Larisa Kazakova, the head of the Penza regional branch of the "Search movement of Russia", gave the documents of Vasily Stepanovich Igoshin, a red army soldier who died in captivity on October 16, 1942, to his relatives.
His daughter Maria made a request in the public reception "The Soldier's Fate" to find out his fate. All she knew about her father was his first name, patronymic, surname, place of birth, and that he had gone missing in July 1942.
When working with the databases of the RF Ministry of Defense, searchers found that Vasily Stepanovich Igoshin was born in 1922, worked as a telegraph operator, then he was captured in July 1942 near the village of Shizderovo in the Kalininskaya Oblast (now Tver Oblast) and was sent to the Stalag-342 prisoner-of-war camp located in Molodechno, Belarus. In Stalag-342, which was created at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War, 33 150 Soviet prisoners of war, including Vasily Stepanovich Igoshin, died.
Documents containing information about him were given to Maria Vasilyevna, as well as photos of the memorial complex, the Monument to the Victims of the Stalag-342 Concentration Camp, which was opened in the Republic of Belarus in 1996.
Information about the soldier was transferred to the Penza Oblast State Archive for editing the Book of Memory of the Penza Oblast.
During the work of the public reception "The Soldier's Fate" only in 2019 searchers were able to clarify the fate of more than 100 countrymen.
In the Penza Oblast the public reception "The Soldier's Fate" works weekly in the building of the information and search resource centre (Youth's centre "Yunost"). Implementing the project "Witnesses of an Immortal Feat. Museum of Finds of Search Teams" searchers help residents of the region not only to clarify the fate of their relatives, but also to place photos of heroes of the Great Patriotic War in the gallery "Road of Memory" of the RF Ministry of Defense.
