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War

My Grandfather's Account of the Early Days of Germany's Attack on the Soviet Union in World War II

Today is the 85th anniversary of that momentous event.

Ilya Somin | 6.22.2026 11:30 AM

Nathan Firun (WW II-era photos). (NA)

Today is the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, in 1941. Virtually all my then-living relatives were caught up in the war in one way or another. But none more immediately than my grandfather Nathan Firun, who was 17 at the time. This is a shortened version of his story of that time, which he recounted to me in 2011. He hated talking about his experiences in World War II, and only after much effort did I persuade him to tell this story:

Nathan was a graduate of a special military high school in Leningrad, trained as an artillerist. Soon after the fighting began, he enlisted in a "militia" unit of (mostly) untrained civilians. The men were issued Canadian-made rifles left over from World War I, with only five bullets per rifle. When they asked to use one bullet each to test-fire the rifles to make sure they worked, permission was denied, because there were too few bullets to go........

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