Bondarenko Igor: biography, literary and social activities

Prototypes of the heroes of his books were well-known to the whole world and glorified people. He met with the legendary scout Shandor Rado. Ruth Werner, who worked in the pre-war period with Richard Sorge, accepted him in her Berlin apartment. Mikhail Vodopyanov, one of the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, was a consultant to one of the works. Pilots, security officers, scouts and ordinary Soviet people compiled a gallery of portraits of the characters of books written by Igor Bondarenko.

Bondarenko Igor: biography, literary and social activities

At the end of January 2014, Taganrog was covered with snow. Transport stopped, schools closed, gasoline trucks and food cars got stuck on the road. The whole city was cleaning the snow. Not cleared left only the path leading to a small house in the private sector. In the winter whirlwind, the neighbors did not immediately notice that for several days they did not see the elderly person who lived there. The door was broken, but help came late. On a snowy day on January 30, 2014, Igor Mikhailovich Bondarenko, a minor prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp, front-line soldier and writer, died in Taganrog.

Son of the enemy of the people

October 22, 1927 in the family secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol Mikhail Bondarenko, a son was born who was given the name of Harry. A young father, but he was only 22 at that time, devoted his life to the revolution and party work. Later years he headed party organizations at various enterprises of Taganrog. In 1935 he became the second secretary of the City Party Committee - he oversaw the industry of the city. Unfortunately, the career of a young and energetic person ended naturally for that time. In December 1937, he was arrested and after a short investigation was shot. In the summer of 1938, my mother was arrested, Ksenia Tikhonovna Bondarenko. Igor (Harry) was left alone.

For the son of the enemy of the people, only one road was foreshadowed - to the orphanage. But then the boy was lucky - he was taken to live by his cousin Anya. She was 18 years old, and she was not afraid to shelter a boy in her home who was left without parents. Mom was released three months later, at the end of 1938, but for a few more years she remained under the vigilant supervision of "competent" bodies.

The young prisoner No. 47704

The beginning of the war Taganrog, together with the whole country learned from the speech of VM Molotov. Men massively stormed the military registration and enlistment office and demanded to be sent to the front. Their workplaces at the enterprises that switched to the mode of work of wartime were occupied by women. The boys helped the adults and looked forward to a quick victory over the fascists. But the front was approaching, and in the middle of October 1941 along the streets of the city advanced parts of the Wehrmacht marched.

The warring Germany required working hands. People were taken to work in German enterprises for whole families. Fourteen-year-old Bondarenko was among them. Igor, whose family consisted of a single mother, was taken with her to Germany in 1942. More than 600 people were in the train. Later, the writer recalled that the family was constantly trying to separate. The beatings of recalcitrant people continued for several weeks. But later the warders resigned themselves - some of the barracks in the camp were given for "family".

At the Heinkel factory

The concentration camp, in which the teenager got caught, was in the ancient German city of Rostock. Strictly speaking, the camp itself has not been built yet. The prisoners were placed in a sports hall, where there were 2 thousand two-tiered bunks. The stench, stuffiness and overcrowding reigned there. There were no windows in the room. Six months later, the prisoners were transferred to barracks.

At 4 o'clock in the morning - lifting and roll-call. At 6 o'clock the column of prisoners left behind a barbed wire. Up to Rostock walked two hours - 7 kilometers. There were large industrial enterprises. On one of them, the aircraft factory "Marienė", which belonged to the firm "Heinkel", worked Bondarenko. Igor was in a crew of loaders. And after exhausting work - again two hours of road to his barracks. Around was armed guards, evil sheep dogs, hunger, disease. And the crematorium pipes could be seen from the windows of the barrack. Ahead were many years of hard slave labor.

In the ranks of the Resistance

With life beyond the barbed wire can not be reconciled. But life goes on even in captivity. Igor Bondarenko worked in one brigade with Czechs, Poles, Frenchmen. They taught the guy the German language. Thanks to this in 1943, he was transferred from the loaders to work on an electric crane. Here he met two French prisoners of war who were already in the ranks of the Resistance movement. Rumors of the defeat of the Hitlerite grouping at Stalingrad seeped through the camp walls. The captives tried their best to bring the victory over fascism closer. Two of Igor's new comrades were just such people.

With the help of a Russian girl who worked in the factory design bureau, they managed to find out that the plant produces parts for FAA missiles. The French were able to convey this information to freedom. A series of air raids of the Union aviation completely destroyed the plants in Rostock. During one of them the future writer nearly died. He waited for the bombing in the station building. The bombing of the air projectile brought down floors - almost everyone in the room was killed. Our hero survived, but was buried under the ruins of brick walls. The rescue was brought by another bomb. Buried next to the surviving wall, she made a big hole in it. Through this hole people got out.

From a prisoner of war to a Red Army man

After the aircraft factories were destroyed, the life of the captives changed. They were transferred to other camps. This also affected Bondarenko. Igor, along with a small group of Russian prisoners was placed in a new concentration camp. The Nazis turned a barracks building into an empty warehouse in an old, non-functioning brick factory. The guards did not fulfill their duties very diligently - the defeat of Germany in the war was already obvious. In early 1945, Igor made an escape. He made his way east at night, and in the daytime he hid in the woods or abandoned houses. He ate with every bit of it, warmed himself by the fire, but stubbornly went to his own. One night he was awakened by artillery fire. And in the morning on the edge of the forest he saw Soviet tanks.

Without verification, of course, there was not. Soon a regimental recruit appeared in the regimental reconnaissance of one of the advancing units of the 2nd Belorussian Front. In the battles on the river Oder, in the destroyed fascist dugout the scouts found a camera. No one was able to take pictures, but they enthusiastically "clicked" each other. There remained such a picture with Bondarenko. Igor kept the photo carefully - a frozen, visible memory of the front. The war ended on the Elbe in the position of the driver of the mortar battery. The Victory came, but the service in the army continued. In the forests were caught "werewolf" - members of the organization of Hitler's partisans, created from old people and adolescents. They destroyed the non-killed SS men. Before the demobilization was still a long 6 years.

Again at the school desk

In 1951, at the secondary school No. 2 of Taganrog, a student emerged from the general mass of schoolchildren - Bondarenko. Igor studied books and educational literature almost round the clock. Before the war, he managed to finish only 6 classes. And stayed in school yesterday, the Red Army soldier was not going to - he was already 24 years old. I passed the school curriculum externally. Immediately entered Rostov State University. He studied greedily, drinking, as if he was catching up on lost years.

After 5 years, graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philology young teacher Bondarenko on distribution leaves for Kyrgyzstan. Two years he taught in the village of Balykchi. In 1958, the threshold of the editorial board of the magazine "Don" in Rostov entered a new literary employee. The next 30 years of his life, Igor Mikhailovich devoted to this edition.

The feather is equal to the bayonet

With what began Igor Bondarenko - a writer? For the first time he felt the need to write down his thoughts at the front. Pure paper on the front line was a rarity. But somewhere on the ruins of a destroyed German house he found a children's book. She began to describe everything that happened to him on her pages. A little awkward and naive - you need to remember that behind his shoulders were incomplete 6 classes of the school.

The first publications in the newspaper appeared in 1947. And while studying at the university, a book of short stories (1964) was published. The experience survived during the war spilled out onto blank sheets. The first major work of the story "Who will come to the" Mariin "was published by the Rostov book publishing house (1967). The artistic fiction of the work is closely intertwined with the actual material. After all, the action took place at the very factory of the firm Heinkel, where the young prisoner Igor worked. The continuation of this story was the story "The Yellow Circle" (1973).

True, this book could not even see the light. The manuscript, written in 1969, received a negative review of one of the departments of state security. It was about the use of spy equipment by Western intelligence agencies. "Competent" employees saw this as an elevation of foreign technologies. The author did not agree with the remarks and did not rewrite the story. The manuscript lay down on the table. Three years later, at one of the meetings in the Writers' Union, Bondarenko told about this incident and added that he would no longer write on such a topic. One of the leaders of Soviet intelligence took part in the discussion. Having penetrated into the essence of the question, he gave "good" to the publication of the story "The Yellow Circle". Saying goodbye to the author, the general said: "The topic is very important, and there are fools everywhere. There will be questions - please contact! "

Two books about the main

The first part of the dilogy "Such a long life" appeared on the shelves of bookstores in 1978. Two years later the second book of this novel was published. This is the history of the twentieth century, described through events that accompanied the lives of one family. In many ways, this is an autobiographical work. The family of Putivtsevs, whose life is traced from the 1920s to the 1980s, lived in Taganrog. In the image of the head of the family, the features of the writer's father, Mikhail Markovich Bondarenko, are clearly visible. His son, Vladimir Putivtsev, went through the Nazi camp, the underground, the front - these are the stages of the author's hard life. Perhaps, it is thanks to its reliability that the dilogy has withstood several reprints - the events described in it accompanied the life of many Soviet families.

Another significant work is the novel "The Red Pianists". In the opinion of intelligence historians, this is the most complete artistic understanding of the work of a group of illegal scouts who were given the pseudonym Red Chapel in the Nazi counterintelligence service. In order to study the factual material, the author visited Berlin and Budapest, met with survivors of those events. The first readers of the manuscript were the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Shandor Rado and intelligence officer Ruth Werner. They praised the new novel.

Not only figures (conclusion)

The life of any creative person can be expressed in numbers and dry state phrases. Bondarenko is not an exception to this rule. Igor Mikhailovich lived a long and bright life, the success and value of which can be summed up very briefly:

• Wrote 34 books;
• The total circulation of his works published in the Soviet Union is more than 2 million copies;
• Books were translated into European languages and languages of the peoples of the USSR.

He was also a member of the Journalists 'Union (1963) and the Writers' Union (1970). He founded the Publishing Cooperative (1989), then one of the first independent publishing houses in the history of the new Russia, "MAPREKON" and the journal "Kontur" (1991). More than a million books were issued by the Bondarenko publishing house. As a result of the default and financial turmoil of 1998, publishing activities failed. In addition, Bondarenko established the regional branch of the Union of Russian Writers in Rostov (1991) and became its first head. For a long time, the separation existed only at the expense of the revenues from the publishing activities of the "MAPREKON".

In 1996, he changed his place of residence - he moved from Rostov to Taganrog. He is an honorary citizen of his native city since 2007. Edited the third edition of the "Encyclopedia of Taganrog" (2008). But is it possible to evaluate the writer in print runs and for years?

January 30, 2014 in Taganrog died the author, who did not have time to finish his last work. The filmmaker "Whirlpool" was to be the continuation of the "Such a long life" dilogy. Life that broke off during the winter blizzard ...

PS The last will of the writer was not performed. Igor (Harry) Mikhailovich Bondarenko bequeathed to dispel his ashes over the waters of the Taganrog Gulf. He was buried at the Nikolaev cemetery in Taganrog.