The boy who outran the war
Seryozha Aleshkov lost everyone at the age of six. His father had died before the war began. In 1942 the Germans executed his mother and brother for helping the partisans. A neighbour saved him by pushing him out of a window of the hut and telling him to run as hard as he could. How long he wandered alone through the Kaluga forests, and how he avoided dying of cold and hunger (this was late autumn), nobody knows. Scouts from the 142nd Guards Rifle Regiment found him exhausted in the woods. With the permission of their commander, Major Mikhail Vorobyov, they kept him.
Vorobyov, young and unmarried, grew attached to the boy. He felt sorry for a child without a family. Seryozha, in the meantime, picked out his own mother — a kind, beautiful nurse named Aunt Nina. So, with the boy's help, Vorobyov found his future wife. Mikhail and Nina married, adopted Seryozha, and lived a long life together.
Seryozhenka turned out to be a cheerful and steady boy. He did not whine and did not complain — he carried the discomforts of army life as well as any soldier. He helped where he could: brought up ammunition, fetched the post, sang to entertain the soldiers between battles. And not only sang. One day he literally saved his adoptive father's life. The regiment was fighting near Stalingrad. During an enemy air raid a bomb hit the commander's dugout. Vorobyov was buried under the rubble and no one knew except Seryozha. The boy tried to pull the beams off himself, could not, and ran for help through the continuing bombardment. Soldiers came, dug the major out, and Seryozha stood there crying with fear for the man who had become his father. For that he received the medal "For Combat Service", and General Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army, gave him a captured Walther pistol.
Seryozha was wounded more than once and came close to death several times. In 1944, with his regiment in Poland, he was wounded again, went to hospital and did not return to the front. He was sent to a Suvorov military academy but could not finish for reasons of health. After the war Sergei graduated from the Kharkov Law Institute and spent his career as a lawyer in Chelyabinsk, where his adoptive parents Nina and Mikhail Vorobyov had settled.
Over time the story of the youngest "son of the regiment" took on the air of legend and started to feel improbable. What proves it real is a single photograph: Sergei Aleshkov, a six-year-old guards private, with the medal "For Combat Service" on his chest. A film based on his memories, Soldatik, was released in 2019.
