My job as an archaeologist for the US Army sometime takes me to far flung places. On several occasions I've been involved in the recovery of Japanese soldiers killed in action at Kwajalein Atoll in the Central Pacific. Remains are often inadvertently discovered during infrastructure improvements on the island. Indeed, over 3,000 Japanese service members are buried in yet undiscovered individual and mass graves across Kwajalein Island alone.
Even though these were enemies of my country, I can't help but be saddened by these discoveries. It is always sobering to remember that these men died and were buried by strangers, in a land far from home. In almost every case, the families of these men never learned of the circumstances of their death, only that they were lost at Kwajalein.
The emotions expressed by the people in this article reveal much of what I experienced, but magnified many times over. The archaeologists and volunteers recovering the missing in Russia are doing to account for their countrymen and for those still living who were left behind. My hat is off to these people and what they are accomplishing.
Visit the website below to find more information and many more photos
Digging for
their lives: Russia's volunteer body hunters
By Lucy Ash BBC
News, Russia
Of
the estimated 70 million people killed in World War Two, 26 million died on the
Eastern front - and up to four million of them are still officially considered
missing in action. But volunteers are now searching the former battlefields for
the soldiers' remains, determined to give them a proper burial - and a name.
Olga
Ivshina walks slowly and carefully through the pine trees, the beeps of her
metal detector punctuating the quiet of the forest. "They are not buried
very deep," she says.
"Sometimes
we find them just beneath the moss and a few layers of fallen leaves. They are
still lying where they fell. The soldiers are waiting for us - waiting for the
chance to finally go home."
Nearby,
Marina Koutchinskaya is on her knees searching in the mud. For the past 12
years she has spent most of her holidays like this, far away from home, her
maternity clothes business, and her young son.
"Every
spring, summer and autumn I get this strange sort of yearning inside me to go
and look for the soldiers," she says. "My heart pulls me to do this
work."
They
are part of a group called Exploration who have travelled for 24 hours in a
cramped army truck to get to this forest near St Petersburg. Conditions are
basic - they camp in the woods - and some days they have to wade waist-deep
through mud to find the bodies of the fallen. The work can be dangerous, too.
Soldiers are regularly discovered with their grenades still in their backpacks
and artillery shells can be seen sticking out of the trees. Diggers from other
groups elsewhere in Russia have lost their lives.
Marina
holds up an object she has found, it looks like a bar of soap, but it is
actually TNT. "Near a naked flame it's still dangerous, even though it has
been lying in the ground for 70 years," she says.
Many
countries were scarred by World War Two, but none suffered as many losses as
the Soviet Union.
On
22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest and bloodiest
campaign in military history, aimed at annexing vast areas of the USSR to the
Third Reich. St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, was one of his main
targets. In less than three months, the advancing German army had encircled the
city and started pounding it from the air.
But
attempts to take the city by storm fell through, so Hitler decided to starve it
into surrender. For more than two years, the Red Army fought desperately to cut
through German lines.
Olga
and Marina are working near the town of Lyuban, 80km (50 miles) south of St
Petersburg. Here, in an area of just 10 sq km, an estimated 19,000 Soviet
soldiers were killed in just a few days in 1942. So far the diggers have found
2,000 bodies.
Ilya
Prokoviev, the most experienced of the Exploration team, is carefully poking
the ground with a long metal spike. A former army officer with a droopy blonde
moustache, he found his first soldier 30 years ago while walking in the
countryside.
"I
was crossing a swamp when suddenly I saw some boots sticking out of the
mud," he says.
"A
bit further away, I found a Soviet helmet. Then I scraped away some moss and
saw a soldier. I was shocked. It was 1983, I was 40km from Leningrad and there
lay the remains of a soldier who hadn't been buried. After that there were more
and more and more, and we realised these bodies were to be found everywhere -
and on a massive scale."
There
was little time in the heat of battle to bury the dead, says Valery Kudinsky,
the defence ministry official responsible for war graves.
"In
just three months the German death machine covered more than 2,000km (1,250
miles) of our land. So many Red Army units were killed, wiped out or surrounded
- how could anyone think about burials, let alone records of burials, in such
conditions?"
Immediately
after the war, the priority was to rebuild a shattered country, he says. But
that does not explain why later the battlefields weren't cleared and the fallen
soldiers not identified and buried.
The
diggers now believe that some were deliberately concealed. The governing
council of the USSR issued decrees in 1963 about destroying any traces of war,
says Ilya.
"If
you take a map showing where battles took place, then see where all the new
forest plantations and building projects were located, you'll find they
coincide with the front line. Nobody will convince me they planted trees for
ecological reasons."
If
you crouch down in the woods near Lyuban, a series of grooves in the earth can
be clearly made out.
"They
actively planted new trees on the battlefield - they ploughed furrows and put
the trees exactly in the places where the unburied soldiers were lying,"
Marina says.
She
recently unearthed a helmet and in order to find its owner, the team had to
uproot two nearby trees.
"When
we cleaned away some clumps of earth from the roots we saw two hands tangled up
in them. Then we found a pelvis and some ribs between the roots. So we think
the whole soldier was underneath the roots and the trees were growing on top of
him."
But
how could anyone - farmers or workmen - get on a tractor and plough over land
littered with human remains?
"If
they refused to plough a field because there were corpses or bones in it,
they'd just be sacked," says Ilya. "If you lost your job in those
days you were a non-person - you didn't exist. That's what life was like in the
Soviet Union." Plus, it was less than two decades after the war. The
workers had endured far worse horrors, he says.
There
are horrors for the diggers, too.
Nevskaya
Dubrovka, on the banks of the River Neva, was the scene of one of the bloodiest
campaigns of the Leningrad siege. The Red Army fought tooth and nail to secure
a narrow stretch of river bank in an attempt to break the blockade. Hundreds of
thousands of troops, used as little more than cannon fodder, were slaughtered.
Diggers
discovered a mass grave in the area last summer. The soldiers may have been
thrown into the pit by their comrades or local villagers as a hasty form of
burial, or even by the German Army, anxious to prevent an epidemic among its
troops.
"There
must have been 30 or 40 soldiers in there. Four layers of people one on top of
the other," says Olga, as she sits by the campfire. "But the
skeletons were all mixed up and smashed. Here you have a head - there a
leg…" She pauses and stares into the fire. "Once you've seen that,
you'll never forget it. You are no longer the same person you were
before."
Going
back to city life and her job with the BBC Russian Service is sometimes hard
after a few weeks in the forest. When her friends in Moscow complain about not
being able to afford a good enough car or designer clothes, she feels
alienated.
"Everything
seems so pointless - even my job as a journalist - and sometimes I think, 'What
am I doing?' But here, on the dig, I feel we are doing something which is
needed."
For
Olga - who sang hymns to Communism in her primary school, then learnt about
profit and loss at secondary school - volunteering as a digger also provides a
moral compass in confusing times.
"Sometimes
you need to know that you are doing something which is important, that you are
not just a piece of dust in this universe. This work connects us to our past.
It's like an anchor which helps us to stay in place even during a storm."
Finding
the dead is only one part of their mission. Rescuing them from anonymity is the
other.
In
Moscow an eternal flame burns at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the shadow
of the Kremlin Wall, but for the diggers, the best way to honour those who lost
their lives is to give them back their identities.
"The
soldier had a family, he had children, he fell in love," says Ilya.
"Being unknown is nothing to be proud of. We are the ones who made him
unknown."
But
discovering who they were is not always easy, especially after so much time has
passed.
"The
more data we can collect from the spot, the better the chance we have to
identify a soldier," says Alexander Konoplov, the leader of the
Exploration group. Sometimes they find old coins with the soldiers, given to
them by their families. The belief was that if the family lent him a few coins,
he would come home to repay the loan.
But
while personal items can build up a picture of the person, they can't help find
his name, or place of birth. Initials scratched into spoons and bowls are good.
But the key is usually an ID tag.
During
World War Two, Soviet soldiers' ID tags were not made of metal - they were
small ebony capsules containing a small piece of paper for their personal details.
Sadly, the papers are often illegible. Others were left blank because many
soldiers were superstitious - they believed filling in the forms would lead to
certain death.
Alexander,
who ran his own business selling food products before becoming a full-time
digger, is holding a bullet case plugged with a small piece of wood. He hopes
that it is an improvised ID tag. But when he turns it upside down in his hand,
what comes out of it is not a roll of paper, but a trickle of brown liquid.
"Sometimes
we find messages with the soldier's name," says Alexander. "Some
wrote, 'If I am killed, please pass this on to my girlfriend or my mum.' You
can't help feeling touched by it."
Exploration
is one of 600 groups of diggers from all over Russia who have found and reburied
a total of 500,000 soldiers so far.
These
teams are known as the "white diggers", but there are also those
dubbed "black diggers" who search for medals, guns, coins or even
gold teeth which they sell online or to specialist dealers. They are not interested
in identifying the soldiers - they just leave the bones in the ground.
Alexander
has a strict set of guidelines about how the remains should be excavated,
labelled and stored. Each soldier is photographed and their location is
recorded and entered into a digital database.
If
a decades-old ID tag cannot be deciphered by the team on the ground, it is
carefully packed and sent to the team's headquarters in the Volga city of
Kazan.
The
team's technician, Rafik Salakhiev, uses ultraviolet light and digital imaging
to reveal the faded pencil marks. "Let's try to enhance purple colours on
this yellow paper," he says. "We can reduce the saturation and yes!
We start to see some letters…"
Once
a name emerges, the diggers use old army lists, classified documents and
contacts in the military or police to identify the soldier precisely and to
locate surviving members of his family.
"Every
new search gets to me as if it was the first one," says Rafik. Many of the
relatives are now elderly and may not be in good health. "When you call
the relatives, before telling them the news, you try to prepare them. Even if
they have been waiting for a long time."
But
tracing a soldier's family can take years - on occasions more than a decade -
especially if the family moved after the war.
When,
in 1942, people in First Lt Kustov's home village heard he was missing, they
suspected him of deserting and collaborating with the Germans. They branded his
young son and daughter traitor's children and the family were forced to leave.
It took Ilya Prokoviev months to track them down.
"When
we told them that we had found their father's remains, for them the feeling was
just indescribable. They knew that he hadn't just deserted, that he couldn't
have behaved like that, but there was never any proof until 60 years
later."
From
the archives, the diggers worked out that Kustov had been the commander of one
of Stalin's notorious shtrafbats, a battalion made up of prisoners and
deserters. Only a trusted officer and staunch communist would have been
appointed to such a post.
"They
had managed to restore historical truth and honour their father's memory,"
says Ilya. "It was the main event of their lives, I think." Kustov's
children took his remains and buried them next to their mother, who had waited
her whole life for her husband to return.
Near
the banks of the River Neva, close to the mass grave found by diggers, a
Russian Orthodox priest chants prayers as he walks around the rows of bright
red coffins laid out on the grass.
The
children, grand-children and great-grand-children of the soldiers they
unearthed look on, some quietly sobbing.
Valentina
Aliyeva is here to bury the father she has not seen since she was four years
old. For seven decades, the only link she had with him was a black and white
photo of their former family home.
"My
mother remarried some years later and everyone told me to call my stepfather
Daddy. But I refused - I knew who my real dad was," she says, her eyes
filling with tears. "What those diggers have achieved means so much to me.
I can't tell you how grateful I am."
Tatiana
Uzarevich and Lyudmila Marinkina, twin sisters in their early 50s, have
travelled from the remote region of Kamchatka - nine hours away by plane. The
diggers found their grandfather's ID tag in the mass grave. When they were
unable to trace his family, the group put out an appeal on the evening news.
The
twins' elderly mother was stunned when she heard his name - Alexander Golik -
the family had searched in vain for years. His disappearance had left his wife
and children destitute. "The fact that he was missing in action meant that
my grandmother was not entitled to any of the financial support given to other
relatives after the Great Patriotic War. She didn't get a penny and she had four
children to raise," says Lyudmila.
"My
mum was so hungry all the time, she begged the other kids for pieces of bread
at school.
"She
only remembers the shape of her fathers' hands - but she had memories of a
kind, good man," says Tatiana. "We just had to come to this reburial
service to visit the place where he died and accompany him to his final resting
place."
The
walls of the large, newly dug grave are draped with red cloth - an act of
respect normally accorded only to army generals. Young men dressed in
Soviet-style army uniforms form a guard of honour. Visibly moved, as coffin
after coffin is carried past to be buried, some of them look up to the sky.
There is a belief that birds flying overhead transport the souls of the dead.
There
are more than 100 coffins - each contains the bones of 12 to 15 men. The
diggers would like each soldier to have his own, but they can't afford the
extra 1,500 they would need for today's service.
This
is the culmination of months of work by the volunteers. It's what it's all for
- bringing a semblance of order to the moral chaos of the past, and paying
tribute to those who gave their lives.
In
the spring they will resume their searches in the forests and fields where so
many were slaughtered. They are determined to continue until the last man is
found. But it could be a life's work - or more.
"There
are so many unburied soldiers, it will take decades to find them. There will
definitely be work for our grandchildren," says Marina. "But nature
is working against us. The remains are decomposing and it is getting harder to
find the bones, ID tags and army kit." The more years that go by. The less
information there is.
"We
need to continue to do this for ourselves, so our souls can be at peace,"
says Ilya. "It has become the meaning of our lives."
