BERDYCHIV, Ukraine — Oleksandr Afanasiev, a young man dressed in khaki fatigues, walks through a recently harvested field of wheat.
His combat boots tread upon fresh stubble. He carries a shovel and a metal detector in his hands.
Today, this place near the city of Berdychiv some 150 kilometers southwest of Kyiv is a pleasant paradise of cow pastures and fruit gardens.
But exactly 80 years ago, in the days of World War II, these meadows were a hellscape of gore and fire.
In July 1941, the Soviet Army’s 44th Armored Division desperately charged through this field, yelling in terror, their bayonets fixed. German machine guns and mortars mowed them down, wave after wave.
The insane suicide attacks through open terrain were meant to push back the Wehrmacht’s 11th Panzer Division occupying the village of Semenivka nearby.
Very few managed to come anywhere close to the Nazi lines through the mayhem of thousands of mutilated bodies.
“If there can be an illustration of blood-soaked earth, it was here,” says Afanasiev.
Many decades have passed. But the fallen never left this old battlefield.
Unidentified and unrecognized, they were forgotten in their unmarked mass graves. Nowadays, Afanasiev returns to these fields, again and again, to lift them out of their sad oblivion.
As a combat veteran, he and a handful of fellow enthusiasts have given themselves a mission to finally give the fallen a proper resting place and official military honors.
“It is not okay when soldiers’ bones rot in old shell craters plowed over by tractors for decades,” he says.
“We give them what they deserved in battle.”
Remains of a Soviet soldier killed in action in 1941 and unearthed near the city of Berdychiv (Courtesy of Oleksandr Afanasiev )
Killing field
The metal detector in Afanasiev’s hands never stops beeping as he scans the field.
The topsoil still teems with scores of rusted remnants: shell fragments, cartridges, pieces of bayonets. It sometimes takes no more than a couple of strikes with a spade to unearth another half-decomposed cylinder: a Soviet RGD-33 hand grenade.
The traces of the old war are everywhere.
Human remains are sometimes the most frequent find.
As Afanasiev walks through the field, he points out dozens of sites where he and his mates had unearthed old bones.
The discoveries paint a dreadful picture of the events of 1941. The infantrymen sent to storm the Nazi lines were all doomed. Many of them were killed before they could make a single shot. Some met their end while holding grenade clusters in their hands, trying to get up and throw them into enemy foxholes.
Germans were battering the field with mortars, leaving scores of torn-off limbs.
Many troops — injured, scared, or shell-shocked — tried to escape the hail of lead and roll down into impact holes. And some died in there, clutching their heads in terror.
Inevitable death was in front of them, and there was no way back as well.
“Almost all of them were aged between 19 and 21, judging by their skull structure,” Afanasiev says.
“They were newbies, often with no real combat experience, drafted in 1939 or 1940.”
Once in a while, Afanasiev and his mates find skulls with pistol bullet holes: Germans would sometimes walk the scorched battlefield to finish off the injured with two headshots from their Lugers.
Skeletons often tell their stories through everyday items preserved in graves. Water jars with barely legible letters or carvings; decayed pieces of newspapers with poetry in Ukrainian printed just days before the fatal battle; simple hand-made pen-knifes; sometimes, even canned stewed meat or jars of what used to be milk 80 years ago.
Unfortunately, the bodies never reveal their names.
Their dog tags issued in 1941 in the Soviet Union have decayed so much, they’re almost indecipherable.
Remains of a Soviet soldier killed in action in 1941 and unearthed near the city of Berdychiv (Courtesy of Oleksandr Afanasiev)
“Sometimes we find spoons, or metal mugs, with some names or nicknames scribbled on them,” Afanasiev says.
“But we can’t be sure these items identify the remains. Soldiers could swap belongings many times over.”
After years of work in fields and kitchen gardens in Semenivka, Afanasiev’s group has unearthed hundreds of skeletons. Many more probably remain to be found. By mid-July 1941, the village outskirts were literally cluttered with dead bodies.
As Afanasiev says, the fallen soldiers were most probably buried by local civilians.
“They didn’t take their weapons, or their money, or ammunition,” he says. “Germans in the city would quickly put them against the wall for that.”
Many graves tell horrific stories of how the people of Berdychiv had to bury the dead.
In some locations, Afanasiev and his fellows found rusty meat hooks — the civilians used them to grapnel the dead bodies quickly decaying in the summer heat and ditch them into impact holes.
The team has never found remains of German soldiers. The Nazis collected their fallen and buried them at the center of Berdychiv. A month later, Adolf Hitler visited Berdychiv and the German soldiers’ graves.
The Soviet losses were in vain.
The attacks lasted several days, after which the Soviets managed to retake Semenivka — but not for long. A German counter-offensive pushed the Soviets farther east. And several weeks later, the 44th Armored Division was fully destroyed, together with many other formations, in the disastrous Battle of Uman.
The German victory was tragic to Berdychiv. Nazis set up a death camp near the city, where over 38,000 local Jews were slaughtered. Over 11,000 other civilians were forced into slave labor in the Third Reich.
Wrongs of the past
Old-timers of Berdychiv still remember the days when patches of local farmland produced especially rich wheat or corn. It was obvious that the plants fed on nutrients from the decomposing bodies in the mass graves left over from the war.
The Soviet authorities did nothing about this. The old pits were left untouched.
When Afanasiev got back from his own war in 2016, he decided to do something about it.
Originally from Crimea, he volunteered to fight the Russian invasion from the very beginning, and later served as a recon unit soldier with the 92nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade.
Two years on the front line damaged his hearing and made him strongly aware of the sad fates of soldiers during a war.
Together with a handful of locals, some of whom are also combat veterans, Afanasiev closely studied available documents on all WWII operations near Berdychiv: from Soviet battle logs to German aerial surveys archived in the United States.
He knows about every maneuver performed near the city, which led his team to many forgotten graves where young soldiers had been cut down.
The team spent its own money to install a small memorial stone near a garden where they exhumed over 100 bodies. It bears no names.
Oleksandr Afanasiev, an amateur archeologist, demonstrates bullet holes in a Soviet SSh-36 helmet unearthed near the city of Berdychiv on Aug. 11, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
“Someone brings flowers to this stone time after time,” Afanasiev says.
“That’s what we can do for these guys. Otherwise, no one would even know anything about them.”
The quiet outskirts of Semenivka have just one official World War II memorial — a standard Soviet soldier monument bearing the names of locals killed in action.
Behind it are six small mounds where unknown soldiers found by Afanasiev have been given their final resting place. Multiple remains were bagged and buried in six coffins to the salute of rifle shots.
After eight decades in limbo, the fallen were finally honored as soldiers.
Afanasiev and his friends will continue with their mission. He currently works as a lawyer in Berdychiv, but still pays much of his time to local war history studies and excavations.
“As soldiers, we know what it’s like to be at war,” he says.
“We do what needs to be done now. I want people to see what we find in the ground, all these traces of war, how terrible war is. People need to see that we’re better off learning from the wrongs of the past.”
Oleksandr Afanasiev, an amateur archeologist, demonstrates unknown soldier graves in the city of Berdychiv on Aug. 11, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
