Real Life Fields Of Bone Remind Us Of The Horror of War
A ghastly testament to the brutality of the Eastern Front
There are rumors that if you know who to ask, have some extra rubles, and speak a little Russian, you can be taken to remote places around Volgograd, where there are fields containing exposed human skeletons. If you go off the beaten path in the untamed woods of Southern Russia, you run the chance of stumbling upon piles and piles of bones. Human bones. Hundreds of them. Bones in quantities hardly ever seen in the modern era. The appearance of a single human bone is often enough to launch an investigation in the West. In Russia, there are forests full of them.
These bones are a stark reminder of the horrors of war and have been the source of fascination, horror, and reinternment missions for decades. Many of these bones lie in the open, and many local Russians claim to have played with them and among them, growing up. They are remnants of armies long gone and shades of soldiers who fought for states that no longer exist. These bones are the remains of hundreds of thousands of Nazi and Soviet soldiers that died on the steppes around Stalingrad.
So many men died in this part of the world in such a short amount of time that many of them were left unburied. The fighting was so fierce, the weather so cold, and…
