I was a soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945. I saw something on the last day of the war that haunts me to this day.

We had an old saying in the Red Army: Ivan did not drink enough vodka on the day he decided to cross the Blitzkrieg. The German war machine was a horror beyond anything I could have imagined. I had been conscripted from central Ukraine, and spent the first years of the war in the Caucasus, fighting against the Romanians and Moldavians. I had heard rumors of what the Nazis had done in Poland, but no one really believed them. But then they came, and we saw for ourselves what kind of monsters they were. Then it became personal. They killed hundreds of our men in the first hours of Barbarossa, crushed under the treads of their tanks, cut down by their machine guns. We tried fighting back. We gave them hell. But we were regular men, armed with rifles, molotov cocktails, and a few good old Soviet machine guns. We killed a lot of them. But there were always more, an endless tide of Aryan supermen. I saw one of my friends be burned alive by a flamethrower. I saw another drown in a swamp. I saw hundreds of them die. On the day that Berlin fell, our commander told us that the Americans had landed in France and that the Germans were finished. He told us that we’d be going home soon. We were stationed in a godforsaken expanse on the Polesian plain. Miles of wetlands, forests, and swamps. A few other soldiers and I decided to go hunting for rabbits. We were bored, we were drunk. We had nothing else to do. We decided to wander a little way into the forest. We had to be careful - there were probably still German soldiers left over, not to mention bears and wolves. But we weren’t worried. We’d just won the war, after all. We came across a clearing. In the center of it was a man standing on a tree stump. He had his arms held out to the sides. Tied to his hands were two dead birds. Their wings flapped in the wind. He was naked, except for a bear fur laid over his shoulders. He didn’t seem to notice us. He was very tall, six and a half feet at least. His hair was dark brown. I couldn’t see his face because he was looking up at the sky. I knew this had to be some kind of ritual, some kind of dark Germanic magic. I had heard the Nazis worshiped Odin himself, and this looked like a twisted form of that. One of the soldiers with me was a Ukrainian boy from an Orthodox family. He said that we must stop the ritual, that it would be un-Christian to let it continue, that we must kill the man for the good of all of Christendom. We crept up to the man, our rifles at the ready. We reached the tree stump. I looked up at the man’s face. A cold chill ran down my spine. It wasn’t human. His eyes were yellow, his skin gray. His mouth was twisted into a terrible grimace. Teeth pointed like a wolf’s. The soldiers with me froze in horror. But something about the man brought me to anger. He was a monster, an unclean thing. An enemy of God and man. I raised my rifle, ready to put him out of his misery. As I did, he looked down at me. His yellow eyes locked onto mine. I froze. The man smiled, showing his pointed canines. The ground beneath me gave way. I fell into a deep, damp pit. I landed on my side, knocking the wind out of me. The Ukrainan boy fell on top of me. His face was twisted in a grimace, his eyes wide with fear. I tried to cry out. But my voice had caught in my throat. I tried to move. But the Ukrainian boy was crushing me. Then I heard them. Footsteps. Tunnels collapsing. Tunnels opening up. A thousand footsteps, echoing all around us. Rats. I’d been in the war for four years. I’d seen what rats could do to a dead body. I’d seen what they could do to live bodies too. They had come to feast on the dead beast that had fallen into their pit. I tried to push the Ukrainian boy off me. But he was dead. I realized with horror that his face had been ripped into two pieces. The rats came. They crawled all over his body. I could hear them eating his flesh. He twitched. I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. I knew I couldn’t fight them off. I knew that I would be eaten alive. I prepared for death. And then it came. I felt teeth rip through my pants, my skin. Pain shot through my hip. I tried to scream again. I could only moan. The rats were eating me alive. I must have blacked out. I don’t know how long I was down there. I was back in the infirmary. I was in terrible pain, but alive. I was bandaged up. One of the other soldiers was sitting on the bed next to mine. He was sobbing. I asked him what was wrong. The Ukrainian boy was dead. He had fallen into a pit, and been eaten alive by rats. I tried to tell this soldier what had happened. He told me I was delirious. He told me I shouldn’t try to make him feel worse. But I knew it wasn’t just a dream. I had seen the man in the clearing, I had seen his yellow eyes. I came home after the war, back to Ukraine. I never told anyone what happened that day. The other soldier was right - I was delirious. It was a dream. It had to be. But sometimes, when the nights are long, I see the man. I see his eyes. I wake up in the morning, reaching for his throat. But he’s gone. It’s just a dream. And yet, I still can’t get those yellow eyes out of my head.

I was a soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945. I saw something on the last day of the war that haunts me to this day.

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