You have in your hands an amazing testimony of the Great Patriotic War - the memories of the American citizen Niklas Burlak, who, by the will of fate, ended up in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and shared the bitter fate of our country in the 1940s. The author was seriously wounded several times, twice lost the crew of his thirty-four in battle. He is sure that he owes his life to great love, unexpectedly met by him in a military situation completely unsuitable for this, but once tragically ended. Niklas Burlak went through the largest battles of the second half of the Great Patriotic War - the Battle of Kursk, the liberation of Belarus and Poland, the capture of Berlin. In May 1945, he, like many Soviet soldiers, on the walls of the Reichstag briefly described his path from his home to the enemy's lair. Niklas Burlak's inscription began very unusually for a Soviet officer: "Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.." In the USA, the author published this wonderful book in 2010-2012 under the name M.J. Niklas, perpetuating in his pseudonym the memory of two of his brothers Mike and John, who also drank all the "charms" Soviet life.