Bøker av Leonard Chepel

It has been the darkest period in human history, when on September 01, 1939 the Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and the Soviet Union supported the invasion by attacking Poland from the east on September 17, 1939. Such was a beginning of the WWII with the Nazis fascists raiding the European countries and the USSR communists seizing the Baltic countries. My father was a pilot of an attack bomber Il-2, and he took off on 22 June 1941 to meet the Luftwaffe west of Kyiv. Then, one month later he flew a final combat sortie over Ukraine. Through the misty shades, the pilot noticed down the ground an enemy armor convoy and threw his bomber into a sharp-dive-attack, precisely hitting the target with heavy bombs. But, probably, it was too sharp, and the fuel in the tanks was very low quality to abort the inertia of such a steep descend. Ivan-pilot crash-landed on the field. The Soviets classified it as a fatal war casualty and called it "lost without news". But he survived and was kept in a Nazi death camp, where he deceased in 1944. I have traced the father's tragic path all through from the moment of his last sortie and then, in the manmade hell of captivity. Today, the people come to that once deadly place of Flossenburg in Bavaria and venerate the fallen in the war with hope that it will never happen again. But after 81 years, it again came to Ukraine, however, from the other side - from the east. The Russians suddenly invaded this country almost in the same way as they did it in Poland in 1939 and then, in Finland and the Baltic countries. And again, the Ukrainian life turned deadly with thousands and thousands killed and "to be missing". The bell tolls for them all over in Ukraine. And that sad song-requiem of the 20th century about "Buchenwald alarm bells" has been resumed in the 21st century, resonating in this country, but under a new caption today - "Ukrainian alarm bells". * * *, 1 1939, 17 1939.,, ., - -2, 22 1941, . ., ., , . - . ., 1944., .,,, . 81, ., 1939, . . . - 20-,, 21-, - .

I looked through many events of my oceangoing past and sorted out these seven survival scenarios, in which the main characters ventured into the boundless scene of nature that to see and feel what one great man, Ernest Shacklton, confessed a long time ago: We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders1959 And eventually, it happened to most of them, my friends and colleagues, who became the heroes-actors of the stories, which I still perceive and clearly see in my vivid memory like it happened yesterday: the fledgling lonely marine on a raft, drifting on the high seas and fighting for his life; the tender lady, armed just with a primitive spear, battling with a dreadful beast to save the other people; the scouts miraculously coming alive out of hell of the Antarctica tempest in Royal Bay of South Georgia; the nonchalant mariners, enjoying the Arctic scenery and escaping a huge polar bear; the crew of a fishing trawler struggling for survival when trapped by hurricanes Debbie and Camille on the Grand Banks. The last two stories of Howling Wilderness and The Castaways of frozen Land are about the most remarkable survival in Siberia and on Arctic islands.