Ion Lazarevich Degen - a famous doctor who saved the lives of hundreds of people in peacetime, a famous poet and a fearless defender of the Motherland, ranked 10th among the tank aces of the Soviet Union.
This is a man with a capital letter, a hero who went through the whole war, selflessly defended his native land and lost his comrades who left untimely. Twice presented to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, Ion Lazarevich was never awarded the highest degree of distinction, possibly on a national basis.
Degen Ion Lazarevich: biography
Ion was born into a Jewish family of paramedics on June 4, 1925 in Mogilev-Podolsky (Vinnitsa region). When the boy was 3 years old, his 65-year-old father, an excellent paramedic and talented specialist, whose experience was adopted by many certified doctors, died.
Raising a child fell on the shoulders of a 26-year-old mother who worked as a nurse in a hospital. Her small salary was not enough for the family, so 12-year-old Degen went to help a blacksmith and a year later he could shoe a horse on his own.
Folk lines written by Degen
Degen Ion was a versatile teenager,He was very fond of botany, zoology and literature. He was delighted with the poems of the French writer Victor Hugo, inspired by the works of Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose poems Ion knew almost by heart. Perhaps this was the impetus for the development of his poetic inclinations, and the lines written by Degen were passed from mouth to mouth and were often recognized as folk.
Start of war
After graduating from the 9th grade, 16-year-old Ion Degen, whose biography is sincerely admired by the modern generation, got a job as a leader in a pioneer camp, and a month later, in July 1941, with the beginning of a bloody war, he volunteered for the front. From childhood, the young man disappeared on the territory of the local border detachment, where he learned to wield all types of weapons, including a machine gun. He was well versed in grenades, rode confidently, so he went to the front as a well-trained Red Army soldier. He fully demonstrated the skills acquired in childhood in wartime, being part of the 130th Infantry Division.
While leaving the encirclement, he was wounded in the soft tissues of the knee. The wound was considered light, but did not heal for a very long time: there were no clean bandages, the dressings rarely had to be changed. This circumstance provoked blood poisoning. In the Poltava hospital, Degen was given a terrible sentence - amputation of his leg. But the young man categorically refused surgical intervention. A great desire to live and a young strong body helped him to get out.
Service in the 42nd divisionarmored trains
After the hospital, Ion Lazarevich was assigned to the reconnaissance department of the 42nd division of armored trains, formed from volunteer railway workers. The division located in Georgia consisted of two armored trains: "Sibiryak" and "Railwayman of Kuzbass", as well as a headquarters train with five passenger cars.
In 1942, the division, commanded by Degen Ion, was given a responsible task: to cover the paths to Beslan and Mozdok. The Soviet soldier recalls the battles in the Caucasus as the most difficult and bloody: a huge number of Germans attacked an armored train, and the Junkers fired freely from the sky. From the constant bombing, the crew suffered heavy losses. In addition to the massive German attack, the second trouble came - hunger. For three days, Degen chewed on the strap of a tank helmet, and then for several days he did not eat anything at all. The opponents were also starving, so after a while they came to surrender. The pass, the defense of which was entrusted to the division, was then held by the Soviet troops: out of 44, 19 people survived.
Poetry poet Ion Degen started writing at the front:
No, I didn't keep diaries during the war, Not up to writing diaries for a soldier, But someone wrote poetry in me
About every battle, about every loss.”
These lines were born from a heart that passed all the horror of wartime through itself. Ion Degen tried to capture all his observations and experiences in order to preserve reliable information for posterity.
Biography: a tanker with a capital letter
15 October Ion Lazarevich wasseriously wounded in night reconnaissance, the task of which was to determine the location of German reserves and prepare coordinates for the firing of the 42nd division. Getting out of the German encirclement, the young fighter was wounded in the leg, and shrapnel riddled his body. After the hospital, Ion did not return to his division (which was transferred to Iran in 1943), but was sent to the 21st Training Tank Regiment, stationed in the Georgian town of Shulaveri, and from there to the 1st Kharkov Tank School.
After graduating from an educational institution with honors, Degen Ion was sent to Nizhny Tagil to receive a tank and form a crew, the first composition of which was young, unfired and had never been at the front. The same was the second crew and a few more. Almost all the guys, 19-20-year-old youths, died.
The famous 2nd Panzer
Ion ended up in the 2nd Tank Brigade, famous at the front, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Yefim Evseevich Dukhovny. At its core, it was a suicide brigade, used exclusively for a breakthrough and carrying huge losses in each offensive operation. The newcomers who came at her disposal were not told this sad statistic, so as not to frighten the young fighters. It was unrealistic for an ordinary tanker to survive two offensives as part of this brigade. Degen was called lucky in it, because he managed to survive in the summer of 1944 after large-scale operations in Belarus and Lithuania.
As part of the 2nd tank brigade, the crew of Ion Degen destroyed 4 self-propelled guns and 12 tanks of the German enemy.
Miracle survivor
During the wartime, Degen I. L. received22 fragments, a large number of burns and four wounds, the most severe on January 21, 1945. This happened in East Prussia: a tanker, by his own example, tried to lead the company into the attack, but to no avail. During that terrible battle, his T-34 tank was hit, and the crew, who managed to get out of the burning car, were thrown by the Germans with grenades.
Degen survived despite a severed upper jaw, shrapnel in his brain, mangled legs and several bullet wounds to his arm. In the hospital, he developed sepsis, which at the time was considered a death sentence. Ion owes his salvation to the head physician, who demanded that the wounded man be intravenously deficient at that time penicillin. Jon survived! This was followed by a rehabilitation period, lifelong disability - all this at the age of 19.
The talented doctor Ion Degen
Watching the exploits of doctors who saved wounded soldiers, Degen Ion Lazarevich after the war decided to become a doctor too and never regretted his choice. In 1951 he graduated with honors from the Chernivtsi Medical Institute, became a successful and sought-after doctor, defended his doctoral dissertation. Despite the fact that the wounded hands did not obey Degen (he regularly knitted knots for the flexibility of his fingers, and wore a cane filled with lead for the efficiency of his hands), he achieved his goal - he became a skilled traumatologist and orthopedist. During several decades of medical practice, I did not use the thumb of the right hand during operations (I could not physically), but the patients did not even know about it.
In 1951, Degen Ion worked at the Institute of Orthopedics in the city of Kyiv, then in Kustanai in the Kazakh steppe. Then the doctor returned to Ukraine in Kyiv, where he continued his medical activities. Ion Degen developed a unique surgical technique, wrote more than 90 scientific articles, and in 1959 performed the first surgical engraftment of a severed forearm in medical practice.
Life on Israeli soil
Since 1977, Degen Ion Lazarevich has been living in Israel, where he left at the age of 50, feeling how his native state, for which he risked his life, rejects him like an unknown alien object.
In his historical homeland, Degen worked as a doctor for more than two decades; his wife got a job as an architect at the University of Jerusalem, and his son successfully defended his dissertation at the Weizmann Institute and became a theoretical physicist. Ion Degen spoke about his own life on the land of his ancestors in the work “From the House of Slavery”. Also from the pen of Ion Lazarevich came such books as "Portraits of Teachers", "Immanuel Velikovsky", "Holograms", "The War Never Ends", "The Heirs of Asclepius", "Unfictional stories about the incredible." The author's works are published in magazines in many countries, including Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Australia, America.
In Israel, Ion Degen (photos of recent years are presented in the article) continues to work actively, consults fellow orthopedists, writes books, gives memoir lectures in different cities.
This amazing man of amazing destiny with a high positiveenergy left a significant mark in the literature about the Great Patriotic War, which he experienced and carried in his heart.
About the Soviet front-line poet, tanker-ace, directors Yulia Melamed and Mikhail Degtyar shot a documentary film "Degen". The film tells not only about the military biography of the hero, but also about life in peacetime, marriage, medical work, moving to Israel and relations with the Soviet authorities.
