Memoir of Fedor Fedorovich Khudiakov

Fedor Fedorovich Khudiakov was drafted into the Soviet Union’s Red Army when the German attack on the Soviet Union began in June 1941. He fought against German forces in the area around his home city of Kyiv and was captured in late September. Khudiakov recorded his experiences in German captivity in a postwar memoir.

The featured pages of Khudiakov’s memoir focus on the horrific conditions he endured in German prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. He recalls how German guards seized many of the Soviet POWs’ coats after their arrival in a camp. Taking their protective clothing made these prisoners particularly vulnerable to the weather, which was turning colder as autumn set in. Camp officials also forced certain groups—Jews, as well as soldiers from Central Asian regions of the Soviet Union (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan)—to give their warm clothing to Ukrainian and Russian POWs. Early on, this gave prisoners of Ukrainian or, like Khudiakov, Russian ethnicity greater chances of survival than those prisoners whom Nazi racial ideology deemed to be more dangerous or “barbaric.”¹

Like most of the millions of Soviet POWs captured on the eastern front in the first months of the war, Khudiakov faced deadly threats created by the German army’s deliberate neglect.² POWs were forced into camps that were often nothing more than open fields surrounded by barbed wire. Each camp contained hundreds—if not thousands or tens of thousands—of captured Soviet soldiers. Facilities to house the prisoners were minimal or nonexistent.³ Khudiakov describes how the POWs were forced to sleep outside with no shelter in the October frost. He huddled together with fellow prisoners in shallow pits in the ground in an airfield. This strategy kept him alive, but many did not survive the harsh conditions.⁴

Shuffled from camp to camp, Khudiakov was forced to dig ditches along the sides of roads. He witnessed the deaths of many fellow prisoners. German forces marched Khudiakov and his fellow prisoners back to a camp in Kyiv in October 1941. To relieve overcrowding in the camp and labor shortages in German-occupied territories, German authorities began releasing some Soviet POWs.⁵ Those who demonstrated that they were Ukrainian and lived nearby could return to their homes. These POWs had to promise to register with the German occupation authorities upon arrival.⁶ Khudiakov lied about his ethnicity, speaking to the Germans in Ukrainian, although Russian was his mother tongue. His lie convinced the authorities and he returned home to Kyiv.

Khudiakov had hoped to spend the remaining years of Nazi occupation with his wife and son, but during the time of his imprisonment his family had been evacuated to avoid the advancing German invasion.⁷ He would not see his family again until 1945, more than three years later.

Memoirs of Soviet POWs like Khudaikov are relatively rare. The majority of Soviet POWs did not survive captivity. Those who did often chose not to write or speak about it because returning prisoners of war were viewed with suspicion in the postwar Soviet Union. The Soviet government under Josef Stalin doubted the loyalty of citizens who had spent time abroad, and in some cases, collaborated with German forces. Those who returned home often faced imprisonment and interrogations. Some were held for years in a system of Soviet labor camps known as the Gulag.⁸

Khudiakov likely drafted this memoir later in his life, in the 1970s or early 1980s, when some aspects of the war were more openly discussed in Soviet society.⁹ Even so, it is unlikely he expected it to be published or read by anyone other than family or close friends.

For more detail on how Nazi racial ideology shaped German military policies on the eastern front, see the related item in Experiencing History, "Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars."

A very large number of Soviet prisoners were captured in the first few months after the German invasion. Red Army troops were often surrounded as they attempted to retreat from the rapidly advancing German military. Although record keeping is often unreliable, German wartime documents claimed to have captured over 3 million Soviet soldiers before the first year of the war was over. German military planners anticipated capturing large numbers of POWs before the invasion of the USSR had even begun, estimating they would take between one and two million prisoners in the first six to eight weeks of the invasion alone. Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 39.

A single camp outside Minsk contained 100,000 Soviet POWs in summer 1941. Alex J. Kay, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 148–149.

In October 1941, as many as 4,600 Soviet POWs died per day in German captivity. Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Third Edition (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 204.

For more on the German decision to use Soviet POWs for forced labor, see the related Experiencing History item, Labor Deployment of Soviet Prisoners of War.

Certain categories of Soviet POWs were sometimes released from camps early in the war and allowed to return home: ethnic Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians and Belarusians (or others who could convince the German authorities that they belonged to one of these groups). The policy of releasing certain ethnic groups from camps was abandoned in the autumn of 1941 when German authorities decided to ship Soviet POWs into Germany to act as forced laborers there. Nevertheless, some Soviet ethnic groups in German captivity continued to receive preferential treatment. See Seth Bernstein, Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in World War II and the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023), 59. See also the related item in Experiencing History, Photograph of Trawniki Men at Belzec Killing Center.

Khudiakov's wife and child had departed to Bukhara in Uzbekistan as part of the Soviet state program of evacuation, which relocated large numbers of civilians, factories, and goods eastward beyond the Ural mountains in 1941 and 1942. The aim of these evacuations was to keep people and resources from falling into the hands of the German occupiers, and to keep the Soviet economy functioning. To learn more about the experiences of those evacuated to Bukhara, see the related item in Experiencing History, Letter from Boris Gurevich to his Mother and Sister. See also Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Homefront During World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Bernstein, Return to the Motherland, 128–131.

After Stalin's death in 1953, the governments of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev opened up different aspects of the war for public discussion, and subsequently, commemoration. Nina Tumarkin, "The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory," European Review 11, no.4 (2003), 595–611.

Geman authorities marched Soviet POWs long distances to and between camps in occupied areas. Exposed to the elements, and without adequate food and water, many POWs died during these marches.

[Pg. 70]

I was captured on September 22, and I escaped from captivity on October 22, 1941. One month in captivity.

I have forgotten a bit, but what I had to endure during that month, and what events I had to witness, have never faded from my memory to this day and will not fade until I die. Only there, in captivity, did I see with my own eyes what kind of people these fascists were; I saw their cruelty. I will not describe day by day my stay in captivity, I will describe only a few episodes, which will give a full description of the Germans and the conditions in which we found ourselves.

The first thing they did was take away our overcoats. The coat was made of cloth, but winter was approaching. If someone had boots, they took away his boots. If someone had woolen uniform items—trousers, jackets, shirts—the woolen garments too were taken away. Among the hundreds of prisoners, there appeared men wearing only underwear, barefoot. The whole time they kept us outdoors, right on the ground. Admittedly, the Germans displayed “mercy.” Among the prisoners there were many Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Jews. So, if a Russian or a Ukrainian turned out to have only underwear or no shoes, the translator accompanying the German submachine gunner gave our soldier—a Jew or an Uzbek, a Kazakh—a searching look and, threatening him with being shot, forced him on the spot to remove his clothes or shoes, and handed his cotton clothing to the Russian or Ukrainian prisoner.

After three or four days, only soldiers of non-Russian nationality turned out to be wearing underwear alone. Naturally, these men, exhausted by cold and hunger, huddled together, warming each other with their bodies, and in the camp area they held themselves aloof, as a separate group.

[Pg. 80]

On October 17th, they did not lead us out to clean the road; instead, they had us form up and then moved us to Borispol’. This was 40 to 45 kilometers.¹ Along the way, at one of the forks in the road, we passed through a graveyard of our Russian motor vehicles that had been shattered by bombs…There were no bodies of Red Army men who had been killed. Apparently, the Germans, fearing putrefaction and ptomaine poisoning, had taken them away. But the dead, twisted, ruined vehicles remained. I noted that many prisoners ran up to the vehicles and began to tear off the seat coverings. I followed their example, and I quickly pulled the padding out from under one of the seats, stuffing it around my chest between my shirt and my high-collared tunic, and also into my trousers. Soon I felt that the padding had begun to warm me. A pleasant warmth flowed through my whole body. Now I was really a “king,” I thought with bitterness.

In the evening, they led us to Borispol’, to the spacious airfield where almost a month ago, full of hope, we had passed through during the retreat from Kiev…

It started drizzling again, and even though protected now by my padding, I felt that I was wet through. By nightfall, the rain had changed to wet snow, and by midnight it was freezing again. My wet high-collared tunic and padding no longer saved me. Then Shidlovskiy and I discovered that the whole airfield was scarred with small holes—2 meters long and 70 to 80 centimeters wide—like graves. The prisoners, seeking refuge from the icy crosswind, climbed into these little grave-holes and lay there in twos and threes, one on top of another. Shidlovskiy and I also climbed into one of the holes. He lay on the bottom, and I was on top of him.

[Pg. 81]

Before long, I felt a third prisoner lie down on top of me. His torso was level with the ground surface, and he was warmed by the heat coming from our bodies below. We agreed to lie as we were for half an hour, and then to switch places. The man on top would go to the middle, the middle man would move to the bottom, and the man at the bottom would be on top. And that is what we did after half an hour. I was in the middle—I moved downward, Shidlovskiy to the top, and the third man took the middle position. After another half hour, we changed places again. Shidlovskiy took the place in the middle, I moved to the top, and the third man went to the bottom. That half hour that I spent lying on top—I thought I would come to a bad end. Lying almost level with the surface, I felt the crosswind as if I had no side protection of any kind at all. As for my back, I had already lost all feeling there. My wet shirt, padding, and high-collared tunic froze and produced a solid, icy coat of mail. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I nudged Shidlovskiy, saying that half an hour had passed, I couldn’t hold out any longer, but he kept saying the same thing over and over—wait a bit longer, the time’s not up yet. Fine for him, I thought, he’s lying in a warm spot, I’m warming him from above. Our companion on the bottom was silent. Finally, Shidlovskiy said:

“Well, all right, move into the middle, get warm.”

I climbed out of the hole, Shidlovskiy right behind me, but the prisoner at the bottom did not move and gave no signs of life. We tugged at him anyway, but with no result. He’s dead—the thought flew through my mind. We pulled him out, more precisely, his body, onto the surface. He did not stir, and I felt his pulse—there was no pulse. Shidlovskiy put an ear to his chest—there was no heartbeat. We dragged him a step away from the edge, but we were surrounded by five prisoners asking to be the third man in our group.

After a short bit of trading, we accepted a third companion in exchange for one small carrot. Shidlovskiy and I divided this carrot in half and ate it then and there. Then each of us lay down in his assigned place. Shidlovskiy was on the bottom, I was on top of him, and our third comrade lay at the very top.

Today all this seems absurd, incomprehensible. How was it possible to value a human life at one small carrot. But at the time, I did not think about that. I lay atop Shidlovskiy, up above me our new third man was getting warm, and all I was thinking was whether my back could recover after half an hour, and whether my coat of mail would grow. In this way, we spent the night until morning came. We switched places four more times and, of course, did not sleep.

In the morning, when it was light, the Germans, aided by blows with sticks and submachine guns, made us carry all those who had died during the night to the edge of the airfield, chuck the bodies into holes similar to our own, and cover them with earth. Then they made us form a column, herded us onto the highway, and forced the hungry, frozen, sleep-deprived men to walk to Darnitsa.

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