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On May 1, an ordinary resident of Samara, Alexandra Rashchupkina, a fragile and smiley woman marked her 92nd birthday. Her heart pounds every time when she recalls the war years, she says. “I just cannot help crying when I see war films and newsreels on TV sometimes.”
She is a remarkable woman. Born in Uzbekistan nearly a century ago, she was one of the first female tractor drivers in her village. By the time the war broke out she and her husband had been married for several years, had two children and moved to Tashkent, the capital of the then-Soviet Uzbekistan, where they lived happily until one of their children died. Then the second child died, too.
Alexandra’s husband volunteered when the war began and the woman followed him to the military enlistment office, but her application was rejected. She was told her help would be more useful at home and she needed not to go to fight …
“Why was I so eager to be on the front line? For the sake of my loved ones, of course. Even if everyone shouted ’For the Motherland! For Stalin!’, we still went to fight for our relatives, for people we knew. For our mothers, sisters or brothers,” Alexander recalls.
She had her hair cropped, put on man’s uniform and applied to the recruitment office again. “How obstinate I was,” she smiles. She said her name was Alexander Rashchupkin. The fact she had no identification papers on her did not bother anyone… She was assigned to a training school near Moscow where she took a driving course. Upon completing it she was dispatched to Stalingrad where she learned to drive a tank.
She survived an air raid on her school. It was the first air raid in her life. “But a woman is always a woman. Instead of being happy to be alive I was worrying about my new uniform, all turned to rags,” she smiles.
However advanced in years she is now, she still accepts invitations of local schools to tell the little ones about her military experience.
When she first saw a tank, she was scared, Alexandra admits. “I had studied the hardware for two months and never feared anything. But once I saw that iron monster I thought: ’God gracious, what shall I do with the thing’,” she laughs.
But she overcame her fears and went to the war on par with men. No one in her regiment ever suspected a thing, she is convinced. “My secret remained a secret,” she says. She even learned to change her voice when she spoke. For three years she kept her secret. “You don’t get undressed often on the frontline. Nobody cared much for hygiene,” she recalls.
It was not until February 1945 that her secret was revealed. The Soviet tanks moved into Bunulau where they were ambushed by Nazi troops. Her tank caught fire and a fellow serviceman saved her from the burning machine. When he attended to her wounds he saw that she was not a man…
After the war was over and Alexandra’s husband also returned home, they moved to Kuibishev (Samara). They never had children again.
These days, she lives alone in Samara. Her friends and neighbors help her with shopping and cleaning. Although she feels lonely at times, she tries to be cheerful and never rejects an invitation to meet with local schoolchildren and tell stories of her war days.
Yelena Batyreva, Yelena Vakhrusheva
Komsomolskaya Pravda
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