Quotation

One of the Soviet soldier: By age 14, Nikiforov had been picked up 10 times by the police. But fate was to send him to work in a tractor factory where there was a House of Culture that was famous throughout Stalingrad. By age 16, he had an amazingly pure tenor voice. The factory sent him to Moscow to the conservatory. A year before the war, he returned to Stalingrad as a soloist with the Philharmonic and became a local celebrity. ... On the first day of the war, he signed up as a volunteer For 20 days, he was lost in the human slaughterhouse of the Belarusian forests until he found his unit. The Soviet military police questioned him for 20 days more. Those terrible first months of the war made him stern, silent, and even cruel.