After Prison
Released from prison in the week that Nazi Gerrmany invaded the USSR World War II, Petrov, made his way across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. He avoided Soviet mobilization; as an ex-convict he would have been placed in a mine-clearing battalion. The German front established by Operation Barbarossa passed by his town and thus came under control of the Third Reich. He managed, over two years, to work his way across Eastern Europe, into Germany and then Italy. In Nazi Germany, he contacted and played a role in the operations of General Vlasov.
His memoirs give markedly less information concerning his association with Vlasov than they do about almost all his other associations, even those with minor convicts. This has fueled speculation as to how he managed to secure passage to America at the end of the war.
Read more about this topic: Vladimir Nikolayevich Petrov
Famous quotes containing the word prison:
“Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce great poetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Whensoever any affliction assails me, me thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgements upon them.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)