Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth

Author:Alexander Werth [Werth, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2014-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Young Leningrad girl on an anti-aircraft observation post. In the background is the Admiralty.

Cabbage plots in the Champ de Mars.

From another essay on how the schoolchildren dug trenches while the Germans were approaching Leningrad: ‘In August we worked for twenty-five days digging trenches. We were machine-gunned and some of us were killed, but we carried on, though we weren’t used to this work. And the Germans were stopped by the trenches we had dug.’

And here is how, according to the same Valentina Solovyova, work continued at school during the worst time of the blockade: ‘ … It became very difficult to work. The central heating was, of course, out of action. It became terribly cold. One’s hands and feet were quite numb, and the ink froze in the ink-pots. We hid our faces inside our coat collars, and wrapped scarves around our hands, but it was still terribly cold. Antonina Ivanovna, our chemistry teacher, came into the classroom and teased us for sitting there all huddled up. Feeling a little ashamed, we put down our collars and took off our gloves. She was always cheerful, and always managed to cheer us up. She made jokes which made us laugh. … Only thanks to this moral support we received from all the teachers and the headmaster did we stick it at all. Otherwise we should have stopped coming to school. … But we had to give up using the shelter as a classroom. And the reason for this was quite simple. There was no more light in the shelter; so we had to move back to the classroom. Not that this was very bright either. For there was only one small pane of glass in the window. And so we continued to sit around the little burzhuika stove – and so we continued till the spring. Sometimes the stove smoked terribly. And altogether, it was dangerous to sit too close to it. Often there was a smell of burning valenki in the class, and gloves went on fire, and even the clothes sometimes began to smoulder.’

Another girl of sixteen, Luba Tereschenkova, described the same strange scene as follows: ‘At the end of January and in February, frost also joined the blockade and lent Hitler a hand. It was never less than thirty degrees of frost! Our classes continued on the ‘Round the Stove’ principle. But there were no reserved seats, and if you wanted a seat near the stove or under the stove pipe, you had to come early. The place facing the stove door was reserved for the teacher. You sat down, and were suddenly seized by a wonderful feeling of well-being; the warmth penetrated through your skin, right into your bones; it made you all weak and languid and paralysed your thoughts; you just wanted to think of nothing, only to slumber and drink in the warmth. It was agony to stand up and go to the blackboard. One wanted to put off the evil moment. It was so

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