During his school years he took an active part in public life: he was an editor of the wall newspaper, an organizer of art recitation contests, an agitator-propagandist, and joined the Komsomol.

After high school, Vladimir entered the Dnepropetrovsk Industrial Workers' Faculty (now the National Metallurgical Academy of Ukraine), having managed to study there three courses before the war.

When enterprises, public institutions and a significant part of the city’s population were evacuated in August 1941, Vladimir moved to Yessentuki, where he settled with his aunt, his father’s sister.

He was trained at an artillery school near Maykop in the western Caucasus and received the military rank of sergeant.

In July 1942, when the Caucasian oil fields became the direct target of the German offensive, Vladimir Gelfand was on the southern flank of the Kharkov Front (as he writes in his Diary, entry dated 06.16.1942) as commander of the mortar squad.

As part of a small group of soldiers, Vladimir managed to break out of encirclement and join the units of the 62nd Army under the command of Vasily Chuikov, who fought in Stalingrad.

In December, Vladimir was wounded in the arm and ended up in a military hospital near Saratov, where he stayed until February 1943.

From her letter, he learned that almost all of his paternal relatives in Essentuki occupied by the Nazis - grandmother, uncle, two aunts and two cousins - were killed during an action to exterminate the Jews.

Vladimir underwent a three-month training in the courses of officers and received the military rank of junior lieutenant.

In the memoirs of the division commander, Colonel Antonov, it is reported that the 3rd battalion of the 1052th rifle regiment was supposed to reflect the enemy’s particularly cruel counterattacks.

Lieutenant Gelfand manned consignments of various goods in the Soviet units and accompanied them, organized the transportation and dismantling of restitution property.

At the beginning of 1946, he was briefly appointed head of production at the Kremennsky sawmill, where six soldiers and two horse teams were subordinate to him.

Together with his parents, he resorted to a trick: medical certificates were sent to the command about the poor state of health of the mother, the plight of the family was dramatized.

In 1955, Vladimir left his wife and son and returned to Dnepropetrovsk, where he joined the city Technical College as a teacher.

In 1957, Vladimir Gelfand met with a graduate of the Institute of Pedagogical Education of Makhachkala, Bella Efimovna Shulman.

“As long as I am here as a school district council,” said one head, “no Jew will work in high school.” Thus, Bella with higher education worked in kindergarten, and Vladimir remained his whole life a teacher of social science, history and political economy in vocational schools, first in the 12th, and since 1977 in the 21st city of Dnepropetrovsk.

Gelfand offered the local press not only articles about school workdays and work results, but also his memories of the war.

His account of the end of World War II in Germany and the German society that underwent its post-war crisis is also highly instructive.

Apart from offering a different view on the spirit and the moral condition of the Red Army which was often represented in an exaggeratedly glorifying manner in the Soviet media, the diary contradicts to the commonly held belief that explains the military success of the Red Army by systematic repressions.

Gelfand represents a certain group among the conquerors, namely the young officers who were sure that their front experience gave them the right to laugh at a dull instructor, to avert denunciation, to speak plainly to a high-ranged party functionary or to go their own way in occupied Germany.

Gelfand’s experience with women also proves the existence of love relations between masculine conquerors and feminine conquered in 1945–46.

The diary illustrates that German women searched contact to Soviet soldiers on their part, too, and that not only for material matters or in need of protection."

The only facts that Soviet soldiers were not allowed for security's sake to keep a diary and that the Ukrainian lieutenant Gelfand had the courage to violate this prohibition is a very good reason to be thankful to the author.

Although imperfect in certain respects, this diary surely refutes the assertion of numerous historical revisionists trying to represent the great victory of mankind over Hitler as a barbarian aggression of Stalin's Henchmen against Western civilisation.

"[4] Stefan Lindgren, Flamman, Sweden "Among the many eye-witness accounts of the end of World War 2 in Germany to emerge in the anniversary year of 2005 was the diary of a young Red Army lieutenant who participated in the capture of Berlin and remained in that city until September 1946.

Vladimir Gelfand’s Deutschland-Tagebuch was the subject of widespread media interest with commentators generally agreed that his account forces a review of existing German narratives of the fall of Berlin and the perceived relationship of the Soviet occupiers to the German population at this time."

Anne Boden, Trinity College Dublin, Bradford Conference on Contemporary German Literature "The Young Lieutenant’s Diary.

This is a review of Vladimir Gelfand’s Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946 which presents a unique insight both into the Red Army during the decisive battles for Berlin and into the German society of the period immediately following liberation.