After the Battle of Stalingrad, Nadezhda Petrova, a Soviet army nurse, wandered through the ruins of the city looking for wounded soldiers. She found them. But she also found the orphaned. Children of German soldiers, children of German civilians, children of Soviet soldiers, children of Soviet civilians. They were all the same to her.
Petrova began taking them in. First one child, then two, then five. By the end of the war, she had adopted 17 children, most of them German war orphans between the ages of four and twelve. She raised them in a single-room apartment in a building rebuilt from the ruins of Stalingrad.
The Soviet authorities ordered her to send the German children to an orphanage. She refused. She told them, They are children. They are not Germans. They are not Russians. And they are mine. The children were raised as Russians, given Russian names. They did not learn they were German until they were teenagers.
After the war, Petrova was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. When asked why she had adopted enemy children, she said, I was a nurse. My job was to save lives. It does not matter if the life is German or Russian. If it is a life, it must be saved.
One of the children, a boy named Hans who was given the Russian name Alexei, became a doctor in Stalingrad. He delivered more than 3,000 babies in his career. He named his first son Nadezhda.