In the Vitebsk region, BRSM volunteers held an event to help WWII veterans and lonely elderly people
A detachment of volunteers from the agricultural college of the educational institution "VSAVM" went to the agro-town of Olgovo to help dig up a household plot and tidy up the area around the house of Great Patriotic War veteran Nikolai Sergeevich Ivanov, who turned 91 this year.
The war caught him as a 12-year-old boy, but tested him like an adult: a partisan detachment, a year in concentration camps (in Vitebsk, then in Lithuania).
– My friend and I managed to escape from the camp, otherwise I would not have returned home alive, – recalls Nikolai Sergeevich.
During the crossing of the front line, he was shell-shocked and remained unconscious for five days. "But I survived," the veteran said with a tremor in his voice.
In the post-war period, Nikolai Sergeevich dedicated his life to medicine, fighting not on the front lines, but against diseases. For the last 20 years until his retirement, he worked as a radiologist at a tuberculosis dispensary. By the way, the fate of many in his family is connected with medicine. His wife Zinaida, with whom they have been together for 50 years, worked as a paramedic, and his sister was an Honored Ophthalmologist of the Russian Federation.
Despite his considerable age, Grandpa Kolya (as his wife affectionately calls him) keeps his household in perfect order: there is a potato patch and a garden of apple and pear trees planted with his own hands, and even his own pond, which his father dug many years ago and stocked with fish.
Nikolai Sergeevich expressed his gratitude to the volunteers who worked on the plot for several hours:
– So many young people came today! It's pleasant, of course, and I am immensely grateful to them.
The First Secretary of the Vitebsk District Committee of the BRSM, Konstantin Shevyakov, who is overseeing the volunteer detachment, shared his impressions of the time spent in Olgovo:
– I am glad that there is an opportunity to help the people thanks to whom we live today. I wish our veterans many more years of life!