One of these items is his notebook, where Mr. Vinatovsky wrote down his notes and talked about the battles for Velikiye Luki in December 1942. The second stage of the Velikiye Luki offensive operation was taking place, where units of the 3rd Shock Army had to solve two interrelated tasks: repel a counterstrike and try to defeat the surrounded enemy. 

The regiments fought in the city: the enemy stubbornly resisted. Close combat took place literally for each house. On one of these houses on KolOmenskaya Street, senior sergeant Genrikh Vinatovsky, platoon assistant commander of the 943rd Infantry Regiment, placed a torn red pouch instead of a red flag, and exclaimed: “From now on, the city is ours!” He himself wrote about this in his diary on December 12, 1942: “I personally raised a red flag on the first floor.” 

Soon, for this feat, the command gave him the extraordinary rank of “Hero of the Soviet Union”, as written in the entry dated December 14, 1942. Further entries dated December 15 and 16 indicate that Genrikh Vinatovsky participated in the storming of a school and a church, where he was wounded by a German sniper: “December 17, 1942. wounded by a sniper. Exploding bullet. Hospital life began”. 

The wounded Vinatovsky was transferred to a military hospital in Kalinin. There he continued writing in his diary. The serious wounds received in the battles for Velikiye Luki were fatal. The last entry in the diary states that Vinatovsky died in military hospital No. 3829 in KalInin (present-day Tver). Today it is the territory of Tver. Genrikh Vinatovsky was buried there, at the Bobachevsky Bor military cemetery.