn’t that I didn’t want to, my feet didn’t want to. Now I stay at home with my grandchildren, with my children – that’s my life now.
I earn a certain respect, both from Greeks and from Russians at the Embassy here. They respect me, that I’m Meliton’s daughter, the hero of the Soviet Union.
Someday, fascism is going to return. The younger generations, this new world, they don't know. In Georgia, the books don’t write about it, they don’t know who Meliton was. In Russia they know and the Russians here in Greece know. They invite me to the cultural center, and they all come up to me and I say “thank you.” And on the bus, they’ll call out to me: “Hey! Daughter of Meliton! Melitonovna!” That makes me very happy, really happy.
Without the Russians there wouldn’t have been a victory, they were falling in front of the tanks in order to be able to vanquish the enemy.There are lots of rumors that it wasn’t my father who raised the flag, and of course one time a guy came to me and says: “My father was there, too!” “Who are you?” I ask him. And he says to me “I’m an Armenian.” “Come on, man, get out of here,” I say to him. Lots of people say lots of things; even when my father was alive they would say all kinds of things. But my father would say: “Let someone come here and say it to me, and I’ll give them all my medals.” That’s what he used to say. “Τhey know me and they know what I did – they can say whatever they want.”
I hope that all people will have freedom, that they can live in a free and normal country.