Thank you

From The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux.  Page 267.

John Le Cato, the third officer of the Liberty ship Thomas Hartley, had an especially moving encounter while he and some shipmates were touring a Russian school near Archangel in 1943. A kindergarten teacher asked them to stand before her class and introduced them to the children:

These are your uncles from America. They have left their homes and their families and crossed the ocean to bring food for you and guns for your daddies in the Red Army. That is who they are.

Seventy-four years later, those memories are still vivid for many survivors of the Great Patriotic War in North Russia. In the summer of 2017 an elderly tour guide leading a group of Westerners through the Museum of the Northern Fleet in Murmansk stopped in front of a map of the route of convoy PQ-17. Speaking through an interpreter, she recounted the story of the Ghost Ships, describing how a British commander named Gradwell—she pronounced the name “Grade-well”—had led white-painted ships into the Matochkin Shar on Novaya Zemlya and ultimately to Archangel.

She said food from the Arctic convoys helped keep her and her family alive. “I still remember the the paper bags with words in English typed on them: ‘Dry onions, carrots, potatoes.’” She remembered especially the “rhombus-shaped tin cans”—the cans of Spam processed meat—and the clever way the Americans attached little metal keys to the cans for opening them.

She said she and her family ate food from the Arctic convoys until 1955. Holding her hand over her heart, she looked into her listeners’ faces and said softly, “Spasiba”—“Thank you.”