“At the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute there was a team of climbers led by coach and captain Vasily Sasorov. In 1940, it became the best team in the Soviet Union. She received record-breaking medals and fulfilled the standards of masters of sports. At the very beginning of the war, the entire team went to the front. Volunteers, ordinary soldiers, scouts of the 1st Mountain Rifle Brigade, which soon became a swamp rifle brigade, because it was not thrown into the mountains, but to defend the distant approaches to Leningrad. There were ten of us, native Leningraders, and they began to kill us. One at a time, two at a time. Kill... kill. I, Levka Rubinstein (now Lev Mikhailovich), was the last one left in the brigade. So God gave. And I wrote these notes not about how they shot, how they attacked, how they took cities and towns, how they died... I wrote the truth about how they lived in the war.” (From the preface).