Ion Lazarevich also liked to joke how he once “broke all the world records for drape,” fleeing with other tanks from nine of his own attack aircraft. Soviet Ils planes flew in a circle and bombed Soviet tank crews, without having contact with them. It is interesting that the Germans knew about the conditional signal - a white rocket, which they launched, deceiving the pilots. The commander of the rifle regiment, which the tankers were supposed to support, shouted at the top of his lungs: “Cowards! They escaped!” He only calmed down after receiving a good kick in the ass from Guard Junior Lieutenant Degen when he decided to hide under his tank from sudden shelling. The lieutenant colonel, who lay down directly under the tank’s evacuation hatch, located in the bottom of the vehicle, was so frightened that he mistook Degen’s savory blow for a shrapnel hitting a soft spot.

One day, Ion Degen’s crew confronted a “Tiger” dug in in a field near the village. When the Soviet tank crews tried to lean out from behind the stables, which were located at the exit from the village, the German immediately fired at them from his powerful cannon. Suddenly Degen saw a strange picture: right across the open area, on the left side of the Tiger, a column of ten brand new Thirty-Fours was blithely walking. The German was not taken aback and immediately knocked out the lead and trailing vehicles. The massacre began. Ignoring caution, Ion Lazarevich decided to urgently go to the rescue. With great difficulty, maneuvering across the field in an attempt to dodge the Tiger blanks, he managed to bring the four remaining T-34s to cover. As it turned out, someone ordered completely “immature” lieutenants, graduates of a tank school, to move to a position that was deep in the rear of the Germans.

On January 20, 1945, Degen got lost again. Having walked tens of kilometers behind the front line, he and another tank rolled into a large city. Seeing in front of him luxurious houses and a tram traveling peacefully with passengers, the guard junior lieutenant ordered to leave urgently. As it turned out, Soviet tank crews entered the capital of East Prussia, the city of Koenigsberg, completely unhindered. They left not so quietly, having crushed and rammed a huge number of cars. Already at the exit from Koenigsberg, right at the edge of the forest, they saw a German self-propelled gun and the crew having lunch next to it. A shot - and the self-propelled gun flared up like a torch. The Germans scattered, and the Soviet tankers hid behind a long brick building, which covered their safe retreat. Ion Degen personally presented a report on his adventures in Konigsberg to the front commander, General Chernyakhovsky, who watched from the edge of the forest as Degen’s tank burned a German self-propelled gun.
During the last battle of Ion Lazarevich, which took place the next day, January 21, 1945, a real miracle occurred. Battalion commander Dorosh set Degen the task of leading a combined company of tanks, blocking the Gumbinen-Insterburg highway and taking up defensive positions until the troops arrived. The order to march without support and cover to a poorly explored German fortified point was certainly criminal.

The combined group of 12 vehicles was forced to move forward with difficulty. No one responded to the command transmitted by radio. The subordinates had to drum on the armor with a crowbar, sprinkling threats with choice obscenities. The tankers did not want to die, but for failure to comply with the order they would still have been expelled by their own command. Walking at the head of the column, Degen tried to spot the Hitler Youth armed with Faustpatrons who had settled in front. These young soldiers of the Fuhrer were such a nuisance to the tank crews that the crew simply did not notice the 75mm StuG III self-propelled gun standing off to the side of the highway. But Ion Lazarevich suddenly felt strong anxiety and, unexpectedly for himself, commanded: “Tower to the right, armor-piercing - fire!” Hitler's Art-Sturm and Degen's tank fired simultaneously.

At first, Ion thought that a shell had exploded in the tank breech: he did not see either the German self-propelled gun or its shot. The gun commander, Zakaria Zagidullin, was wounded, but conscious. The rest are dead. Degen tried to pull out the seriously wounded Zagidullin, but they were hit by machine gun fire and died in the tank. Having fallen from the armor, the guard lieutenant heard the Germans very close. He was saved by senior lieutenant Fedorov, who arrived in time in his car. Over time, he came to the conclusion that the Almighty then intervened in his fate. He could not use any intuition to explain the unexpected decision to turn the turret around and shoot at random.

The seriously wounded Degen was evacuated to the hospital. He was considered hopelessly ill. When the professor arrived and examined the patient, he ordered the head of the hospital to immediately inject him with penicillin. Ion Lazarevich was conscious and heard the boss begin to protest: “What penicillin? He will die in a few hours!” Imported penicillin was worth its weight in gold, but the professor snapped: “Inject it. That's an order". Ion Lazarevich considered this day to be his second birthday.

​ Ion Degen celebrated Victory Day from his hospital bed in the city of Kirov. The veterans celebrated well, but Degen, a survivor of the fire of war, began to be tormented by anxiety for his future. Disabled, without education, he painfully pondered what he should do in peaceful life. Inspired by the noble feat of doctors saving the lives of soldiers, he decided to become a doctor. Ion Degen was discharged from the hospital on June 6, 1945. By this time, his mother was able to find him, from whom he fled to the front in 1941. She didn’t recognize her son when they met: he had changed so much during the war years.

Within a month, he managed to prepare and receive a matriculation certificate in Mogilev-Podolsk. Having successfully passed the exams, he entered the Kiev Medical Institute. He studied in Kyiv for a short time: the distance between the buildings of the institute was so great that he, a disabled war veteran, could not possibly come to class on time. After lying in the hospital for some time due to a suddenly opened wound, Degen began to think about transferring to another institute. Ion Lazarevich did not go to Lviv, which seemed to him a very “German” city. His alma mater became the Medical Institute in Chernivtsi.

From 1951 to 1954, Ion Lazarevich worked as a resident at the Kyiv Institute of Orthopedics, then as an orthopedic traumatologist in Kyiv hospitals. Having married Lyusa Grinshpun, an architecture student, the young doctor soon became a father - the couple had a son, Yuri.

In 1959, Ion Lazarevich was the first in the USSR to perform forearm replantation surgery. In May 1965, he defended his PhD thesis in Moscow, at the Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics. After his defense, people congratulated him, and along with everyone else, a short man in a gray suit. “Thank you, young man, for your kind words about your supervisor,” the man praised Degen. “Thank you too!”, Ion Lazarevich smiled, “Why should I?” As it turned out, this elderly man, Vasily Chaklin, was the professor who in January 1945 ordered him to be injected with penicillin. When asked why he then decided to treat the hopeless, Chaklin looked meaningfully at Degen and pointed his finger to the sky.

In 1973, Ion Degen defended the first doctoral work in the USSR on the use of magnetic therapy in the treatment of orthopedic diseases. Despite his career successes, he wanted to live in the Soviet Union less and less.

At the front, he always emphasized his Jewishness. Even in the most difficult moments, he did not show that he was scared, so as not to play along with the anti-Semites who told tales about Jews waiting out the war in the rear. Even after his first wound, in a hospital in the Urals, Degen was faced with the completely wild beliefs of people. Meeting the heads of the hospital - local women from the collective farm - he identified himself to them as a Jew from Ukraine. “Stop joking like that,” the women were indignant, “you don’t have horns on your head!” Degen began to agitate collective farmers, citing Marx as an example, but this did not make the proper impression on them. And when the conversation turned to Jesus Christ, they completely cut the young man off: “Stop talking this nonsense.”

The commanders several times “wooed” Degen to become a Hero of the Soviet Union, but each time he received more “modest” awards. Moreover, usually all these attempts by the command stopped at the level of the political department of the brigade, which did not hide its reluctance to assign such an honorary title to a Jew. The last explanation came to Degen in 1965, on the 20th anniversary of Victory Day: the Kiev regional military registration and enlistment office again requested awards from the department of the Presidium of the Supreme Council. Soon they responded: since Degen had already been awarded a large number of awards, it was decided not to award him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

At the dawn of his medical career, in 1951, Degen again had to take the fight - he, a Jew, was flatly refused to be accepted into a clinical residency in traumatology. Then there was a fight with the director of the institute, where he was sent to improve his knowledge. Having suggested that Degen bought the medals in Tashkent, the fat official received a punch in the face right in his office. I had to fight literally and figuratively for loved ones. When his mother-in-law, a first-class microbiologist, was once again not hired because of her nationality, his son-in-law immediately showed up at the head physician’s office. “If you don’t hire Adele Mironovna Rosenberg, tomorrow you’ll say goodbye to your life! And you can start preparing right now!” warned former intelligence officer and tanker Degen. On the same day, the mother-in-law was accepted into the staff.

The Soviet regime was unfair not only to Jews. She couldn't stand any truth. From a young age, Ion Degen was interested in poetry. In the summer of 1945, while walking around Moscow, he decided to go to the Committee for the Protection of Copyrights to report the authorship of a then popular song, which was composed by his deceased tank comrade. The employees thanked Degen, asking if he wrote himself. "Writing!" - “Read to us!” The young poet’s lyrics so impressed the assembled employees that the next day he was invited to the Central House of Writers. The entire literary elite, led by Konstantin Simonov, gathered to listen to him. After Degen’s speech, Simonov and other elders of Soviet literature began to disparage the veteran. He especially got it for his poem “My comrade, in mortal agony.” “This is looting, Kiplingism!” Simonov thundered at the poet, indignant at the scene in which Degen’s lyrical hero takes off his fallen friend’s felt boots. The only person who quietly clapped in approval was the poet Sergei Orlov, a fellow veteran tankman, sitting by the door.
​
The young poet was terribly offended by Simonov, and only many years later he heard an amazing story from Yevgeny Yevtushenko. As it turned out, after the public defamation of Degen, the MGB opened a case against him: the security officers did not like his poem “Random Raid on Enemy Rear Lines,” which talked about a certain “commander” who was undeservedly stealing victory from the soldiers. In the thief, the KGB agents saw Stalin himself, which amounted to an inevitable guilty verdict. And Konstantin Simonov stood up for Degen - he was able to convince the security officers that for the lieutenant, the “commander” could only be the brigade commander sitting at the headquarters, but not the generalissimo, Comrade Stalin.

During the years of post-war anti-Semitic hysteria, Degen gradually lost his former fiery love for the communist idea. Back in 1965, when the famous doctor and writer, Mark Tverskoy, was visiting Degen, he quite openly encouraged him to leave for Israel. At that time, this proposal sounded like sheer madness, but Ion Lazarevich was extremely serious.

In November 1977, he, his wife Lyusya and son Yuri left for Israel. The former communist, holder of Soviet military orders and medals, happily left the evil empire, which was masquerading as a socialist state with the fairest system. Degin and his family were met by Mark Tverskoy, who heeded the advice of his senior comrade, and in 1974 repatriated to Eretz Israel.

In Israel, Degen learned Hebrew, worked in his specialty for many years and became one of the leading orthopedists and traumatologists in the country. From his pen came a large monograph devoted to magnetic therapy. Ion Lazarevich was recognized as “one of our own” by veterans of the Israeli wars, becoming the only Soviet tanker accepted into the “Society of Israeli Tankmen Honored for Heroism.”

He continued to write poems, stories, sketches, essays, and books of memoirs, publishing them in magazines in various countries. In Israel, Ion Lazarevich belonged to the right in his political views. It was his convictions and perseverance that brought him to the conflict zone during the first intifada. Degen was not afraid of anything.

At the end of December 2014, Ion Lazarevich was honored at the Grand Kremlin Palace. In a solemn ceremony, he was awarded the “Fiddler on the Roof” prize from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, in the most prestigious category – “Man-Legend”.

Ion Degen passed away on April 28, 2017. Reacting to poems and articles written about his life, Ion Lazarevich always protested against “panegyrics” addressed to him. “I was an ordinary coward and, like everyone else, I dreamed of surviving the war,” this is how Degen modestly described his exploits. We, grateful descendants, will always remember him as a great Jew and person.

Bibliography and sources:

1. Ion Degen. From the house of slavery. Publishing house: “Moriya”, Israel, 1986.
2. Mikhail Gauzner. Warrior, doctor, poet, personality. Ion Degen // Chaika Magazine, July 2, 2023
3. Degen Ion Lazarevich // Foundation for the Preservation of Historical Memory Electronic periodical “I remember”.
4. The last poet of the Great War. Interview with Ion Degen