In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak

Author:Geert Mak
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, Non-Fiction, Travel, History, Society
ISBN: 9780307280572
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

Leningrad

ON DISPLAY IN ST PETERSBURG'S MUNICIPAL MUSEUM IS THE THIN, light-blue diary of eleven-year-old Tanya Savitsyeva. The only entries for 1941–2 are these:

Zyenya died, 28 December, 12.00 a.m. Grandmother died, 25 January, 1942, 3 p.m. Leka died, 17 March, 5 p.m. Uncle Vasya died, 13 April, 2 p.m. Uncle Aleksei, 10 May. Mama died, 13 May, 7.30 a.m. The Savitsyeva family is dead.

Following page:‘They are all dead.’ Following page:‘I am here alone.’ Tanya was evacuated and died in an orphanage, in 1944.

‘I've lived in St Petersburg all my life,’ says Anna Smirnova. ‘I was twenty-one when it all started, on Sunday, 22 June, 1941. It was a beautiful day, and I remember how angry I was when I was awakened early that morning by the droning of whole swarms of planes. I wanted to sleep! After breakfast, we heard on the radio at noon that the war had begun. We weren't even surprised. We had talked about it a great deal, the Finnish war was already over, blackout drills had already been held. All the older people had been through a war before, and we all knew that we would experience one or more wars in the course of our lives. But this time my parents were terrified. My father said: ‘This is horrible. This is disgusting. This is death.’ He sensed it beforehand.

‘There was a huge run on the shops that same afternoon. Whenever anything happens, of course, Russians expect a food shortage, so everyone started stockpiling matches, salt, sugar, flour, things like that. And six weeks later there really was nothing left in the shops. The war was approaching fast. In July the air-raid sirens went off all the time, we didn't have any bomb shelters, so we crawled under a couple of stone archways in the garden. We had to help dig antitank trenches outside the city, thousands of people were out there with shovels. Meanwhile, at the theatre school, classes went on as usual.

‘On 8 September, the Germans reached the ring around our city, and the siege began. There were two million of us packed in there, closed off from everything else. You had to be in line at the bakery at 5 a.m., by 11.00 there was no bread left. It wasn't easy to walk around when you were starving, you had to drag yourself along by force of will. If possible, you kept all your clothes on in bed. You lay there like a big ball of rags, you forgot you even had a body. But, well, we were young Soviets, we had absolutely no doubt that we would be victorious. On the radio they said the whole war might last a year or two, but that the siege of Leningrad would be over soon. They kept saying that. And we believed it, what else could we do? No one told the truth. There were no newspapers, no letters arrived, all we had was the radio.

‘Excuse me if I become a little emotional, I don't talk about this very often.

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