Konstantin Alexandrovitsch Schilov - Russia

1913 born in Bugulma in the province of Samara (Russia); grows up in a poor family in Siberia

since 1932 volunteers in the Red Army and passes die artillery school

1939 after the Hitler-Stalin-treaty he takes part in the Soviet invasion of Poland and marries in occupied Białystok; afterwards studies at the military academy in Moscow

June 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union commander of an artillery division at the southwest front near Kiev

September 1941 captured, survives the wide spread deaths of Soviet prisoners of war in several POW-camps in the Ukraine and in Poland

March 1944 arrested and transported to the Gestapo prison in Bromberg / Bydgoszcz (Poland)

June 1944 deportation to Mauthausen, where he is compelled to forced labour in the quarry

November 1944 transferred to the branch camp Ebensee

May 1945 liberation; afterwards in numerous Soviet “filtration camps” in Hungary and the Soviet Union, dismissal from the army

autumn 1945 returns to Moscow to his wife, suffering from suppressions as former prisoner of war for years

since the 1950s forced to live in a shack in Udelnoje in the district of Moscow, where he still lived at the time of the interview