"A great trip to Volgograd!!!" a Volgograd Travel Page by heplion

What a fantastic trip this was. I drank homemade wine with a colleague and his family and his WWII veterin father at their dacha (country home), road along the Volga river with a new friend, and had a great work week!!

Volgograd is located on the Southern portion of the Volga river. At one time it was called Stalingrad, and if you saw the movie "Enemy at the Gates" with Jude Law, you might have an idea of this cities history. While the movie is inaccurate in many ways, the general idea of what happened there is true. When the Germans attacked the bombed the city for 6 days straight, killing 46,000 of the non-military locals. The fighting lasted for about 200 days which saw heroism and attrocities that can hardly be imagined. The entire city was destoyed and only 4 buildings were left standing. Imagine a city the size of Cleveland, OH or Indianapolis, IN completely wiped out, office buildings, homes and apartments, schools, everything.....

Over 1,500,000 Russian soldiers lost their lives in the war, 600,000 were captured and sent back to Germany as prisoners of war, and over 1,000,000 German soldiers lost their lives. At the peak of the fighting over 8,000,000 soldiers were fighting in the city.

Vasily Zaitsev of "enemy at the gates" fame did exist and killed 241 Germans as a sniper. In another story of heroism 4 Russian were credited with stopping 24 German tanks single handedly, and survived and live today. In another case a soldier throwing a maltov cocktail at a tank had the bottle shot and broken over him and he burst into flames. Instead of extinguishing himself he grabbed another and ran at the tank, destroying it. And in yet another instance a nurse was surrounded by enemy soldiers when the driver of the emergency vehicle was shot. After exhausting the available ammunition, she grabbed a grenade and waited until the Germans approached. She then detonated the grenade taking out several of the German soldiers.

Walking through the city and talking with the locals you hear many stories of this sort. After the war the city was completely rebuilt and serves as a reminder of the autrocities of war...