Volodya Dubinin

The boy was 14 years old when the Patriotic War broke out. His father volunteered for the navy, and Volodya stayed with his mother in Kerch, a city in eastern Crimea.

When the city was captured by Nazi troops, he and the partisans went to the Starokarantinsky underground quarries, and the Nazis began blocking all the entrances they could find from the catacombs, pouring cement over them. Only children could crawl through the remaining narrow slits to bring the command information about the enemy from the outside. And Volodya was the smallest by physical parameters, and the time came when only he alone could get out of the quarries.

In December 1941 the Germans decided to flood the quarries together with the people inside Volodya Dubinin managed to get this information, and in time to warn his comrades about the threatening danger just a few hours before the punitive operation. Having hastily built dams, the fighters blocked the entrance to the water, being in it up to their waists.

Volodya died after blowing himself up on a network of minefields with which the Germans surrounded the quarries.