A Somber Realization in Battlefields of Bones

Every spring, when the snow has melted, the searchers come armed with shovels and spades, metal detectors and long steel probes, coaxing the field to give up its bones. This spring, they have been working for two weeks, and already there is a neat pile of ribs, thigh bones, broken skulls and bits of pelvis laid out on a plastic sheet: the remains of 94 men.

In 10 years of springs, workers have unearthed the bones of more than 2,000 other men from this field steeped in birdsong and memory. By all accounts, at least 9,000 more died here during 15 horrific days in February 1942, when Russia's 32nd Rifle Division stood alone in the dead of winter as a tightening noose of German forces encircled, froze, starved and finally slaughtered them.

The searchers know where many of them are -- broken skeletons lie scattered on the forest floor, or piled in trenches no one has time to sift. And time is what it takes. In much of the world, the casualties of World War II lie under rows of neat white military crosses, but here in Russia, millions still lie where they fell.

A war that killed an estimated 26 million Russians -- more than 60 times the number of American casualties -- may never give up all its dead. But it won't be because no one looked for them. For decades, teams of searchers have patiently sifted the muddy spring soil of Russia's miserable battlefields, searching for ID tags or a name scratched on a bent spoon.

"When we started looking at the number of families who, 40 years after the war, now 60 years after the war, knew nothing about their men, I was shocked at what we discovered," Yuri Smirnov, chairman of the Union of Search Teams of Russia, said this week as he oversaw a group of volunteers, some as young as 12.

"It turned out there are not dozens or hundreds of thousands of people missing, but millions," Smirnov said. "It turned out that from Brest in the west to Sakhalin, the country is covered with bones. And I decided I should devote myself to looking for these people."