Sasha had never liked the cold, and this fact was underscored with particular emphasis on this sub-zero evening — a night so cold a man’s spit would freeze before it hit the ground. Back when Sasha was a child, long before the start of the war, he used to stoke the fire in his room to be so warm it would make even the worst kind of sinner break a sweat. There was no fire to be stoked tonight, as Sasha, now a grown man serving in the 122nd Stalingrad Defensive Company was holed up in the bottom of a 7-foot trench with nothing but his ripped and tattered military-issue clothing, Tokarev SVT-40 rifle with 16 remaining bullets and the fleeting memory of what his life was before the war shattered his existence.

Surrounding Sasha in the trench were 12 other Russian men, all equally as ravaged by the conditions in Stalingrad. It didn’t take long after the Nazi advance was barreling towards Moscow that Sasha was plucked out of his vehicle assembly plant and thrown into a Red Army uniform to serve the Motherland. Stalin talked often on the radio that Soviet Russia does not need to ask, it demands loyalty and demands the ultimate sacrifice of the worker.

The sacrifice in Stalingrad, Sasha felt, was nothing short of inhuman.

Before being deployed to the front Sasha’s commanding officer told a room full of nervous Russian boys that the Red Army was losing the battle, and that if Stalingrad fell, the Soviet State would fall. The German advance to Moscow would be swift and excruciating. It really was that simple, no need to dress it up anymore, the officer said plainly. Present in the air was a palpable discomfort and fear as the horror stories of S.S. soldiers terrorizing Europe suddenly became personal.

The Stalin propaganda machine refused to release any substantive information on the status of Stalingrad, but Sasha’s barber told him before he was sent to training that he heard whisperings of over 100,000 Red Army casualties. When Sasha heard this he went immediately to tell his father, an aging butcher in North Moscow. His father, long a Red Army zealot, replied in a matter-of-fact tone that it would be an honor to die while serving the Soviet State and that he was lucky to be on the right side of history.

When Sasha arrived in Stalingrad it was in the black of night. The Germans had surrounded all but one entryway into the city, and Red Army soldiers were forced to cross into the city over a frozen river. The night before Sasha arrived Nazi soldiers began firing off bursts of rounds in the direction of the river randomly, and as he crawled across the river, he couldn’t help but think he was inching closer to an inevitable death.

Sasha thought as hard as he could about that fire as a child, but no matter how hard his mind worked his body continued to freeze, bit by bit. He had lost feeling in both his feet a few hours before, and the sensation in his hands was slowly disappearing too. When the Germans cut off the oil supply line into Stalingrad two days before, the fires went out and the real cold settled in.

Wrapped with his frozen and fading fingers, Sasha gripped his rifle waiting. He didn’t know why he was doing it, a gun hadn’t fired in over three days. The air was so frigid the oil froze and jammed, rendering it as nothing more than a piece of swinging metal. Still, Sasha held onto it tightly almost as if it would spontaneously generate heat.

By the time the sun began to go down, Sahsa had lost feeling in all of his lower body and most of his arm. He was dropping in and out of consciousness, almost as if he was stuck on a loose yo-yo. Sasha knew that time was running down, he could feel his body giving up.

As Sasha’s final breath was escaping his lungs he sputtered, “is this the right side of history?” A few moments later, he became another frozen body in the sea of dead at Stalingrad.