1st Compere: Dear guests, teachers and friends ! We’ve come here today to say that we are against war and that we’ll do everything we can to preserve peace At dawn on June 22, 1941, Hitler’s armies attacked the Soviet Union without declaring war. The Great Patriotic War, which was to last about four years, had begun.

The Hitlerites brought 190 divisions into action on the first day of the war. They had the advantage of a surprise attack . Frontier units and divisions stationed along the Soviet-German border were the first to shoulder the enemy’s blow. Soviet soldiers courageously met the Nazis and fought them to the last. The very first battles convincingly showed that Hitler’s plans for a Blitzkrieg had failed completely. During that period the German fascist army lost more troops and military equipment than in all years of the Second War in Europe.

2nd Compere: World War 1 claimed more then 55 million lives. The war involved 72 countries. Hundred of battles were fought during the war on land and at sea. Can you imagine those battles? They were terrible; and many of them were fought in our country. Our country suffered more than any other. On May 9, 1945 Hitler Germany signed a pact of unconditional surrender. Thus ended in Europe the Bloodiest war that mankind has ever experience. Soviet people will never forget the war years, which began with the devastation of Russian cities and villages in June 1941, when the armies of Hitler and his supporters launched their attack on the East.

Our people will always remember the troubled autumn of the Battle for Moscow; the Volga burning near Stalingrad, and the hungry eyes of children in besieged Leningrad, begging their mothers for a piece of bread.

3rd Compere: We want no war. There are many reasons. When you see the slides about the life of war prisoners in German concentration camps, you’ll understand one of the reasons.

1st speaker: Musa Jalil was born in the small Tatar village Mustafino, in the Orenburg steppes. From childhood he knew what poverty and hunger meant and the humiliation that his people were open to in pre-Revolutionary years. In 1921, when a severe draught hit the steppelands, he left home so the family would have one hungry mouth less to feed and became a vagrant in the city of Orenburg. He slept in the streets, ate what he picked up in the marketplace and even stole to keep from starving, as Jalil admitted years later in his autobiography. Soviet government enabled him to get an education and mad a respectable man of him. His poetry was like him. Impulsive and passionate believing implicity in the just cause of socialism, hostile to all the trash to all trash surviving from pre-Revolutionary times, it was, at the same time, kindly, responsive, tender and lyrical.

3rd speaker: In 1946, N. Teregulov, a former prisoner-of-war, brought a slim pad to the Union of Writers of the Tatar Republic. Closely written in it were 60 of Jalil’s poems. A year later, the Belgian patriot Andre Timmermans, who had shared a cell with the poet, sent another notebook with Jalil’s poems to Kazan The poems in those notebooks have since become widely known as The Moabit Notebooks, but it took several years to trace step by step the path traversed by the poet through the death camps and to learn the details of his exploit.

In June 1942, the badly wounded and shellshocked Musa was taken prisoner when his unit was attempting to break out of a pocket. After months in concentration camps for Soviet prisoners-of-war, Jalil was transferred to Deblin a fortified stronghold in Poland. There Musa met his fellow countrymen, for the fascists were assembling prisoners of Eastern nationalities in the comp. He sought out people he could put his trust in and together they subsequently formed a resistance group.

4th speaker; In Late 1942, the fascists started forming what they called "national legions” Among others, the Idel-Ural legion was formed in Jedlino, Poland, of prisoners-of-war belonging to the nations of the Volga basin. (Since the majority were Tatars, the Germans usually called it the Volgo-Tatar legion.) The fascists brainwashed the prisoners in a rabidly chauvinistic and ant - soviet spirit ,to prepare the legionnaires for action against the Soviet Army. Jalil’s group set out to wreck the fascist plans, to convince the men to use the weapons they would be supplied with against the fascists themselves. The members of the resistance group infiltrated the editorial board of the Idel-Ural newspaper. The German command produced, and printed and circulated antifascist leaflets among the legionnaires. They also organized the legionnaires into esoteric action groups consisting of 5 men each.

The very first battalion of the Volgo-Tatar legion that was sent to the Eastern front mutinied, shot all the German officers, and defected to the querillas in Byelorussia.

5th speaker: In August 1943, fascist spies managed to track down the resistance group. Musa Jalil and most of his militant comrades were seized. There followed nightmare days and nights of interrogations, torture, and more torture. 6th speaker: The Moabit Notebooks of Musa Jalil are one of those inimitable, glaringly truthful historic documents. They contain few day-to-day details. There are practically no particulars about the prison cell, of the sufferings and humiliation to which prisoners were subjected. The poems are concrete in a totally different sense. Their concreteness lies in their emotional and psychological impact.

1st compere: Dear friends! Thank you for coming and taking an active part in our party.