Badge "Veteran Of The 62nd Army".

[Tommy]

Veteran of the 62nd Army

"Not one step backward, Fight to the death"

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Awarded to Nikolai Efemovich Zhmenko

Signed by A V Tsygankov

Here's a quote from Tsygankov


Today, some survivors remember those horrible times. Alexander Tsygankov, who was a soldier in the 181st Infantry Division of the 62nd Army, said in an interview with the Voice of Russia:


"We disembarked straight on the bank of the Volga, where on a patch of land, several thousand civilians were gathered for evacuation across the river, old people, women and children, some wounded. The Nazi planes came right over the heads of those defenceless people, dropping bombs and striking them with heavy machine guns," Alexander Tsygankov told his interviewer.


"I cannot tell you the hatred we felt for those sadists. We swore that we would be avenged for the bloodshed they had caused and for the destruction they had brought. They had completely destroyed the city in just a few days," he emphasized, when recalling those painful memories of the Great Patriotic War.