The exhibition ‘Dedicated to Defenders of the Fatherland…’ houses a hand-made capsule with a shard, which seriously injured the pilot Pavel Soldatenko. He made it on his own in the 1970s–1980s, and in 1984, he donated the capsule to the collection of the Museum of Local History.

Soldatenko was born in 1923, in Anzhero-Sudzhensk. Before the war, he was engaged in the aircraft pilot club and studied at the aviation flight school. In January 1943, he was sent to the front — to the 46th Reserve Aviation Regiment, and later — to the 384th Aviation Bomber Regiment.

During his service as a commander of the crew, Pavel Soldatenko made 79 sorties. On February 16, 1944, he was performing another combat mission, when his plane was shot down. The pilot recalled:

When Pavel Soldatenko landed, his comrades-in-arms ran up to him — they managed to pull the wounded pilot out of the cabin before the plane exploded. The pilot’s face was badly burned, he had to undergo many plastic surgeries to restore his eyesight.

In 1948, Soldatenko was transferred to reserve as a disabled person of group 2. Soldatenko received several government awards for his personal courage at the front. In 1954, he graduated with honors from the Mining Technical School.

During the Great Patriotic War, soldiers and civilians very often received shrapnel wounds: fragments of exploding shells damaged human tissues and organs. The consequences could be very different. It depended on where the shrapnel hit and what position it was in.

There were cases when doctors decided not to touch a foreign body and leave it in. This was due to the risks of the surgery: the consequences of removing the shrapnel could have been much more severe than the wound itself, or unpredictable at all.