The terrible legacy of war (9 pictures)

Few people know that on the island of Valaam, Karelia, there was a boarding school for disabled people of the Great Patriotic War. It was a very terrible place where people lived, of whom the war had left only stumps. In 1952, when a boarding house for war invalids was organized in the old monastery buildings, there were no living conditions there.
Many people drank themselves to death, many died, many lived in inhuman suffering. In 1974, artist Gennady Dobrov decided to paint a portrait of every poor fellow who lived on Valaam at that time. In 1980 he completed the last fortieth portrait. I suggest you watch them. I warn you that the pictures are not for the impressionable. Dobrov painted portraits of the immobilized, legless, blind, and one woman without a face who fainted right in the oven from the news that the war had begun. The husband whom she loved madly had been sent to the Brest Fortress the day before, and her heart did not deceive him - he died. A blind woman with a faded face sang folk songs to Dobrov to an unknown tune, which still amaze him decades later.

"Portrait of a woman with a burnt face"

Let's look into the face of a man with a bullet through his head, doomed to immobility, let's look him straight in the eyes - if we can.
Lieutenant Alexander Podosenov.

"The Story of Medals"
Private Ivan Zabara. Deep wrinkles carved the face of the blind man.
From the mutilated hand of a soldier, from the finger that felt the medal for Stalingrad - “Oh, there was hell there!” - impossible to look away.
There is something attractive, hypnotic about this... But what? Don't understand.

Sailor Alexey Chkheidze jokingly called himself a “prosthetic man.”
It was they, the Marines, then, in 1945, who saved the Royal Palace in Budapest from explosion and destruction.
Almost everyone died.
He - with burnt out eyes, deaf, having lost both arms - survived. And he even wrote the book “Notes of the Danube Scout”

"Rest on the road"

These are portraits of heroes, but not everyone has names.
The artist felt someone's gaze on him. Turned around.
There was a swaddled man lying on the bed in the corner. Without arms and legs.
The orderly came up. - Who is this? - asked Gennady. - There are no documents. But he won’t say - after being wounded he lost his hearing, memory and speech.
Dobrov called the portrait of this soldier “Unknown.”
Deprived of arms and legs, memory and the gift of speech, wrapped in an envelope like a child, and just as helpless.
Only the eyes see everything. And all of it is like a silent reproach.

"Return from a Walk"