Who was actually the prototype of the story of the unknown hero

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In fact, on his chest he had not a TRP badge, but the badge of a parachutist instructor.

Everyone knows Marshak's poem "The Story of an Unknown Hero": A young man riding a tram ("about twenty, medium height, broad-shouldered and strong, he walks in a white T-shirt and a cap, a TRP sign on his chest") saw a fire on the top floor of one from houses. A girl thrashed about in the fire.

The citizen jumped off the foot of the tram and, without waiting for the fire brigade, climbed to where the fire was, along the drainpipe. When the firemen arrived, a woman approached them and asked: "Girl, save my daughter!" The firefighters, however, replied that they could not find her.

"All of a sudden, an unknown citizen came out of the gates of the burnt house." Passing the girl to his mother, he jumped into the tram, "flickered like a shadow behind the car glass, waved his cap and disappeared around the corner."

In reality, everything was not quite as described by Marshak. it was not spring, but in the very middle of summer - a hot Sunday afternoon on June 12, 1936. The guy, who had not a TRP badge on his chest, but a parachutist instructor's badge, was not 20, but 27, and the girl being rescued was already 24 years old by that time.

Captain Ivan Georgievich Starchak, who commanded the battle, in which the commander

Senior Lieutenant Vasily Mikhailovich Burnatsky served as one of the companies at the beginning of the war.

on his chest he has that very badge of a parachutist instructor.

That year, as well as in 2010 and as in 1972, there was an abnormal heat in Moscow. In Moscow, the average temperature in May was above the norm by 1-2, 5 degrees, in June - by 3-5 degrees, in July - by almost 6 degrees. The Yauza dried up, and the Moscow River, not yet replenished by the waters of the Moscow-Volga Canal, completed a year later, turned into a muddy, stinking stream, fed only by the city sewage system.

That year, fires followed one after another, and fire brigades, torn between fires, were far from being able to succeed everywhere.

On that day, Vasily Burnatsky, a 27-year-old student of the workers' faculty, was driving along the Boulevard Ring, hanging on the footboard of the tram line A to classes in the parachute section of OSOAVIAKHIM. The fact is that a year before that, the Red Army soldier Burnatsky served in the 3rd Special Purpose Aviation Brigade and was among the 1188 paratroopers who parachuted during the famous 1935 maneuvers. Therefore, having entered the labor faculty after mobilization, he was attracted by the military registration and enlistment office in the parachute section, created at the Bolshevik confectionery factory as an instructor.

July 12 was a day off. It was not a day off because it fell on a Sunday - the days off until June 26, 1940 were the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th and 30th of each month, plus March 1 instead of February 30. The tram, however, despite the day off, was overcrowded, and there was no place in Burnatsky's cabin. But hanging on the footboard, it was possible not to pay the fare and save the five-kopeck coin - so from old memory they still continued to call the 15-kopeck coin.

And so, driving along Rozhdestvensky Boulevard - and then "Annushka" walked there too - he saw a flame escaping from the window of the fourth (and not the sixth, like Marshak's) floor of the house at number 20. The former Malyushin apartment building, built in 1879, was on fire. architect Campioni. The tram had just passed the pipe square and, having barely overcome the steep ascent, was now slowly approaching the intersection of the boulevard with Dzerzhinsky Street.

The same house: Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, 20. It has not six floors, but four.

A few minutes earlier, 24-year-old citizen Anikeeva, putting a saucepan on a lighted oil stove, began to iron the linen with a heavy coal iron. At that time, gas was not yet brought into the houses (the massive gasification of Moscow began in 1946 after the completion of the construction of the Saratov-Moscow main gas pipeline), and food was prepared on stoves and kerosene stoves. However, this also had its advantages - it was possible to cook not only in the communal kitchen, but also in your room. The heat that day was such that kerosene evaporated no worse than gasoline, and its vapors, in contact with the flame, exploded. The flame immediately engulfed half of the room, cutting off the dwelling from the exit, and citizen Anikeeva had no choice but to lean out the window of the fourth floor and in vain to call for help from onlookers gathering from below. It was then, jumping off the foot of a crawling tram on the move, Burnatsky, with the dexterity of a circus monkey, made his way up the pipe to the fourth floor and stood with his feet on the cornice - the protruding part of the interfloor overlap. Holding onto the pipe with one hand, he grabbed the frightened Anikeeva with the other. Then with a strong kick, he knocked out the frame in the window of the next room and, in front of the quiet crowd of thousands, began to make his way with Anikeeva along the cornice to the broken window. It took a few minutes. Through the next room, still intact by fire, Burnatsky pulled Anikeeva into the entrance, went down into the courtyard and went out through the gateway (where Robertino's restaurant is now) arch onto the street. After handing Anikeev to the fire brigade workers, Burnatsky quietly left the house and thought that he remained unknown.

Fire lorry

In the evening, returning to the hostel, Burnatsky was dumbfounded: a local precinct officer and two in civilian clothes were waiting for him in his room. The commandant, strict with the guests, spilled out in front of them in courtesies and gave them tea from an old-regime Tula samovar brought from his closet.

- Vasily Mikhailovich Burnatsky? - asked the district police officer.

“He's the one,” the commandant said gloatingly for him.

One of those in civilian clothes approached Burnatsky and, holding out his hand, expressed gratitude to him for his help in saving a man in the fire. The medal "For Courage in the Fire" did not exist at that time, and Burnatsky was awarded a personalized watch.

This watch saved Vasily's life, when on the night of December 15, 1941, to help the soldiers of the ski battalions in defeating the retreating enemy columns, an airborne assault was landed west of Klin by the forces of the 53rd air brigade of the 23rd air division. One of the companies operating as part of the landing was commanded by Senior Lieutenant Vasily Mikhailovich Burnatsky. Our paratroopers landed on the village of Kurbatovo, occupied by the Germans. They began to fire at the paratroopers while still in the air, and a bullet from an MP-40 hit the body at an acute angle. But she got into those very personalized watches lying in her left breast pocket and was stopped.