Ivan Gerasimov

In almost every train with troops moving to the front, they regularly caught hare-brained boys who were going to war to avenge their relatives. Thus, 14-year-old Ivan Gerasimov was found at the station Povadino. His father, Fyodor Gerasimovich, died at the front, his house was burned down, and together with him – his mother and three sisters.

In October, once again came the order – in fulfillment of Stalin’s order to send all teenagers to the rear for determination in schools. And at 5:30 a.m. on October 14, the Germans began an artillery preparation, and the question of Ivan’s evacuation to the east was postponed.

The first attack was repulsed, then an air raid, then German tanks moved forward. The guns were cut off from each other. Vanya single-handedly fired two last shells at the tanks. In front of the division commissar Filimonov he got his left arm elbow shattered. And then grenades flew towards the Germans. A fragment of another shell tore off Ivan’s right hand. It seemed to the survivors that he was dead.

However, when German tanks bypassed the artillerymen’s position, Ivan Gerasimov stood up, got out of the ditch, holding an anti-tank grenade with the stump of his right hand to his chest, pulled the pin with his teeth and lay under the track of the lead tank.