RUSSIA: The Beast of Berlin

On leave from the front, Maiya Sloboda, an army lieutenant in command of 100 men, looked more like a boy than an 18-year-old girl, in their olive-grey uniform with dispatch case hooked on the shoulder. In the case she carried pictures of her friends and family. In her heart she carried a hate undimmed by having shot, to her certain knowledge, 28 Germans in the past year. She paced the floor, her brown eyes shining, her hands moving restlessly through heavy black hair which she herself had bobbed. "I am nervous, yes," she said to a U.S. correspondent. "It...

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