Mar 14, 2013 - Issue 508

Love and War

By Greg King



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I've got a friend, Nick Burlak, who's an American veteran of the Soviet Red Army during World War II.  Nick took part in the biggest tank battle in world history, the Battle of Kursk.  He became a tank commander and a lieutenant in the Red Army. As the Soviet forces rolled westward, Nick helped liberate several death camps.  He also was among the first of the Soviet troops to enter Berlin in very early May 1945.  When, a couple of days later, thousands of Red Army troops scrawled their names all over the ruins of the Reichstag in the Cyrillic alphabet, Nick scrawled his in English.  He was wounded four times during the war and went back to the front all four times. He fell in love with a beauitful Ukrainian nurse who was also a higher- ranking lieutenant than he was.


Nick Burlak wrote about all this in his books, Love and War: An American Volunteer in the Soviet Red Army, Book I and now Love and War Book 2.  He plans a Book  III, but that's about post-war years.  I'm sure that will be worthwhile, too. Nick uses a pseudonym, a "nome de plume" -- M.J. Nicholas, to memorialize his brothers, Michael and John, and himself.

The whole family, except for his older sister, Anne, who was also a friend of mine, a great woman known in her youth as the "Red Flame," moved to the Soviet Union when his father, who was a veteran of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, answered Stalin's call for 6,000 skilled workers to come and help build socialism.  His Dad had been a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel, but moved his family to New York City in search of work during the Great Depression.  Mr. Burlak worked as a steelworker in Makayevka in the Ukraine.  He had been born and raised in the Ukraine.

If all this sounds improbable and like creative fiction, believe me, it's not.  Nick and his story are quite real.  He's a decent, honorable man with a big heart.

I read Book I and will soon read Book II. Nick's incredible, unique story is very much worth reading.

Nick provides us with a look through the the very real, horrible window on war.  He never wants to see fascism prevail again.   He never wants a war like World War II again, with the twenty million Soviet citizens lost and the fifty or even sixty million worldwide.
 
Please do consider not only buying and reading the books yourselves, but once you're done, urge others to read them.  We must put an end to the scourge of war, and Nick's books can help do that.


BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Greg King is a veteran labor activist in Boston. Click here to contact Mr. King.



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