Stories about the siege of Leningrad (stories about the war for children). Cat-eaters: terrible stories of besieged Leningrad - photo
The war began suddenly, on the second day after graduation. Everything changed at once, it became alarming, people were only interested in front-line reports. Mobilization has begun. The government provided the opportunity to evacuate, but not everyone took advantage of this: people hoped that the enemy would not reach the city. (Aksenova Tamara Romanovna).
Before leaving for the front, I met only with Uncle Seryozha. He was at the recruiting station on Borodino Street, already wearing a soldier's uniform. The officer released him, and we went out to Zagorodny Prospekt and had the opportunity to talk. In parting, he said: “Lenka, don’t go to the army. There is now such a mess and such confusion among the commanders that it is hard to imagine. To fight in such an environment is suicide.” Those were his last words. (Vasiliev Leonid Georgievich).
The war began, my father was taken to the front - he was the captain of the medical service. He served on the Northern Front, where the Finns stood. ... One day he came home on a lorry with soldiers and said to his mother: "Pack your things and go to Luga." That is, in fact, towards the Germans - we only later found out that many were taken almost on orders to the Novgorod, Pskov regions. For some reason they were taken to the front, and not from the front. Whose order was this?.. I don't know. (Gogin Adrian Alexandrovich).
The boys were given combat lessons, and no later than November they went to the front as volunteers. They were surrounded in a swamp, and only ten people returned home from our and parallel classes. On November 7, 1941, I heard Stalin's speech from Moscow on the radio, in which he said that nothing terrible had happened. (Ansheles Irina Iosifovna).
Hunger
The blockade of Leningrad lasted 900 days: from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, two and a half years.... September 8, 1941, the Germans bombed the large food warehouses of Badaev, and the three million population of the city was doomed to starvation. (Bukuev Vladimir Ivanovich).
The most difficult winter for Leningraders of 1941-42 has come when frosts reached 40 degrees, and there was neither firewood nor coal. Everything was eaten: both leather belts and soles, there was not a single cat or dog left in the city, not to mention pigeons and crows. There was no electricity, hungry, exhausted people went to the Neva for water, falling and dying along the way. The corpses had already ceased to be removed, they were simply covered with snow. People were dying at home with whole families, whole apartments. All food for a person working in production was 250 grams of bread, baked in half with wood and other impurities and therefore heavy and so small. All the rest, including children, received 125 grams of such bread. (Aleshin Evgeny Vasilievich).
Cake from cotton seeds, intended for burning in ship furnaces, was also added to the bread.. Four thousand tons of this cake, containing toxic substances, was found in the port and added to food supplies. This mixture has saved thousands of human lives. (Alekhina Antonina Pavlovna).
... We bought glue in tiles, one tile of wood glue cost ten rubles, then a tolerable monthly salary was around 200 rubles. Jelly was boiled from glue, pepper, bay leaf remained in the house, and all this was added to the glue. (Brilliantova Olga Nikolaevna).
They also made Thursday salt: it had to be thrown into the ashes in a bag so that it turned black, and then it acquired the smell of a hard-boiled egg. They poured it on bread, and it seemed as if you were eating bread with an egg. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
...Once Uncle Volodya came to our house and brought a pack of yeast, each kilogram. Grandmother was surprised why we need them, because there is no flour, there is nothing to bake. He explained that yeast can be eaten - scrolled in a meat grinder, dried and then boiled like pasta. I still remember what a pleasure it was to eat not just slightly cloudy warm water, but with yeast. The smell of this stew was like mushroom soup! Then it turned out that yeast is very good for restoring strength. (Grigoriev Vladislav Grigorievich).
It is simply impossible to convey these feelings: In the morning you open your eyes, and immediately your stomach starts to whine. Then this sensation grows, and there is an aching, incessant pain, as if some animal were tearing with its claws. Many people went crazy because of this pain. Constantly tried to eat at least something, to fill the stomach. If there is boiling water, it’s already good, you drink it and you feel how it fills everything inside. (Gushchina Zinaida Petrovna).
Not far away, on the Obvodny Canal, there was a flea market, and my mother sent me there to change a pack of Belomor for bread. I remember how a woman went there and asked for a loaf of bread for a diamond necklace. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
Mother, a practical village woman, unlike our "wise leader", knew that there would be a war, and dried a bag of crackers and a bag of potatoes in advance. Drying crackers was dangerous. The neighbor kept threatening to denounce the mother “where to go” because she was sowing panic. Nevertheless, the crackers were dried, and thanks to this we survived. (Ivanov Yuri Ilyich).
During the blockade, I went to kindergarten on Kamenny Island. My mother also worked there. ...Once one of the guys told a friend his cherished dream - a barrel of soup. Mom heard and took him to the kitchen, asking the cook to come up with something. The cook burst into tears and said to her mother: “Don't bring anyone else here ... there is no food left at all. There is only water in the pot." Many children in our kindergarten died of starvation - out of 35 of us only 11 remained. (Alexandrova Margarita Borisovna).
Children's institutions employees received a special order:"Distract children from talking and talking about food." But no matter how hard they tried, it didn't work. Six- and seven-year-old children, as soon as they woke up, began to list what their mother cooked for them and how delicious it was. As a result, all the cones fell on our cook. Then she came up with her own recipe and called it "vitamins". The cook lived near a forest park and on her way to work tore pine needles and boiled them. In the evenings, I went to the hospital, which was located in the building of the Forestry Engineering Academy, and helped lay out sugar and butter in portions for the wounded soldiers. For this, they gave me two tablespoons of sand, which we added to the “vitamins”. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
It was a special kindergarten: during the entire blockade, not a single child died there, nothing was stolen from a single one! ... In children's institutions they gave not 125 grams, but 150, the manager divided this bread into three parts, and the children received it three times a day. The stove, an old tiled stove, still pre-revolutionary, was always hot, several children came up to it and warmed their backs and arms. One group would warm up, then another, and then they were all put under a blanket. ...The kindergarten was located in a large communal apartment, and grandmothers and mothers were sitting on the stairs, who did not have the strength to climb up to the child. Some of them died on the stairs. (Batenina (Larina) Oktyabrina Konstantinovna).
I remember one man who walked in the dining room and licked the plates after everyone. I looked at him and thought he was going to die soon. I don’t know, maybe he lost the cards, maybe he just didn’t have enough, but he has already reached this point. (Batenina (Larina) Oktyabrina Konstantinovna).
On the fifth day they bring bread. Forever before my eyes, the scene was preserved when an old overgrown man, swaying from dystrophy, with distraught eyes, grabbed a piece of someone else's bread from the scales and stuffed it into his mouth. He did not chew it, but swallowed it. The crowd silently beat him, but he ate someone else's bread, the bread of someone who was also dying somewhere. They beat him, trying to take away the bread, blood flowed from his nose in two streams, and with shaking hands he ate the bread along with blood and tears. (Gryaznova Valentina Vasilievna).
I looked like a little skinny old man with deeply sunken eyes and cheekbones, with hanging skin on the face, hands and even on the fingers. Bones were clearly visible through the skin. (Bukuev Vladimir Ivanovich).
Once our flatmate offered my mother meatballs, but her mother escorted her out and slammed the door. I was in indescribable horror - how could one refuse cutlets with such hunger. But my mother explained to me that they are made from human meat, because there is nowhere else to get minced meat in such a hungry time. (Boldyreva Alexandra Vasilievna).
Once for lunch we were served soup, and for the second cutlet with a side dish. Suddenly, the girl Nina sitting next to me fainted. She was brought to her senses, and she again lost consciousness. When we asked her what was going on, she replied that she could not calmly eat cutlets from her brother's meat. It turned out that in Leningrad during the blockade, her mother hacked her son to death and made cutlets. At the same time, the mother threatened Nina that if she did not eat cutlets, then the same fate would befall her. (Derezova Valentina Andreevna).
...My mother saved me. She managed (for unknown means, probably for her wedding ring, which I later did not see from her) to get a bottle of Tokay wine. Mom gave me in the morning, before leaving for work, and in the evening, returning from work, a tablespoon of wine. (Vasiliev Leonid Georgievich).
Feelings have become dull. I walk across the bridge, a tall man walks slowly, staggering ahead. One step, another, and he falls. I stupidly walk past him, dead - I don't care. I enter my entrance, but I can’t climb the stairs. Then I take one foot with both hands and put it on the step, and then the other foot on the next step ... Aunt opens the door and quietly asks: “Did you get there?” I answer: "Got it." (Aksenova Tamara Romanovna).
I remember February 1942, when bread was added to the cards for the first time. At 7 o'clock in the morning the shop was opened and an increase in bread was announced. People were crying so much that it seemed to me that the columns were trembling. 71 years have passed since then, and I cannot enter the premises of this store. (Grishina Lidia Alekseevna).
...Spring. You can eat tree leaves. We turn them through a meat grinder and make cakes. Our bellies are swollen. (Aksenova Tamara Romanovna).
Throughout the blockade, I, tormented, asked myself the question, why didn’t I finish the cake that someone bought me. I still remember this cake, it was round and stepped. (Ivanov Yuri Ilyich).
Death
Already at the end of October, one could occasionally meet a city dweller on the street, who swayed due to weakness from malnutrition, as if he accidentally "went over". And a month later it was possible, if you were not lucky, to meet the deceased, who was dragged to the cemetery on a sledge (like barge haulers) by people close to him. At the end of November, it was no longer unusual to see a dead man lying in the street. December: winter was coming into its own, and now the frequency of possible meetings with the dead depended on the length of the path you had traveled and on whether you were walking along the avenue or moving along the "smelly" side street. The corpses were taken out of residential buildings, thrown from the windows of the lower floors, piled in non-residential premises. (Vasiliev Valentin Leonidovich).
...People were dying right on the go. Drove a sled - and fell. There was a dullness, the presence of death was felt nearby. I woke up at night and felt - a living mother or not. (Bulina Irina Georgievna).
... Once they announced that there would be a distribution of cereals, and my mother with this woman, whose name was Lida, went to receive. They were descending the stairs, and suddenly a terrible cry was heard throughout the entire entrance: they stumbled over the body of the eldest son of this woman - Zhenya. He was lying on the stairs, clutching a string bag of gruel—he was only three floors short of his apartment. His mother Lida screamed, who had just buried two girls, and even earlier - her eldest son, who died at the front. She, working at a bakery, could not bring even a piece of bread to her dying children. (Bulina Irina Georgievna).
On the night of January 1, 1942, my father died. For two days we slept with the deceased father in the same bed. On the same day, the owners of the apartment also died. Three corpses were in the room. Leaving for work, my mother warned the janitor that there were two children left in the apartment and the bodies of the dead had to be removed. ... I remember that my brother and I were not afraid to be in the same room with corpses, but we were very afraid of rats. They gnawed the hands, feet and noses of the dead. We refused to be alone in the room. Mom, crying, explained to us that she was in the barracks, and she had to go to work. (Grigorieva Zinaida Fedorovna).
My sister came out to me, put me on a bench and said that my mother had recently died.... I was informed that they take all the corpses to the Moscow region to a brick factory and burn them there. ... The wooden fence was almost completely dismantled for firewood, so it was possible to get quite close to the stoves. In the courtyard of the plant there was a line of cars with corpses, they were waiting for unloading. The workers laid the dead on the conveyor, turned on the machines, and the corpses fell into the oven. It seemed that they were moving their arms and legs and thus resisting burning. I stood dumbfounded for a few minutes and went home. This was my farewell to my mother. (Grigorieva Zinaida Fedorovna).
My own brother Lenya was the first to die of starvation - he was 3 years old. His mother took him to the cemetery on a sled and buried him in the snow. A week later I went to the cemetery, but only his remains were lying there - all the soft places were cut out. He was eaten. In January 1942, Aunt Shura, my mother's sister, died of starvation. She was 32 years old. Two days later, her daughter Nyura died of starvation, she was 12 years old, a day later Aunt Shura's son Vanya died, he was 9 years old. The corpses lay in the room - there was no strength to carry them out. They didn't decompose. The room had walls frozen through, frozen water in mugs, and not a grain of bread. Only corpses and me and my mother. Then the janitor carried out the bodies - the dead from our house were stacked in the courtyard of the house. There was a whole mountain of them. ... Mom died of starvation in March 1942. She was 29 years old. Completely ill with dystrophy, I was taken to an orphanage. So I was left alone. (Gryaznova Valentina Vasilievna).
Weekdays
Transport in the city did not work. There was no lighting on the streets, water, electricity and steam heating were not supplied to the houses, and the sewage system did not work. (Bukuev Vladimir Ivanovich).
In the room ... there is not a single glass, the windows are clogged with plywood. Water is dripping in the basement of the house, there is a queue for water. People share front-line news. It is amazing: not a single complaint, discontent, cowardice - only hope. Faith and hope that they will break through the blockade, that we will wait, that we will live. (Aksenova Tamara Romanovna).
We went to the toilet then in a bucket, and then people did not have the strength to go down to the street to carry him out. They poured it straight from the door up the stairs, then it all froze, and the stairs were covered with frozen sewage. There was no special smell, there were terrible frosts, down to -30 degrees and even lower. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
At first, I continued to study. Because of the constant bombing, the lessons were often interrupted. But it was harder to return from school - the Nazis knew that the lessons ended after 13 hours, and it was at this time that they began to intensively shell the city. (Zenzerova Valentina Vladimirovna).
Mom got the cards, put them on the table and turned away for a second. When she turned back, the cards were gone. It meant almost certain death. The mother screamed in a terrible voice. There were active people in the dining room, who immediately closed all the doors and began a search. The first suspect was a friend of my mother, who at that moment was nearby. She didn't confess. Then the women began to undress her. And there were cards. (Ivanov Yuri Ilyich).
...Mom ended up in the hospital. As a result, my brother and I were alone in the apartment. One day my father came and took us to the orphanage, which was located near the Frunze school. I remember how dad walked, holding on to the walls of houses, and led two half-dead children, hoping that maybe strangers would save them. (Veniaminova-Grigorievskaya Nina Andreevna).
By that time, my hands and feet were frostbitten.... When the nanny began to undress me and took off my hat, she was horrified - I had more lice than hair. There was not only hunger, but also cold, so I did not take off my hat for about six months. In those days, the water was in the form of ice, so I could not wash my hair. I was shaved bald. ... It was impossible to look at children, as soon as they opened their mouths, as soon as blood flowed, teeth fell out. All these children were as dystrophic as I am. They had bedsores, their bones were bleeding. It was terrible. (Alekseeva A.V.).
And then spring. The legs of the dead stick out of the melted snowdrifts, the city is frozen in sewage. We went out to clean up. Scrap is difficult to lift, difficult to break ice. But we cleaned the yards and streets, and in the spring the city shone with cleanliness. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
In April, the streets were already clean and, finally, the first tram started running. I can't tell you what a holiday it was for everyone! People came out to the sound of rails, rejoiced, applauded. (Ansheles Irina Iosifovna).
The city has changed. Where there were lawns, vegetable gardens were laid out: on the Field of Mars, wherever there was only a piece of land. They made beds and planted everything that was possible - both potatoes and carrots, once they planted cucumbers, and some small watermelons grew. Then the baths were opened. We somehow came to wash: this is how they show Auschwitz, this is the same spectacle that was in this bathhouse. We bathed and enjoyed hot water. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
I remember how my mother and I walked through our yard in the spring. It was sunny, warm, my soul was cheerful, we survived the winter, we are alive. And I wanted to run. I released my mother's hand and tried to run. But he could only take a few slow steps. I was very surprised by this. In my childish head, as I remember now, it flashed: “After all, I remember that before the war I ran! Why can't I do it now?!" (Ivanov Yuri Ilyich).
Job
The situation in Leningrad was such that in order to survive, it was necessary to get up and go to work. It was the most important thing - to find courage, strength and will in yourself. (Ivanova Zinaida Petrovna).
The words “I don’t want, I won’t” didn’t exist then. There was only the word "must". (Kaleri Antonina Petrovna).
Without hesitation, we went to dig trenches. Half-starved children, from 5th to 10th grades. Nobody forced anyone. It was sacred - for the Motherland. (Zalesskaya Valentina Mikhailovna).
Children's brigades were created in the houses to help adults put out lighters. We were wearing canvas mittens and protective helmets on our heads, as incendiary bombs pierced the roofs, fell into the attic and spun like a top, emitting a sea of sparks from themselves, causing a fire and illuminating everything around with fire. We - children from 10 years old and older - took bombs in mittens and threw them out the windows of the attic onto the paving stones of the yard (at that time there were no paved yards), where they rotted. (Blyumina Galina Evgenievna)
...Despite the bombing and shelling, they began to restore production. It was cold in the shops, there was ice on the floor, it was impossible to touch the machines, but the Komsomol members undertook to work at least 20 hours overtime. ...Mostly 15-year-old girls worked here, but they fulfilled the norm by 150-180%. (Dotsenko Anna Mikhailovna).
The projectile weighed 23-24 kilograms. And I’m small, thin, it happened that in order to raise a projectile, first I laid it on my stomach, then I stood on tiptoe, put it on a milling machine, then I wrapped it, worked it out, then again on my stomach and back. The norm per shift was 240 shells. The whole jacket on my stomach was torn. At first, of course, it was very hard, and then I threw them like potatoes and made a thousand shells per shift. The shift was 12 hours. (Zhironkina Kira Vladimirovna).
The "tractor" Palace of Kirov was very memorable for the rest of my life. There was a burn hospital. We went there in 1942 and 1943, gave water, fed the wounded, read letters and newspapers to them. The pilot Sasha was there, his girlfriend stopped writing to him. To support him, we wrote letters to him every week, ostensibly from her. And he always waited for this letter - it was like medicine for him. (Bogdanov Yury Ivanovich).
Another of the few exceptions is my teacher Ekaterina Stepanovna Ryzhova. In the most difficult time, she gathered us, her students, bypassing the dark deaf entrances of houses herself, and, the only one of the teachers, studied with us in an empty, frozen school (No. 26, Petrogradsky district). Until the end, I’m not afraid to say - until the last breath, she fulfilled what she considered her duty, in which she saw her calling (she died in mid-December 41) ... (Kalinin Georgy (Yuri) Mikhailovich).
We were on duty on the roofs, went around the apartments and reported where there were people, where there were no more. All Leningraders lived in hope! They helped each other in whatever way they could. On the hand of each was written the address of relatives and friends. Once I also fell, going to work (or from work) only after receiving a card. All documents and the card, of course, disappeared. As soon as I came to my senses, I heard someone nearby shouting: “Break through the blockade!” People are up! Who cried, who laughed. (Ilyina Valentina Alekseevna).
Joy
Olga Berggolts read her poems to the residents of the city on the radio in the intervals between bombing and shelling with a cold voice, inspiring vigor, hatred for the invaders and faith in victory. ... The famous Leningrad symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich, broadcast from the concert hall of the State Philharmonic Society, produced an "explosion" in the minds of not only allies, but also enemies. The air defense troops carefully prepared for this concert: not a single enemy aircraft managed to break through to the city that day. There was also one theater - the Theater of Musical Comedy. The performances were held in Alexandrinka, as Leningraders lovingly called, and even now the Pushkin Theater is called. I remember I was at the play "A long time ago" ("Hussar ballad"). In the cold hall, hungry actors sang and danced, as in peacetime. Isn't that a feat? (Aleshin Evgeny Vasilievich).
... We did not play children's games, we did not indulge and did not act as hooligans, as boys should. The slogan "Everything for victory!" he even lived at school: he got an "A" - he killed Hans (an officer), received a "Four" - he killed Fritz (a soldier), you get a "two" - that means you shoot at your own. (Aleshin Evgeny Vasilievich).
... The boys' favorite pastimes were collecting and collecting fragments from exploding shells and bombs. Those who had the largest fragments were very envied by the rest of the guys - children always remain children, even in war. (Bukuev Vladimir Ivanovich).
Before I burned the books, I read them. When there was no electricity at the plant and production stopped, I sat and read. They asked me: “Well, why are you sitting, spoiling your eyes with this oil lamp?” I answered: “I am afraid that I will die and never finish reading Stendhal - “Red and Black”, “Parma Monastery”. When I took the book The Last of the Mohicans, I said: “That's interesting - the last of the Leningraders burns The Last of the Mohicans. I didn’t really feel sorry for Western literature, and I burned the Germans first. (Batenina (Larina) Oktyabrina Konstantinovna).
On December 31, 1941, our mother brought home a small tree from somewhere. We installed it in our room and dressed it up with home-made Christmas decorations that we had preserved from the pre-war years. Small candles were fixed on the branches of the Christmas tree in special Christmas tree candlesticks, similar to clothespins - they still had no idea about electric Christmas tree garlands. We also hung a few small pieces of bread and sugar on the Christmas tree. Exactly at midnight, mother lit candles on the tree, and we met the New Year by drinking hot boiling water and eating our portions of bread and sugar that hung on the tree. The light of hot candles dispersed the twilight from a weakly burning oil lamp - the usual lighting device of the blockade time. (Bukuev Vladimir Ivanovich).
Evacuation
On June 26, we were evacuated along Ladoga in the hold of a ship. Three steamships with small children sank, blown up by mines. But we were lucky. (Gridyushko (Sakharova) Edil Nikolaevna).
They drove us through Ladoga by car.... Tracer bullets illuminated the road, lighting lanterns hung on parachutes, and when the shells fell into the lake, huge fountains rose. I looked at it all and kept saying: "Just like Samson." (Bulina Irina Georgievna).
The next day, the children of besieged Leningrad were loaded into cars and sent on their way. Along the way, the number of fellow travelers decreased markedly. At each station, small corpses were carried out. The isolation car was full of malnourished children. (Veniaminova-Grigorievskaya Nina Andreevna).
One family was sitting next to us: dad, mom and two children - a boy of eight years old and a baby. A small child opens and closes his mouth, they began to look for a doctor, they found some woman, and the child had already died. And this woman said that if they had found him even a little water, he would have survived. He survived the entire blockade, and died on the Road of Life. Mom and I were sitting at different ends of the car, I wrote her a note that they needed to help them somehow. And my mother cut off a piece of our ration for several days and passed it along the car to our end. If I were a director, I would make a film: people passed this piece palm up, and everyone said: “I pass this bread” to the next one. For several minutes the bread roamed around the car, and imagine - hungry dying people, and no one bit off, did not hide a crumb! I was happy that we could at least help the older brother of this dead baby. (Batenina (Larina) Oktyabrina Konstantinovna).
... When they gave me a roll, it seemed to me that I would swallow it all now. I stuffed it into my mouth, and my sister, with tears in her eyes, tells me: “You can’t eat everything at once.” Indeed, after such a hunger, it was impossible to eat everything at once, it was necessary to break off a little bit, chew and then swallow. I remember how my sister pulled this bun out of my mouth. And I could not understand why she was crying and doing this. (Ivanova Zinaida Petrovna).
As soon as the train approached the platform, women with buckets of soup, plates and spoons began to enter the cars, pour soup for us and distribute bread. They were crying as they looked at us. Then they gave everyone a can of condensed milk and made a hole in them so that we could immediately suck the condensed milk. For us it was something incredible! (Alekseeva A. V.)
At the railway station Zhikharevo we were fed a hot lunch. It consisted of barley soup, barley porridge with lamb and bread. In addition, each was given one piece of smoked sausage and one bar of chocolate. People ate it all at once and immediately died, never understanding the reason for the terrible torment. ...Mom diluted one spoon of the issued porridge with boiling water and fed us every hour. (Blyumina Galina Evgenievna).
... Local residents, knowing that we were Leningraders, treated us very cordially, they tried to treat them to something, the local state farm also helped a lot - they supplied them with fresh milk. One day we received gifts from America. The rumor quickly spread throughout the village, and everyone came to see what the “gentlemen” had sacrificed. When the bales were opened, our surprise knew no bounds. For orphans, they sent high-heeled shoes, worn dresses with crinolines, hats with feathers, and dishes with fascist signs. We immediately broke the dishes, and dressed up the children and released them to the people, so that everyone would know what they were giving us. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
End of blockade
The blockade was broken in January 1943 at Lake Ladoga in the Shlisselburg area, which made it possible to somewhat improve the supply of food, and Leningrad was completely liberated on January 27, 1944. A solemn salute was held in the city on this occasion. ...According to the calculations of the Germans, all the inhabitants and soldiers who defended Leningrad were to die of hunger and cold. But Leningrad survived, defeating the Germans and driving them back from its walls. (Bukuev Vladimir Ivanovich).
Leningrad was a front, and every street was a front line. We were mercilessly bombed and shelled almost continuously. We died not only from bombs and shells, but also from terrible hunger. ... 800 thousand of us are buried only at the Piskarevsky cemetery. And only about 900 thousand of the city of three million remained by the end of the blockade. (Aleshin Evgeny Vasilievich).
There was no electricity - they wrote by the light of an oil lamp, the ink froze - they wrote with a pencil. For what? So that children and grandchildren know: in extreme situations, the transcendental forces of the human soul are revealed, forces that we are not even aware of in a relatively prosperous time. To understand us. (Evstigneeva Nadezhda Viktorovna).
Now they are embarrassed to write and talk about many things: for example, the truth about the number of children and adults lying at the bottom of Lake Ladoga, about mass lice and dystrophic diarrhea. But for us, employees of children's institutions, this will forever remain in our memory. (Aizin Margarita Vladimirovna).
When January 27 comes, or September 8, or May 9, I always think - is it really me? I am alive? Those were terrible days. ...I still don't leave food on my plate. My children, especially the eldest, always collect food from the plate with bread, and they say: “Excuse me, but my mother hates to leave food on the plates.” Yes, bread is sacred, every crumb. (Viner Valentina Sharifovna).
We stayed alive to remember them, mourn, worship them, lay flowers at the Piskarevsky cemetery. And to tell the truth about the blockade, about how it undermined our health, about how the blockade distorted our destinies. None of us can even today, after 60 years, calmly talk about the blockade, we are all crying. (Gryaznova Valentina Vasilievna).
Memories of the Siege of Leningrad
It is hard to imagine anything more terrible than the blockade of the city for nine hundred days. Bombing, hunger, cold and madness. We publish excerpts from the memories of people who survived the blockade, did not go crazy and survived to this day. It cannot be forgotten and it cannot be forgiven either.
Tatyana Borisovna Fabritseva
“We were visiting dad's friends when they announced an air raid alert. Prior to that, they were announced often, but nothing terrible happened, anti-aircraft guns crackled and announced a retreat. And then we heard not only anti-aircraft guns, but also the muffled blows of explosions. When, after lights out, we went out into the street, we saw a terrible crimson sky and clouds of smoke spreading across it. Later we learned that it was the Badaev warehouses that were burning, the very ones where the main food supply for the city was stored. The war has entered a different stage for us. In the evening there was again an alarm, a terrible whistle was heard, and after it a thud. The floor was shaking, and it seemed that we were not at home, but on board an ocean ship. Soon we had to go down to the shelter. What we saw in the morning shocked me for the rest of my life: on the neighboring street, all the houses through one were as if cut with a knife, in the remains of the apartments stoves were visible, the remains of paintings on the walls, in one of the rooms a crib hung over the abyss. There were no people anywhere."Lilya Ivanovna Vershinina
I remember: it was very cold in the room, there was a potbelly stove, we slept in clothes. Mom's milk was gone, and Verochka had nothing to feed her. She died of starvation in August 1942 (she was only 1 year and 3 months old). For us it was the first hard test. I remember: my mother was lying on the bed, her legs were swollen, and Vera's body was lying on a stool, my mother put nickels in her eyes. I held her legs, and my sister stood at the head of the bed and said: “Vera, Vera - open your eyes and take off your nickels, and so she kept repeating“ Vera, Vera open your eyes. Finally, my father came and brought the coffin where we put it, and he explained to us that he talked with the priest at the Volkovo cemetery, asking where such a small child could be buried. To which the priest replied: “such children are angels”, they should be buried near the church, choose any free place. Father in his arms, across the entire Ligovsky Prospekt (there was no transport), carried the coffin with Verochka and buried her near the church at the Volkovo cemetery.
Valentina Stepanovna Vlasyuga
“In winter, cold added to hunger. They settled in the kitchen, where there was a stove, they stoked everything that burned. Water was obtained from the snow. But you won’t be full of water alone, and hunger mercilessly mowed down people. I remember how Uncle Ilya, my father's brother, brought some horsemeat. He worked as a fire chief. It can be seen that the horse that served with the firefighters died. But mom refused a piece of dog meat. The neighbors put their shepherd dog under the knife, they offered it to my mother, but she said that she could not eat someone she knew well during her lifetime. The neighbors knew their dog even better than their mother, but they ate everything to the last bone, and they also praised it, they say, it reminds of lamb.Igor Vladimirovich Alexandrov
“The most difficult and dangerous work was the preparation of firewood. Fuel was transported to Leningrad along Lake Ladoga only to factories. First, they burned books, furniture, and whatever was found. But during the bombing, houses collapsed and burned, where it was possible to extract unburned wood with difficulty. Opposite our house was a huge house occupying a quarter, from the street. Drive to the next street. Bombs hit this house, it burned like a torch for a whole week. Fire engines extinguished it, but to no avail, it burned down, but there was a lot of unburned wood left. It was difficult to take her, because. people were exhausted and dangerous due to the fact that ceilings and stairs could collapse at any moment. My mother and I went there every day for firewood. She beat off the unburned ones with an ax: railings, frames, window sills, threw them down, and I dragged what I could across the street home. In the burnt-out house on the stairs, landings sat, lay, black, burnt, icy from the water from the fire hoses corpses. From the beginning I was afraid to walk past them, but then I got used to it, they didn’t move. So we prepared firewood for the winter.
Oleg Petrovich Smirnov
Once the Finn owner cooked his cat. We, the children, of course, did not know that the cat was cooking. I remember what a fragrant smell spread around the room when it was cooked. They gave me a piece of meat, I remembered the taste of it for the rest of my life. Mom and aunt did not eat meat, and then I understood their behavior in my own way. They saved this valuable product for us, for children.Georgy Petrovich Pinaev
When mail arrived at the pioneer camp where I ended up, it was a great event. Those who received the letters rejoiced, and the rest dejectedly dispersed to the corners. And then one day, I don’t remember who, runs up to me and shouts: “Dance!” This means that I received a long-awaited letter. I open it and freeze. It is not my mother who writes, but my aunt: “... You are already a big boy, and you should know. Mother and grandmother are no more. They died of starvation in Leningrad…”. Everything went cold inside. I don’t see anyone and I don’t hear anything, only tears flow like a river from wide-open eyes. Terrible words are repeated in my head: “no more, no more, no more ...”. I feel like I won't be here either. The teacher of the Leningrad kindergarten No. 58 I.K. Lirz with children in a bomb shelter during an air raid. Photo - Sergey Strunnikov. Central archive of socio-political history of Moscow.
Evgeny Yakovlevich Golovchiner
We gathered on Sunday as a family at the table. While my mother pours the first one, I take the bread crusts, roll the balls and throw them into my mouth - at full "automatic". And suddenly I look - my father turned green. He jumped up and yelled: “I have been crumbs of bread all the war ... How dare you?” ... I did not understand anything. Then my mother explained that her father had told her about me: “You are standing on the bed naked in a shirt. And the first thing you say: “Daddy, give me a piece of bread.” He never smoked or drank after that. I changed everything I could for bread and crackers, brought home to you. This scene was enough for me for the rest of my life. I still absolutely cannot eat anything without bread - even pasta and dumplings.Lev Arkadyevich Stoma
“Once my mother went to buy milk for me and my sister, and a shell hit this store. This happened in November 1941. There were a lot of victims there. Our mother also died. Grandmother recognized her only by her hand, on which was the ring she knew. So we stayed with Tatochka only with a disabled grandfather and grandmother. Dad came from the front, and mom was buried at the Okhta cemetery. At the end of November, we gathered to commemorate the deceased, and grandfather told my dad: “Well, Arkady, choose - Leo or Tatochka. Tatochka is eleven months old, Leo is six years old. Which of them will live? This is how the question was posed. And Tatochka was sent to an orphanage, where she died a month later. It was January 1942, the most difficult month of the year. It was very bad - terrible frosts, no light, no water ... "Lyudmila Alekseevna Goryacheva (Kurasheva)
Of our entire densely populated communal apartment, three of us remained in the blockade - me, my mother and a neighbor, the most educated, most intelligent Varvara Ivanovna. When the most difficult times came, Varvara Ivanovna's mind was clouded by hunger. Every evening she guarded my mother from work in the common kitchen. “Zinochka,” she asked her, “probably, the baby’s meat is delicious, and the bones are sweet?” Mom, leaving for work, locked the door with all the locks. She said: “Lucy! Don't you dare open it to Varvara Ivanovna! Whatever she promises you!” After my mother's leaving the door, a quiet, insinuating voice of a neighbor was heard: “Lyusenka, open it for me, please!”. Even if I eventually succumbed to persuasion and decided to open it, I still could not do it. I just didn't have the strength to get out of bed. Varvara Ivanovna died of exhaustion.
Hilja Lukkonen
“The long-awaited train has finally arrived. It was a freight train, where we were pushed in crowds, there was almost no air. There was no water, no latrines, and we relieved ourselves anywhere - in the vestibules, opening the wagon door to the outside. Many suffering from indigestion, without waiting for the train to stop, when it was possible to relieve themselves under the cars, did it right there, for themselves. The stench in the car was unbearable. Yes, even someone took it into their heads to die, when the nearest train stop was supposed to be only in half a day. He was wrapped in someone's baby blanket and carried to the cattle car, which was at the very back of the train. This is how we drove all the way to Krasnoyarsk. At all major stations, my mother ran out to the station market to exchange some of the things for food.Leonid Petrovich Romankov
To be frank, I do not remember the blockade as a terrible time. We were too small, the war went on too long, the blockade lasted too long. Almost THREE years! We did not know another life, did not remember it. It seemed that this is a normal life - a siren, cold, bombings, rats, darkness in the evenings ... However, I think with horror how mom and dad must have felt, seeing how their children slowly move towards starvation. I can only envy their courage, their fortitude.Valentina Alexandrovna Pilipenko
My little brother was very weak from hunger, he could not walk, and he began to have death cramps. Mom miraculously managed to bring him to the Filatov hospital and he was saved from starvation. How did we survive? It's a difficult question. My older brother believed that we were supported by products purchased for the summer. Also, fortunately, there was a bottle of old fish oil in my grandmother's cupboard, which they gave us in a tiny teaspoon. In addition, my mother, in turn, took us to the dining room. It was forbidden to take away food from the dining room, but it was not forbidden to bring children to feed. I remember well the first time I came to this restaurant. The room was very cold and there was fog in which the figures of people moved. Mom put me in her arms, but I don’t remember what I ate. For us, at that time, it didn’t matter what we were fed, as long as there was something edible.
Maria Nikolaevna Romanova (Isakova)
The winter of 1942 was very cold. Sometimes she collected snow and thawed it, but she went to the Neva for water. Go far, slippery, I’ll carry it to the house, but I can’t climb the stairs, it’s all covered in ice, so I’m falling ... and again there is no water, I enter the apartment with an empty bucket, It happened more than once. A neighbor, looking at me, said to her mother-in-law: “this one will soon die too, it will be possible to profit.”Rosa Polakainen
One afternoon, my dad and I, perched on things dumped on a dirty platform, were waiting for mom. She was to return with a hot lunch. She was gone for quite some time. We were already beginning to worry, when suddenly she appeared, holding a frozen horse's head in a holey mitten. “Yes, when I was walking there, behind the warehouses, I see something sticking out from under the ice, it looks like it looks like an ear. With an aluminum spoon that she carried with soup, she picked it. Ba! Yes, it's a whole horse's head! I remember we boiled this poor horse of debt in a pot. When they began to divide it, there were more eaters than expected. I gave my portion to my dad - he needs it more. Because lately he has been completely weakened, and damned shortness of breath has tortured him. And I can't eat it. The mutilated corpses of the horses that we met along the way stuck too deep in our memory.
Alexander Ivanovich Ruotsi
“Before the war, our family lived in the village of Virki, Vsevolozhsk District. The mother died a few years ago, unable to bear the death of her father, who had previously been exiled to the Far East without the right to correspond, and was shot just before the war. Mother to us, three boys, was our older sister. When the war began, we found ourselves a few kilometers from the front lines and were literally deaf from the endless skirmishes. In March 1942, representatives of the local rural authorities came to us with weapons and ordered, like the Finns - "traitors and fascists", in half an hour to collect everything that we have time to do and get out. “If you don’t leave in a good way, we’ll throw everyone out on the street!”Eino Ivanovich Rinne
Grandfather Matvey in July took us in a cart to the edge of the swamp, where we dug a dugout, in which we lived until the first frost. There, in a dugout, the mother gave birth to her younger brother Genka. I remember one incident that was told with pride in our family for a long time after the war. Not far from our dugout was a military headquarters. And then one day my sister, returning with a bucket of water to the dugout, met a lost German who asked in broken Russian where the Russian soldiers were. The sister was not taken aback, and showed a completely different direction. She herself reported this to the very first Soviet officer whom she met near the dugout. The German was immediately caught, and the sister was promised to be rewarded. But the frosts were getting stronger, and we were forced to move to Leningrad. “So this promised reward lost its heroine,” a common joke in our family.Elsa Kotelnikova (Hirvonen)
Only later, after the war, mothers admitted that she could not look into our sunken eyes, and having muffled her conscience, she once caught the same hungry cat in the basement. And so that no one could see, she immediately skinned him. I remember that for many years after the war, my mother brought home unfortunate stray cats, wounded dogs, various tailless birds, which we cured and fed. Then they got used to it so much that it was a pity to part with them, although it happened that you couldn’t get through the house - you couldn’t get through, and sometimes there wasn’t enough food for all the wards. But we kids were happy. Each of us had our own pets, whom we loved and nursed. And for my mother, now I understand, it was a cleansing, gratitude to our smaller brothers for saving many human lives from starvation in those terrible years.
Irina Khvalovskaya
And then, on the embankment, back in 1942, I first performed in front of a real audience and with a real “full house”! I sang my favorite “Katyusha”, which I sang constantly, so that it would not be scary when a sled with a corpse wrapped in a blanket was once again taken out of our entrance, or when sirens howled and somewhere, very close, shells exploded. I sang quietly, timidly, embarrassed by the looks of boys and girls fixed on me. When I finished singing, everyone applauded, and it seemed to me that it lasted forever! After that, another small piece of sugar and a round biscuit appeared in my cherished pocket. On the way home, Vaska and I ate our biscuits - they instantly melted in our mouths. I really wanted to eat, and they were so delicious, from real white flour, not at all like those black, mixed with chaff, miserable slices of bread that my mother received on cards and divided into small portions - for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which it was completely pointless, because my portions did not live up to the evening. Mom only sighed heavily and gave me her tiny “dinner”, ridiculously justifying herself: “Oh! On the way, I ate such a bite that nothing will fit into me!Igor Vadimovich Dolivo-Dobrovolsky
Once a week I went with the children's sled to fetch fuel from the archives of the Physics Department of the University where my mother worked. The physics department building on the 10th line near Sredny Prospekt on Vasilevsky Island was already half destroyed by bombs and shelves with books, various documents and papers ugly hung over the yard, collapsing under the weight of snow, and mixed with the ruins. And if there were no destroyed buildings nearby, where one could find some boards, pieces of logs, broken furniture, the archive of the University saved us from freezing. What we can, we have already burned. Astronomical atlases on semi-cardboard and thick paper burned especially well and gave warmth. It was a pity for me to tear up color images of countries, maps of celestial constellations, and I often looked at them for a long time, carried away by my thoughts to other planets and worlds, but the cold returned me to our uncomfortable blockade world, and continents and continents folded in the stove with a crackle, giving life-giving warmth.
Ksenia Gertselevna Makeeva
What about pea porridge? What a nightmare! All my life I hate the smell of peas, but I should have thanked God that my father had the opportunity to feed me this porridge from a soldier's bowler hat. And I roared ... Once dad, in his hearts, poured this porridge for me by the scruff of the neck, and put me in a corner with my knees bare on peas. In 1977, before my father died, I reminded him of this, so he was surprised: “Do you remember? But it was only once.”Natalya Ivanovna Dymchenko
Once I crossed the Neva along the Kirovsky Bridge and went out to the square on the Field of Mars, lined with thick bushes. There were anti-aircraft guns in the center of the square. There was another raid and German bombers were buzzing overhead. Suddenly, a shot rang out from the bushes I was passing by, and a red rocket soared into the black sky, indicating the location of our anti-aircraft guns. I ran a few steps and a policeman stepped out of the bushes from where the shot was fired right at me. I rushed to him, grabbed the overcoat on my chest and shouted that he must catch the saboteur who was shooting from this bush. He looked at me and with the words “It seemed to you” threw me away with such force that I rolled on the asphalt, and when I got up, there was no one around. I realized that this was the saboteur dressed in a police uniform.
Boris Arkadyevich Vulfovich
Our fire brigade was divided into three shifts, and the duty lasted 7-8 hours. However, the most unpleasant thing for us, perhaps, was that the stocks of sand, prepared in advance, ran out pretty soon. We agreed that the shift, before leaving duty, would drag sand from the yard and fill the boxes with it. It was very difficult to lift a stretcher with sand to the attic, they took a little, and this took a couple more hours from the shift on duty. We treated our work more like a game; it happened that during the entire shift not a single bomb flew towards us, and when this happened (more and more often over time), we threw sand at it with several shovels, preventing it from flaring up. But one day I went up to the attic in the midst of a raid. At the top, I saw four guys bending over the fifth. He was lying on his back in the attic dust, the upper part of his head was cut off like a razor, and his eyes were wide open ... This was the first death that I saw eye to eye.Tatyana Grigorievna Martynenko
After watching all these horrors, my mother decided to drown herself with me. She tied me to her and entered the water. It was at the end of September, the water was already very cold, I began to scream a lot, my mother felt sorry for me, and she got out of the water and decided: come what may. I went to the bomb shelter, where there were a lot of people. Old men, women, children hid there from fascist bombs and shells. Our housemates, Alexander Ivanovich Zakatov and his wife, his aunt Lina, also hid in the bomb shelter. They found dry clothes for my mother, and wrapped me in everything dry, too, otherwise we could get very sick, but it was impossible to get sick. Full texts of memoirs and diaries on the website http://leningradpobeda.ru/ .Do you want to receive one interesting unread article per day?
Blockade of Leningrad, children of the blockade... Everyone heard these words. One of the most majestic and at the same time tragic pages in the archives of the Great Patriotic War. These events went down in world history as the longest and most terrible siege of the city in terms of its consequences. The events that took place in this city from 09/08/1941 to 01/27/1944 showed the whole world the great spirit of the people, capable of a feat in conditions of hunger, disease, cold and devastation. The city survived, but the price paid for this victory was very high.
Blockade. Start
Plan "Barbarossa" - that was the name of the enemy strategy, according to which the capture of the Soviet Union was carried out. One of the points of the plan was the defeat and complete capture of Leningrad in a short time. Hitler dreamed of taking the city no later than the autumn of 1941. The plans of the aggressor were not destined to come true. The city was captured, cut off from the world, but not taken!
The official beginning of the blockade was recorded on September 8, 1941. It was on this autumn day that German troops captured Shlisselburg and finally blocked the land connection of Leningrad with the entire territory of the country.
In fact, everything happened a little earlier. The Germans systematically isolated the city. So, since July 2, German planes regularly bombed railways, preventing the supply of products in this way. On August 27, communication with the city through the railways was already completely interrupted. After 3 days, there was a break in the connection of the city with hydroelectric power plants. And from September 1, all commercial stores stopped working.
In the beginning, almost no one believed that the situation was serious. Yet people who felt something was wrong began to prepare for the worst. The shops were empty very quickly. Right from the first days, food cards were introduced in the city, schools and kindergartens were closed.
Children of the besieged city
The blockade of Leningrad was imprinted with grief and horror on the fate of many people. Children of the blockade are a special category of residents of this city, who were deprived of their childhood by circumstances, forced to grow up much earlier and fight for survival at the level of adults and experienced people.
At the time of the closing of the blockade ring, in addition to adults, 400 thousand children of different ages remained in the city. It was the concern for children that gave the Leningraders strength: they were taken care of, protected, tried to hide from the bombings, comprehensively cared for. Everyone understood that the only way to save the children was to save the city.
Adults could not protect children from hunger, cold, disease and exhaustion, but everything possible was done for them.
Cold
Life in besieged Leningrad was hard, unbearable. The shelling was not the worst thing that the hostages of the city had to endure. When all the power plants were turned off and the city was enveloped in darkness, the most difficult period began. A snowy, frosty winter has come.
The city was covered with snow, frosts of 40 degrees led to the fact that the walls of unheated apartments began to be covered with frost. Leningraders were forced to install stoves in their apartments, in which everything was gradually burned for warmth: furniture, books, household items.
A new trouble came when the sewers froze. Now water could be taken only in 2 places: from the Fontanka and the Neva.
Hunger
Sad statistics says that the biggest enemy of the city's inhabitants was hunger.
The winter of 1941 was a test of survival. To regulate the provision of people with bread, food cards were introduced. The size of the ration was constantly decreasing, in November it reached its minimum.
The norms in besieged Leningrad were as follows: those who worked were supposed to have 250 gr. of bread, the military, firefighters and members of the extermination squads received 300 grams each, and children and those who were on someone else's support - 125 grams each.
There were no other products in the city. 125 grams of besieged bread did not bear much resemblance to our ordinary, well-known flour product. This piece, which could only be obtained after many hours of standing in line in the cold, consisted of cellulose, cake, wallpaper paste, mixed with flour.
There were days when people could not get this coveted piece. During the bombing, the factories were not working.
People tried to survive as best they could. They tried to fill their empty stomachs with what they could swallow. Everything was used: first-aid kits were emptied (they drank castor oil, they ate Vaseline), they tore off the wallpaper to get the remains of the paste and cook at least some soup, they cut into pieces and boiled leather shoes, they prepared jelly from wood glue.
Naturally, food was the best gift for the children of that time. They were constantly thinking about delicious things. The kind of food that was disgusting in normal times was now the ultimate dream.
Holiday for children
Despite the terrible, deadly living conditions, Leningraders with great zeal and zeal tried to ensure that the children who were held hostage by the cold and hungry city lived a full life. And if there was nowhere to get food and warmth, then it was possible to make a holiday.
So, during the terrible winter, when there was a blockade of Leningrad, the children of the blockade celebrated. By the decision of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, they were organized and carried out for the small inhabitants of the city.
All theaters of the city took an active part in this. Festive programs were drawn up, which included meetings with commanders and fighters, an artistic greeting, a game program and dances by the Christmas tree, and most importantly, lunch.
There was everything at these holidays, except for the games and the dance part. All due to the fact that weakened children simply did not have the strength for such entertainment. The children were not having fun at all - they were waiting for food.
The festive dinner consisted of a small piece of bread for yeast soup, jelly and a cutlet made from cereals. The children, who knew hunger, ate slowly, carefully collecting every crumb, because they knew the price of the besieged bread.
Hard times
It was much harder for children during this period than for an adult, fully conscious population. How to explain why during the bombing you need to sit in a dark basement and why there is no food anywhere, to children? About the blockade of Leningrad in the people's memory there are many terrible stories about abandoned babies, lonely guys who tried to survive. After all, it often happened that when leaving for the coveted ration, the relatives of the child simply died on the way, did not return home.
The number of orphanages in the city grew inexorably. In one year, their number grew to 98, and in fact at the end of 1941 there were only 17. About 40 thousand orphans tried to keep and keep in these shelters.
Every little resident of the besieged city has his own terrible truth. The diaries of the Leningrad schoolgirl Tanya Savicheva became famous all over the world.
The symbol of the suffering of Leningraders
Tanya Savicheva - now this name symbolizes the horror and hopelessness with which the inhabitants of the city were forced to fight. What then survived Leningrad! told the world this tragic story through her diary entries.
This girl was the youngest child in the family of Maria and Nikolai Savichev. At the time of the blockade, which began in September, she was supposed to be a 4th grade student. When the family learned about the beginning of the war, it was decided not to leave the city anywhere, but to stay in order to provide all possible assistance to the army.
The girl's mother sewed clothes for the fighters. Brother Lek, who had poor eyesight, was not taken into the army, he worked at the Admiralty Plant. Tanya's sisters, Zhenya and Nina, were active participants in the fight against the enemy. So, Nina, while she had strength, went to work, where, together with other volunteers, she dug trenches to strengthen the defense of the city. Zhenya, hiding from her mother and grandmother, secretly donated blood for the wounded soldiers.
Tanya, when schools in the occupied city started working again in early November, went to study. At that time, only 103 schools were open, but they also stopped working with the advent of severe frosts.
Tanya, being a little girl, also did not sit idle. Together with other guys, she helped dig trenches, put out "lighters".
Soon grief knocked on the family's door. Nina did not return home first. The girl did not come after the most severe shelling. When it became clear that they would never see Nina again, mother gave Tanya her sister's notebook. It is in it that the girl will subsequently make her notes.
War. Blockade. Leningrad - a besieged city in which entire families were dying out. So it was with the Savichev family.
Zhenya died next, right at the factory. The girl worked, working hard for 2 shifts in a row. She also donated blood. This is where the power ends.
The grandmother could not bear such grief, the woman was buried at the Piskarevsky cemetery.
And every time grief knocked on the door of the Savichevs' house, Tanya opened her notebook to note the next death of her relatives and friends. Leka soon died, followed by the girl's two uncles, then her mother died.
“The Savichevs are all dead. Only Tanya remained” - these terrible lines of Tanya's diary convey all the horror that the inhabitants of the besieged city had to endure. Tanya is dead. But the girl was mistaken, she did not know that a living person remained among the Savichevs. It was her sister Nina, who was rescued during the shelling and taken to the rear.
It is Nina who, returning to her native walls in 1945, will find her sister's diary and tell the world this terrible story. The history of a whole people who staunchly fought for their hometown.
Children - heroes of besieged Leningrad
All the inhabitants of the city, who survived and defeated death, should rightfully be called heroes.
Most of the children behaved especially heroically. Little citizens of a big country did not sit and wait for liberation to come; they fought for their native Leningrad.
Almost no event in the city took place without the participation of children. Children, along with adults, took part in the destruction of incendiary bombs, put out fires, cleared the roads, and sorted out the rubble after the bombing.
The blockade of Leningrad continued. The children of the blockade were forced to replace adults near the factory machines who died, died or went to the front. Especially for children who worked in factories, special wooden stands were invented and made so that they could, like adults, work on the manufacture of parts for machine guns, artillery shells and machine guns.
In spring and autumn, children actively worked in gardens and state farm fields. During the raids, the teacher's signal served to the fact that the children, taking off their hats, fell face down into the ground. Overcoming the heat, mud, rain and the first frosts, the young heroes of besieged Leningrad harvested a record harvest.
Children often visited hospitals: they cleaned there, entertained the wounded, and helped feed the seriously ill.
Despite the fact that the Germans tried with all their might to destroy Leningrad, the city lived on. Lived and endured. After the blockade was lifted, 15,000 children received the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad."
The road that brings back to life
The only way that gave at least some opportunity to maintain contact with the country. In the summer they were barges, in the winter they were cars moving on ice. Until the beginning of the winter of 1941, tugboats with barges reached the city, but the Military Council of the front understood that Ladoga would freeze and then all roads would be blocked. New searches and intensified preparation of other means of communication began.
Thus, a path was prepared along the ice of Ladoga, which eventually began to be called the "Road of Life". In the history of the blockade, the date was preserved when the first horse-drawn convoy paved the way on the ice, it was November 21, 1941.
Following this, 60 vehicles drove off, the purpose of which was to deliver flour to the city. The city began to receive bread, the cost of which was human life, because progress along this path was associated with great risk. Often cars fell through the ice, drowned, taking people and food to the bottom of the lake. Working as a driver of such a car was deadly. In some places the ice was so fragile that even a car loaded with a couple of bags of cereals or flour could easily be under the ice. Each voyage made this way was heroic. The Germans really wanted to block it, the bombing of Ladoga was constant, but the courage and heroism of the inhabitants of the city did not allow this to happen.
The "Road of Life" really fulfilled its function. Food supplies began to replenish in Leningrad, and children and their mothers were taken out of the city by cars. This path was not always safe. Already after the war, when examining the bottom of Lake Ladoga, toys of Leningrad children were found who drowned during such transportation. In addition to dangerous thawed patches on the icy road, evacuation vehicles were often subjected to enemy shelling and flooding.
About 20 thousand people worked on this road. And only thanks to their courage, fortitude and desire to survive, the city got what it needed most of all - a chance to survive.
Surviving Hero City
The summer of 1942 was very busy. The Nazis stepped up the fighting on the fronts of Leningrad. The bombardment and shelling of the city increased noticeably.
New artillery batteries appeared around the city. The enemies had maps of the city, and important areas were shelled daily.
The blockade of Leningrad continued. People turned their city into a fortress. So, on the territory of the city, due to 110 large defense units, trenches and various passages, it became possible to carry out a covert regrouping of the military. Such actions served to significantly reduce the number of wounded and killed.
On January 12, the armies of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts launched an offensive. After 2 days, the distance between these two armies was less than 2 kilometers. The Germans stubbornly resisted, but on January 18 the troops of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts united.
This day was marked by another important event: the blockade was lifted due to the liberation of Shlisselburg, as well as the complete clearing of the southern coast of Lake Ladoga from the enemy.
A corridor of about 10 kilometers turned out along the coast, and it was he who restored the land connection with the country.
When the blockade was lifted, there were about 800 thousand people in the city.
The significant date of January 27, 1944 went down in history as the day when the blockade of the city was completely lifted.
On this joyful day, Moscow conceded to Leningrad the right to fire a salute in honor of the lifting of the blockade in commemoration of the fact that the city survived. The order for the troops that won was signed not by Stalin, but by Govorov. Such an honor was not awarded to any commander-in-chief of the fronts during the entire period of the Great Patriotic War.
The blockade lasted 900 days. This is the most bloody, cruel and inhuman blockade in the history of mankind. Its historical significance is enormous. Holding back the huge forces of the German troops throughout this time, the inhabitants of Leningrad provided invaluable assistance in conducting military operations in other sectors of the front.
More than 350 thousand soldiers participating in the defense of Leningrad received their orders and medals. 226 people were awarded the honorary title of Hero of the Soviet Union. 1.5 million people were awarded the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad".
The city itself received the honorary title of Hero City for heroism and steadfastness.
Tue, 28/01/2014 - 16:23
The farther from the date of the incident, the less the person is aware of the event. The modern generation is unlikely to ever truly appreciate the incredible scale of all the horrors and tragedies that occurred during the siege of Leningrad. More terrible than the fascist attacks was only a comprehensive famine that killed people with a terrible death. On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade, we invite you to see what horrors the inhabitants of Leningrad chewed at that terrible time.
From the blog of Stanislav Sadalsky
In front of me was a boy, maybe nine years old. He was covered with some kind of handkerchief, then he was covered with a wadded blanket, the boy stood frozen. Cold. Some of the people left, some were replaced by others, but the boy did not leave. I ask this boy: “Why don’t you go warm up?” And he: “It’s cold at home anyway.” I say: “What do you live alone?” - “No, with your mother.” - “So, mom can't go?” - “No, she can't. She is dead." I say: “How dead?!” - “Mother died, it’s a pity for her. Now I figured it out. Now I only put her to bed for the day, and put her to the stove at night. She's still dead. And it’s cold from her.”
Blockade book Ales Adamovich, Daniil Granin
Blockade book by Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin. I bought it once in the best St. Petersburg second-hand bookstore on Liteiny. The book is not desktop, but always in sight. A modest gray cover with black letters keeps under itself a living, terrible, great document that has collected the memories of eyewitnesses who survived the siege of Leningrad, and the authors themselves, who became participants in those events. It's hard to read it, but I would like everyone to do it ...
From an interview with Danil Granin:
"- During the blockade, marauders were shot on the spot, but also, I know, without trial or investigation, cannibals were allowed to be consumed. Is it possible to condemn these unfortunates, distraught from hunger, who have lost their human appearance, whom the tongue does not dare to call people, and how frequent were the cases when, for lack of other food, they ate their own kind?
- Hunger, I'll tell you, deprives the restraining barriers: morality disappears, moral prohibitions disappear. Hunger is an incredible feeling that does not let go for a moment, but, to the surprise of me and Adamovich, while working on this book, we realized: Leningrad has not dehumanized, and this is a miracle! Yes, there was cannibalism...
- ...ate children?
- There were worse things.
- Hmm, what could be worse? Well, for example?
- I don't even want to talk... (Pause). Imagine that one of your own children was fed to another, and there was something that we never wrote about. Nobody forbade anything, but... We couldn't...
- Was there some amazing case of survival in the blockade that shook you to the core?
- Yes, the mother fed the children with her blood, cutting her veins.
“... In each apartment, the dead lay. And we were not afraid of anything. Will you go earlier? After all, it’s unpleasant when the dead ... So our family died out, that’s how they lay. And when they put it in the barn!” (M.Ya. Babich)
“Dystrophics have no fear. At the Academy of Arts, on the descent to the Neva, they dumped corpses. I calmly climbed over this mountain of corpses ... It would seem that the weaker the person, the more scared he is, but no, the fear disappeared. What would happen to me if it were in peacetime - I would die of horror. And now, after all: there is no light on the stairs - I'm afraid. As soon as people ate, fear appeared ”(Nina Ilyinichna Laksha).
Pavel Filippovich Gubchevsky, researcher at the Hermitage:
What kind of rooms did they have?
- Empty frames! It was Orbeli's wise order: leave all the frames in place. Thanks to this, the Hermitage restored its exposition eighteen days after the return of the paintings from the evacuation! And during the war they hung like that, empty eye sockets-frames, through which I spent several excursions.
- By empty frames?
- On empty frames.
The Unknown Walker is an example of blockade mass altruism.
He was naked in extreme days, in extreme circumstances, but his nature is all the more authentic.
How many of them were - unknown passers-by! They disappeared, returning life to a person; dragged away from the deadly edge, they disappeared without a trace, even their appearance did not have time to be imprinted in the dimmed consciousness. It seemed that to them, unknown passers-by, they had no obligations, no kindred feelings, they did not expect either fame or pay. Compassion? But all around was death, and they walked past the corpses indifferently, marveling at their callousness.
Most say to themselves: the death of the closest, dearest people did not reach the heart, some kind of protective system in the body worked, nothing was perceived, there was no strength to respond to grief.
A besieged apartment cannot be depicted in any museum, in any layout or panorama, just as frost, longing, hunger cannot be depicted ...
The blockade survivors themselves, remembering, note broken windows, furniture sawn into firewood - the most sharp, unusual. But at that time, only children and visitors who came from the front were really struck by the view of the apartment. As it was, for example, with Vladimir Yakovlevich Alexandrov:
“- You knock for a long, long time - nothing is heard. And you already have the complete impression that everyone died there. Then some shuffling begins, the door opens. In an apartment where the temperature is equal to the temperature of the environment, a creature wrapped up in god knows what appears. You hand him a bag of some crackers, biscuits or something else. And what struck? Lack of emotional outburst.
- And even if the products?
- Even groceries. After all, many starving people already had an atrophy of appetite.
Hospital Doctor:
- I remember they brought the twins ... So the parents sent them a small package: three cookies and three sweets. Sonechka and Serezhenka - that was the name of these children. The boy gave himself and her a cookie, then the cookies were divided in half.
There are crumbs left, he gives the crumbs to his sister. And the sister throws him the following phrase: “Seryozhenka, it’s hard for men to endure the war, you will eat these crumbs.” They were three years old.
- Three years?!
- They barely spoke, yes, three years, such crumbs! Moreover, the girl was then taken away, but the boy remained. I don’t know if they survived or not…”
During the blockade, the amplitude of human passions increased enormously - from the most painful falls to the highest manifestations of consciousness, love, and devotion.
“... Among the children with whom I left was the boy of our employee - Igor, a charming boy, handsome. His mother took care of him very tenderly, with terrible love. Even in the first evacuation, she said: “Maria Vasilievna, you also give your children goat's milk. I take goat milk to Igor. And my children were even placed in another barracks, and I tried not to give them anything, not a single gram in excess of what was supposed to be. And then this Igor lost his cards. And now, in the month of April, I somehow walk past the Eliseevsky store (here dystrophics have already begun to crawl out into the sun) and I see a boy sitting, a terrible, edematous skeleton. "Igor? What happened to you?" - I say. “Maria Vasilievna, my mother kicked me out. My mother told me that she would not give me another piece of bread.” - "How so? It can't be!" He was in critical condition. We barely climbed with him to my fifth floor, I barely dragged him. By this time, my children were already going to kindergarten and were still holding on. He was so terrible, so pathetic! And all the time he said: “I don’t blame my mother. She is doing the right thing. It's my fault, I lost my card." - “I, I say, I will arrange a school” (which was supposed to open). And my son whispers: "Mom, give him what I brought from kindergarten."
I fed him and went with him to Chekhov Street. We enter. The room is terribly dirty. This dystrophic, disheveled woman lies. Seeing her son, she immediately shouted: “Igor, I won’t give you a single piece of bread. Get out!” The room is stench, dirt, darkness. I say: “What are you doing?! After all, there are only some three or four days left - he will go to school, get better. - "Nothing! Here you are standing on your feet, but I am not standing. I won't give him anything! I’m lying down, I’m hungry…” What a transformation from a tender mother into such a beast! But Igor did not leave. He stayed with her, and then I found out that he died.
A few years later I met her. She was blooming, already healthy. She saw me, rushed to me, shouted: “What have I done!” I told her: “Well, now what to talk about it!” “No, I can't take it anymore. All thoughts are about him. After a while, she committed suicide."
The fate of the animals of besieged Leningrad is also part of the tragedy of the city. human tragedy. Otherwise, you can't explain why not one or two, but almost every tenth blockade survivor remembers, talks about the death of an elephant in a zoo by a bomb.
Many, many people remember besieged Leningrad through this state: it is especially uncomfortable, terrifying for a person and he is closer to death, disappearance because cats, dogs, even birds have disappeared! ..
“Down below us, in the apartment of the late president, four women are stubbornly fighting for their lives - his three daughters and granddaughter,” notes G.A. Knyazev. - Still alive and their cat, which they pulled out to rescue in every alarm.
The other day a friend, a student, came to see them. I saw a cat and begged to give it to him. He stuck straight: "Give it back, give it back." Barely got rid of him. And his eyes lit up. The poor women were even frightened. Now they are worried that he will sneak in and steal their cat.
O loving woman's heart! Destiny deprived the student Nehorosheva of natural motherhood, and she rushes about like with a child, with a cat, Loseva rushes with her dog. Here are two specimens of these rocks in my radius. All the rest have long since been eaten!”
Residents of besieged Leningrad with their pets
A.P. Grishkevich wrote on March 13 in his diary:
“The following incident occurred in one of the orphanages in the Kuibyshev region. On March 12, all the staff gathered in the boys' room to watch a fight between two children. As it turned out later, it was started by them on a "principled boyish question." And before that there were "fights", but only verbal and because of the bread.
The head of the house, comrade Vasilyeva says: “This is the most encouraging fact in the last six months. At first the children lay, then they began to argue, then they got out of bed, and now - an unprecedented thing - they are fighting. Previously, I would have been fired from work for such a case, but now we, the educators, stood looking at the fight and rejoiced. It means that our little nation has come to life.”
In the surgical department of the City Children's Hospital named after Dr. Rauchfus, New Year 1941/42
The fact that in 1937 she left her native Yaroslavl region, Alexandra Ivanovna Nadezhdina never regretted. What happened is called fate. That she survived is a miracle. And 70 years later, she remembers the feeling of hunger, from which it was so terrible to die. Then it seemed that it was better to get hit by a bomb than to slowly fade away in your house and go crazy. But most often she recalls one single moment - how on an August day she saw off her husband to the front. The most important thing that Leningrad gave her is love.
Someday we'll have a home
... In a MODIST blue scarf, she ran after Tolya from the assembly point to the Finland Station itself. It was raining from the sky, a fragile 22-year-old girl could barely keep up with the echelon of soldiers who were sent to the front that day, to the Leningrad region. Alexandra had known Tolya for four years, they studied at the same faculty of the Agricultural Institute. They lived together for a year, got married, dreamed that someday they would have a big house, and there were many, many children in it. That they will live happily ever after. Tolya wrote from the front for only a few months, and then suddenly a “triangle” with someone else’s handwriting came. A friend of her husband said: Tolya did not return from the assignment. Life for Alexandra has lost all meaning.
Burn everything that is on fire
And the blockade every day exhausted the people of Leningrad more and more. In September 1941, the bread ration was reduced four times. Alexandra's father and 15-year-old sister Tamara worked at a military factory. 12 hours a day. Hungry and tired, they came home. Alexandra Ivanovna herself asked to go to the front, but she was refused in the military registration and enlistment office, offering a job as a nurse in a hospital. She cared for each wounded person as if it were her husband. She believed then that her husband would return. The faceless "missing" gave her hope for many decades after the end of the war.
At that time, the winter of 1941 came to Leningrad. In the first half of January, the non-working population of the city did not receive any products on the cards at all. What they gave out could not even be called bread - a small sticky piece of 125 grams. The worst thing then was to lose bread cards. Without them, certain death.
Frosts that winter reached -30 ° C, - recalls Alexandra Ivanovna, - there was no light, water, fuel. At first, our family took boards from the cemetery and heated them. When they could not walk, they burned everything that burned. I then often lay and thought that it was better to be hit by a bomb than to die of hunger. Every day we saw people walking down the streets and dropping dead. Exhausted people carried the corpses of their loved ones on sleds. I will never forget how I put on a burgundy coat, felt boots, a scarf on my head and went to get a bread ration. At 21, she looked like a 50-year-old woman.
One letter
In those years, people survived thanks to their imagination. You won't live long on 125 grams. Therefore, Alexandra Ivanovna's father made “potbelly stoves” from iron scraps and exchanged them for food. Once he brought a horse's head from the gypsies. They didn’t boil it, but burned wool in the oven, cut off the meat, warmed it a little on the fire and ate it raw. They also brought land on sleds from the Badaevsky food warehouses. It was poured into a bucket, filled with water, boiled, defended and drank instead of tea. Alexandra Nadezhdina will not forget the taste of that tea even now. As well as the "blockade jelly" from drying oil and a piece of wood glue.
In February 1942, they managed to evacuate.
We were driving across Lake Ladoga in a truck, - says Alexandra Ivanovna, - cold, wind, so the Germans were constantly bombing the Road of Life. The truck that went ahead, along with the people, went under the ice. During the war years, it often happened that bombs exploded near me, and much more ... It was fate that remained alive. When we got to Yaroslavl, my father died. We drove on.
Alexandra Nadezhdina lived in both Kirov and Kazan in the post-war years. She worked as a secretary in court, a senior agronomist. And then she wrote a letter to her husband's parents in the Krutinsky district of the Omsk region and moved in with them. Even if they had never met before. All her life she was engaged in active labor activity, she was awarded the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner. Family life, however, did not work out, and she never married again. I went to Leningrad in the 1960s: I looked at the fountains and remembered how everything here had once been destroyed. She does not complain about fate and loves Leningrad with all her heart. Because there she met her love, which remained in this city. In Leningrad land. A love that lasts a lifetime and from which the only letter left now ...
