Few people know better than Nadejda Otsep the horrible price the Soviet people had to pay for their victory over Nazi Germany exactly 57 years ago.

For two months in the summer of 1943, Otsep, then only 23 but already a veteran frontline surgeon in the Red Army, was assigned a job that still makes her tremble with rage. "I was assigned to the special SMERSH battalion," Otsep said.

SMERSH is a Russian acronym that means death to spies. Created by Stalin's orders, these units called zagradotryad (literally translated, a blocking unit) followed the regular infantry and shot everybody who was retreating or refusing to advance.

"My job was to jump into the grave that the soldier was forced to dig himself and pronounce him dead," said Otsep, who moved to Montreal from her native Moscow six years ago. "A lot of these poor souls were just young kids who were under fire for the first time. Their only crime was that they were simply scared.

"The SMERSH not only executed them, but also wrote letters to the family saying that their loved one was killed as a traitor and a coward. It was the most terrible experience of the war."

As a frontline surgeon during the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in the former Soviet Union, Otsep walked with her infantry regiment from Moscow to Berlin and back, seeing more death, carnage and mutilation than she cares to remember.

But as dozens of former Soviet veterans gathered yesterday at the Russian consulate in Montreal to celebrate their victory over the Nazis, Otsep said the images of Soviet soldiers executed by their own government still cloud her joy even 60 years later.

Otsep was 21, a fifth-year A student in Moscow's First Medical Institute when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

In October 1941, with German troops on Moscow's doorstep, she got her medical diploma, a military rank and command of the medical company of the 107th Rifle Regiment.

"I was the only woman and a very lousy officer," Otsep said, laughing. "I didn't know how to use a compass, how to read maps, I didn't know anything about the military. All throughout my studies in Moscow, my only C was for the course on military training."

Her lack of experience and naivete almost took her life, and she spent 30 days under arrest for several mistakes.

She was jailed for 10 days after somebody stole her company's horses. Otsep got another 10 days after she and the division commander discovered 12 of her orderlies and the wounded they were supposed to carry drank at a distillery that had just been taken from the Germans. But her third 10-day imprisonment was unjust, she said.

"As the regimental physician, it was my duty to supervise the burials of fallen soldiers," Otsep said. "Except nobody had told me that the dead in the mass graves are supposed to be buried with their heads pointing west."

Otsep recounted that "in 1943, I led my entire company into a minefield."

They were following the regiment and picking up the wounded, she said. The soldiers would usually leave directions for them.

"I saw something written on a tree in the middle of the field," Otsep said. "When I got closer so see what the sign said, I read, 'Warning! Mines!' "

She was told to take off her boots and walk back, trying not step on trip wires that set off mines, Otsep said.

That wasn't her only brush with mines.

That same summer, exhausted after a day-long forced march and making camp in complete darkness, she finally found a comfortable mound on the ground and fell asleep. She was awakened the next morning by the terrified cries of her friends.

"I woke up first thinking that we were surrounded by Germans," Otsep said. "Then I realized what the commotion was all about: all night I had slept on a German anti-tank mine, using it as a pillow. I guess my dumb head was not heavy enough to trigger the mine."

In the fall of 1943, she even took a German prisoner, Otsep said in her usual self-effacing manner.

"In truth, I didn't do much," Otsep said. "The German soldier, a huge fellow who could have broken my neck, simply surrendered."

He probably would have broken her neck had he known the pistol Otsep was aiming at him wasn't loaded.

But behind Otsep's self-effacing tales there is a much bigger story of courage and sacrifice.

In her modesty Otsep doesn't say that for her work as a combat surgeon, she was awarded the Order of the Red Star, one of the highest Soviet military awards. She was also awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War and several other medals.

Otsep saved thousands of lives performing surgery under relentless German shelling.

"I didn't have the right to be afraid," Otsep said. "Even when the whole hell would break loose around us, I had to concentrate on saving the life of the person on my operating table."

She admits there were two things of which she was terrified.

"I was terrified of tanks and falling into German encirclement," Otsep said. "I was a young woman, a Jew, a Komsomol (Young Communists) member and a card-carrying Communist."

Otsep's division participated in some of the heaviest fighting of the war, including the famous Kursk tank battle and the Kursk-Orel Fire Arch that obliterated elite German panzer divisions and entire armies.

During the battle to cross the Dnieper River, she witnessed heroism by Soviet soldiers and experienced the absurdity of party bureaucracy, Otsep said.

"Soviet reconnaissance groups on small boats simulated several attacks on German lines on the other bank to allow the artillery and bombers to get a bearing on German positions when they fought back," she said. "Their chances of survival were almost nil, but these young kids sacrificed their lives so that thousands of their friends would be spared. The river was full of their bodies."

She crossed the river with the troops, but she was soaking wet from the splashes from the shelling and bombardment by the Germans by the time she got to the other side. So was her Communist Party membership card.

The party didn't take kindly to such "disrespect" for its symbols, and a meeting was called - in the middle of the fighting.

"I got a severe reprimand because the ink on the card had run," Otsep said. "They told me I should have carried the card in my teeth, if needed, but I should have kept it dry. The reprimand was taken off my file only several years after the war."

After crossing the Dnieper, Soviet troops kept pushing the Germans all the way to Berlin. But there was no party when Germany signed the capitulation May 8, Otsep said.

"We knew that the war was over in late April. We were just very tired and simply wanted to go home."

At least 20 million Soviet people had died in the war by that time.