Toktogon Altybasarova is called a “legendary woman” in her native land. She was known for taking care of children evacuated from Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War.
Toktogon Altybasarova was born in 1924 in the Issyk-Kul region in Kyrgyzstan. She was an ordinary collective farmer.
She met the beginning of the war at the age of 16, at the same time she was appointed chairman of the village council in the village of Kurmenty. In August 1942, a new concern. Then, children who were miraculously rescued from the besieged Leningrad were brought to Kyrgyz villages and small towns. Transport came with little Leningraders to Kurmenty … Moreover, not ten, not twenty, but one hundred and fifty, in fact, kids from one and a half to 12 years old … When Toktogon Altybasarova saw them, she cried. Before that, they were thin, emaciated. Swollen from hunger, they did not look seriously childishly at the “aunt” who met them, who would later be called “Mom Tonya” all their lives. But that will be much later. Until then … Many of them were so weak that they could not walk on their own.
An empty building was identified as a shelter for the children, which before the war had been prepared for a dormitory for a school of factory training. The villagers filled their bags with dry hay – here are the mattresses for you. Food? Toktogon Altybasarova went to her fellow villagers, told them about the horror that the little Leningraders had to endure. For example, about the nine-year-old Katya Ivanova, who in March 1942, together with the same unfortunate children, was put into a truck and driven across the ice of Lake Ladoga from the city. How the car in front suddenly went under the ice, and the children’s hats were kept in the ice for some time …
Or she talked about four-year-old Valya Ivanova, who was found on the bed next to her dead mother, and how Valya told the finder: “Mom lay down and does not get up” … hay was poured. They fed cake – there was no other food. She talked about others who went through the horror of the blockade and miraculously survived in this Kyrgyz village. And the villagers began to bring what they could to the Leningraders – milk, kumis, cheese … They shared potatoes, beets. And also many, many years later, having already become adults, the children recalled how “Mom Tonya brought them baked pumpkin slices, which were tastier than all the cakes in the world” …
Each family from the village of Kurmenty took patronage over two or three visiting children. By the fall, women had sewn them quilts from felt and knitted socks.
… When they more or less dealt with the blockade hunger, a new concern arose. The fact is that many blockade children did not have documents. The smallest were hung on an oilcloth tag, where their names, surnames and year of birth were written in ink. But the road from Leningrad to Issyk-Kul was long, and the cloths tied to the handles with the written down names faded from children’s tears.
But everyone had to build a birth certificate. So Toktogon Altybasarova had to invent names and surnames for them. The children themselves came up with a name for her in their own way. Those who were older called her Tonya-ezhe – this is how they call their older sister in Kyrgyzstan. And the younger ones began to call her simply mother Tonya … And “mother Tonya” with 150 children in her arms was not even twenty years old …
Toktogon didn’t just take care of the children. At 16, she was able to convey to them maternal attention and warmth.
She was called “the mother of 150 children,” although together with her front-line husband, she raised not only 150 children from besieged Leningrad, but also eight relatives. She left 23 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
People who knew this woman say that all her life she received letters from her pupils, who then dispersed throughout the Soviet Union, and carefully kept them.
Newspapers often wrote about her and filmed programs on TV, in which Toktogon said: “I loved these children as my own. And I always wait for them. “
They shot about this story and a film, for this Toktogon Altybasarova was even specially invited to Leningrad to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade. There she met many of her “children”.
In the Victory Park named after Dair Asanov in Bishkek, there is a monument on which the image of Toktogon is carved in an embrace with one of her “children”.
All her life, the legendary woman has lived in her native village, where she died in 2015 at the age of 90. The last days Toktogon Altybasarova lived surrounded by her own children and grandchildren and wished that “there would never be a war on earth again.”