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 a burnt house on the stairs landings sat, lay, black burnt, icy from water from 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. Teacher of the Leningrad kindergarten№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 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 with old fish oil, which we were given by 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 mom, 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
A 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 to 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?
Today, when the blockade is gradually passing from living memory into history, any evidence of it is very important. In each of them - a piece of what the townspeople had to endure in those tragic days.
There are many diaries and memoirs dedicated to the Leningrad blockade. In the first place, of course, is the Blockade Book by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich. And how many blockade memoirs have been published in recent years! And, nevertheless, the appearance of each new evidence adds new touches to the portrait of the blockade time, to the appearance of the inhabitants of the besieged, but unconquered city.
In some ways, these diaries are similar to each other, but at the same time, each of them is unique in its own way. They have a blockade without feats and heroism, without ideology. Blockade through the eyes of the most ordinary people who could only rely on themselves and their families. People who sometimes only miraculously escaped death from starvation, shelling and bombing.
Each of the diaries has its own recipe for survival in emergency conditions. But they have one thing in common - this is a special mood imprinted in them: the misfortune that befell Leningrad and Leningraders is what we are destined to experience by fate. And reading today's memoirs of the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, one can add the thought appearing in them almost seventy years after the war: “We survived what happened to our native city, not trying to escape from the blows of fate. We lived with him. Only there was no special heroism in this - there was life, and we had to accept it for what it is.
Children's blockade diaries stand apart. They have their own view of the blockade. They sometimes do not have a sense of fear - there is curiosity.
Here is a paradox: many Leningraders who had not previously recorded the events of their lives, it was during the blockade that they began to keep diaries. Probably areas of psychology: why does a person during emergency, stressful situations, being practically on the verge of life and death, try not only to fix what he sees around, but also to express his feelings, emotions, experiences? Perhaps it is at such times that people understand their involvement in historical events and begin to feel their own significance much more than in ordinary times. Or maybe they are simply not sure that they will remain alive, and therefore they try to leave a memory of themselves at least with diary entries?
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Only the closest relatives knew about these diaries. The times were such that for an "extra" word, or simply for a statement that could be interpreted as "decadent" or "defeatist", you could get in big trouble. And often it was the diaries found by the NKVD officers during the search that later served as the most important material evidence of the author's "anti-Soviet activities". And some of them even cost their authors their lives.
For example, this is exactly what happened to the Leningrad teacher Alexei Vinokurov, who was shot in March 1943. On March 16, 1943, the military tribunal of the troops of the NKVD of the Leningrad District and the protection of the rear of the Leningrad Front found him guilty of the fact that “... from July 1941 to February 1943, systematically carried out counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet agitation among school workers, students and those around him, in which slandered the Soviet system and reality, the Red Army and the press...” 1.
The diary of the Red Army soldier Semyon Putyakov2, who was arrested at the end of January 1942 under the infamous article 58-10, also served as evidence of his "anti-Soviet activities", for which he was shot by a military tribunal. And the diary entries of the Red Army soldier Stepan Kuznetsov3 directly appeared in the indictment drawn up against him: “while still a soldier of the Soviet Army, in his diary during 1941-1942 he made a number of entries of anti-Soviet content, in which he erected vile slanderous fabrications on the Soviet people, on the laws of the Soviet Government , on the Soviet army and its soldiers. Sentence SI. Kuznetsov had 10 years of forced labor camps...
Documents testify that the Stalinist repressive conveyor continued to work in full measure in besieged Leningrad. That is why the diaries, like the apple of an eye, were protected from prying eyes. That is why there are so few blockade diaries in the museums and archives of the city today: their descendants still keep them at home, although today, of course, there is no danger of making them public. Moreover, the publication of blockade diaries is necessary today, because they are now the most important historical sources and evidence of the era ...
No wonder they say that a Petersburger, a Leningrader is not a designation of a place of residence, this is a special feeling, this is a state of mind. More than a hundred years ago, this special historical and cultural type of Russian man took shape, a special character and a special style of human behavior. Wherever during the war years the fate of these people brought them, everywhere they aroused respect. True, at that time they were already called not Petersburgers, but Leningraders. The name "Leningrader" was one of the most revered, most respected titles in the expanses of the Soviet country. And people of the older generation remember well that it was enough to call yourself a Leningrader to feel the sympathy and support of those around you in any corner of the former Soviet Union.
The memory of the blockade is part of a special, Leningrad-Petersburg self-consciousness. Mentality, as they say today. It combines everything - the pain of suffering, and the pride that, in spite of everything, survived. And having survived, they saved the city, and after the war they rebuilt it.
The city was a sufferer, a martyr. But its inhabitants did not lose their sense of human dignity. And thanks in large part to that, they survived.
“In a besieged, wounded city, deprived of normal conditions of existence, people did not lose their natural human feelings,” recalled Lev Moiseevich Nikolsky, a literary employee of Leningradskaya Pravda during the years of the blockade. “And therefore, artists performed in darkened theaters, music sounded in concert halls, long queues lined up for books ... "" Leningrad is a city that was distinguished by its high culture, intellect, intelligentsia, its spiritual life, - Daniil Granin noted, talking about the creation of the Blockade Book. - We wanted to show how people who were brought up by this culture, were able to remain human beings, survive...
People during the blockade treated each other much more cordially, humanely and mercifully than then, at the end of the seventies. ...Now there is a process of dehumanization of people, hardening, heartlessness; the blockade in this sense is an example of how, in those terrible conditions, people did not allow themselves selfishness ... "
Let us allow ourselves one more quotation. "At every step - meanness and nobility, self-sacrifice and extreme selfishness, theft and honesty." These words of Dmitry Likhachev referred to the conditions in which Leningraders were on the Road of Life - more precisely, the "road of death", as it was then called in the city. But these same words can also be applied to life in a besieged city, in which, indeed, the most gloomy meanness and the highest nobility and self-sacrifice coexisted.
“... In the famine, people showed themselves, got naked, freed themselves from all sorts of tinsel: some turned out to be wonderful, unparalleled heroes, others - villains, scoundrels, murderers, cannibals,” Dmitry Likhachev considered. - There was no middle ground. Everything was real, the heavens opened up, and God was visible in the heavens. He was clearly seen by the good. Miracles were performed... The human brain was the last to die... People wrote diaries, philosophical writings, scientific works, sincerely, "from the heart" thought and showed extraordinary firmness, not yielding to the pressure of the wind, not succumbing to vanity and vanity "...
Many survivors of the blockade note one more fact: communal apartments helped to survive in those inhuman conditions. During the war, they had an atmosphere of mutual assistance, mutual understanding, and support for each other.
“A common misfortune rallied people,” Yury Galakhov, a resident of besieged Leningrad, told the author of these lines. - We lived at that time in our communal apartment as amicably as we had never lived. Before the war, they constantly swore, even before the court it came. And after the war too. And here - the spirit of people in the war was amazing ... "
The memory of the blockade, like the memory of the war, has a hard fate. She was manipulated, made political capital out of her. Over the years, the memory of the blockade more and more "bronze" and less and less like the truth. "Zalgana" in the words of Solzhenitsyn, was not only a war. "Zalgana" was also a blockade.
The "Leningrad affair" dealt a severe blow to the city. One of Stalin's victims was the memory of the blockade. For many years, the suffering of Leningraders, the tragedy of the blockade became a taboo topic. Olga Berggolts mentioned that back in the forties she was asked not to speak in Moscow with a story about thousands of starving Leningraders. And her famous words “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten”, carved at the Piskarevsky cemetery, were appropriated by state ideology ...
“Stalin had already died, the 20th Party Congress had passed, everything had changed, but the Leningrad “syndrome” continued to operate,” noted Daniil Granin. “A great city with a regional destiny” did not dare to recall the blockade. It froze once and for all in the heroic epic of 900 days approved from above, during which the people of Leningrad survived primarily “thanks to the help of the whole country”, the attention paid by Comrade Stalin. This image of the blockade was approved by the decisions and indictments of the tribunals, therefore, it was not subject to appeal. „ The Leningrad case" sealed it with the blood of hundreds of its victims. Revision was not allowed.
“The truth about the Leningrad blockade will never be published,” Dmitry Likhachev wrote in those days. - From Leningrad blockade they make “sussyuk”....” Thank God, today we still have lived to the time when we can read the truth about the Leningrad blockade.
Probably the first breakthrough to the tragic truth about the Leningrad truth was, after all, the Blockade Book. No wonder it was so difficult to get out in Soviet times. Through what obstacles of censorship Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich had to go through in order for their brainchild to see the light, at least in the edited form that sometimes had to be agreed to.
“Why did we need more people? Yes, because it turned out that everyone has their own story, - Daniil Granin later told about the creation of the Blockade Book. - Everyone had their own tragedy, their own drama, their own history, their own deaths. People starved in different ways and died in different ways...
Much was decided by the talent of the storyteller. Women spoke best. Women's memory is arranged somewhat differently than men's. After all, men's memory is some kind of global one: men are more interested in general situations. And the details of life, life, what happened in a small area - a queue, a bakery, an apartment, neighbors, a staircase, a cemetery - this is the memory ... of a woman. She was more colorful and strong......
By that time, there was a well-established, petrified stereotype of the ideology of the blockade. The blockade is a heroic epic. The feat of the Leningraders, who did not surrender the city, defended it. Nine hundred days of blockade. The only city in the history of the Second World War, in the history of our Great Patriotic War who didn't give up. And - everything! At the Nuremberg trials, it was recorded that six hundred and sixty thousand people died. None more! We soon realized that this figure was significantly underestimated. And, most importantly, it's not about heroism.
After all, for many it was forced heroism. Heroism was something else. It was intra-family, intra-apartment heroism, where people suffered, died, cursed; where incredible deeds were committed, caused by hunger, frost, shelling. It was an epic of human suffering. It was not a story of nine hundred days of feat, but nine hundred days of unbearable torment. Which, of course, did not correspond to the pathos of a feat, something that has firmly entered the history of the Great Patriotic War ... "
The blockade book was published in 1982. And she became one of the harbingers of the fact that the truth about the blockade - alive, real, not embellished with anything - will still make its way.
However, it is impossible not to mention that there were at the same time one more published memoirs about the blockade, in their truthfulness, passion and emotionality, perhaps not inferior to the “Blockade Book”. True, it was inaccessible to Soviet readers - only those who were not afraid to pick up "tamizdat" knew it. For these blockade memoirs in our country in Soviet times were banned due to their "anti-Soviet" and the author-emigrant - a woman who was persona non grata in the USSR. A representative of the "obsolete class", "anti-Soviet", hiding under the "guise" of an employee, after the evacuation from Leningrad - a resident of the occupied territory, and then - a "defector". All this set was enough to label Scriabina as an “enemy of the Soviet regime”, and her diary as “slanderous fabrications”.
We are talking about the diary of Elena Scriabina - it was she who became the chronicler of the Leningrad blockade for the West. In 1964, in Munich, her book "In the blockade" was published in Russian, eight years later on German her “Leningrad Diary” was published, and in 1976 in Paris in Russian - “Years of Wanderings”. During the Iron Curtain, Scriabina's diary served abroad as the main and almost the only evidence of the tragic Leningrad epic during the war years.
Who is Elena Skryabina? She was born in 1904 in Nizhny Novgorod. Father - nobleman Alexander Gorstkin, owner of an estate in the Nizhny Novgorod province, monarchist, deputy IV State Duma. He was loved and respected by the peasants - this saved his relatives during the pogroms of landowners' estates in the fall of 1917. During the civil war, he joined the white movement, dreamed of saving the tsar and his family, leading them out of Siberia. Then he went into exile and died in Paris.
Elena Skryabina, by the will of fate, remained in Russia, from the mid-1920s she lived in Leningrad. She showed a penchant for literary creativity very early. Even as a child, she wrote diaries that had to be burned. During the civil war, they could destroy the whole family - they told about the work of his father in the Duma. In the 1930s, Scriabina miraculously escaped numerous "purges". She worked as a typist, before the war she graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages.
“In my free time, I write a diary that I have been keeping since the very beginning of the war,” Scriabina noted. - All diary entries are scattered sheets, and even scraps of paper. Who knows, maybe someday they will be published as a document from one of the most important periods of history.”
Scriabina's diary has not been banned for a long time - it was published in our country in 1994. However, for many, he is capable of causing rejection: Scriabina took a painfully “unpatriotic” position from the very first days of the war. She didn't dig trenches, she didn't dig cracks, she didn't put out lighters. She just lived in a besieged city, thinking about one thing - how to survive and save the children. Caring for children takes her everywhere. What exactly is not in Scriabina's diary is the unanimity of the city's inhabitants, which is familiar to us. In besieged Leningrad, different people, and Scriabina's notes show that among them there are many who did not differ in sympathy for the Soviet regime. After all, only twenty years have passed since the revolution. Despite the "purges" and repressions, and in many respects thanks to them, there was a layer of people in society who internally felt their absolute alienation from the Stalinist regime.
For twenty years these people lived in the expectation that this power would end. And now, when the war began, many of them were torn between opposite feelings: on the one hand, the homeland is threatened by a terrible conqueror, bringing death and suffering, on the other hand, perhaps he will help free himself from Stalin's tyranny.
Here is what Scriabina wrote down on the second day of the war: “The former house owner Anastasia Vladimirovna did not hide her hatred of the Soviet regime and saw the only salvation in the war and the victory of the Germans. Although I largely share her views, but at that moment her smile irritated me insanely. I would like to believe that no matter what, Russia will not be destroyed, but at the same time, you realize that only this war is a real opportunity for liberation from the terrorist regime.”
The first blockade winter, the most terrible, Scriabina spent in besieged Leningrad. Then - evacuation to the "mainland". The result of long wanderings was Pyatigorsk. But a little time passed, and the war came there too.
In August 1942, the Germans captured Pyatigorsk. In 1943, Scriabina was taken to Germany, where she ended up in the camp of eastern workers in Bendorf on the Rhine. Allied troops freed Scriabin from the camp. Being in the category of "displaced persons", she understood what fate could be in store for her upon her return to her homeland. Once in the French zone of occupation, she avoided extradition. In 1950 she moved to the United States, where she entered the University of Syracuse, worked for three years to obtain a doctorate. In the early 1960s, Scriabina became a professor at the University of Iowa, at the same time her literary activity began ...
From the time of the publication of the "Siege Book" to the era of "glasnost", and then "freedom of speech", there was very little time left. It was then that all prohibitions collapsed. True, here, too, a cruel joke was played with the memory of the blockade. What at times looked most like a sensation came to the fore. And the notorious cannibalism, and the "fattening" Smolnin leaders of Leningrad ... The list goes on. And the starving Leningraders got the role of victims of the regime, which, with its inept actions, doomed the huge city to starvation. Was this the truth about the blockade that Dmitry Likhachev, Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich dreamed about decades ago? Hardly...
And yet, despite all attempts to make sensations on the pages of the blockade, over the past two decades, bit by bit, sometimes almost from scratch, the memory of the blockade was collected anew. Diaries and memoirs play a very important role in this restoration of the true picture of the blockade. They very accurately make it clear the atmosphere of life in besieged Leningrad. And those diaries and memoirs that are collected in this book are also a kind of encyclopedia of Leningrad besieged life.
You can learn a lot from them. For example, why during the siege did Leningraders experience a sense of anxiety when they saw a clear sun and a cloudless sky, and rejoiced at cloudy weather? What movies were shown in the besieged city? How was the news spread in the face of a minimum of official information?
“The newspapers did not clearly report on the situation at the fronts, and people lived on rumors,” Dmitry Likhachev recalled. - Rumors were transmitted everywhere: in the cafeteria, on the streets, but they were not well believed - they were too gloomy. Then the rumors were justified.
Most rumors, often the most ridiculous, spread in crowded places - queues and markets. They immediately acquired all sorts of details and details and began their own lives. For example, in February 1942, a rumor spread in the city about the removal and trial of the chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, Popkov. There were sentiments that the famine in Leningrad was the result of his "sabotage activities."
“It is difficult to say where this rumor originated, but it is obvious why it became so widespread,” notes historian Nikita Lomagin. - Probably, the people longed for revenge for the suffering and deprivation they had endured, they searched for and found a simple explanation for the causes of the famine. Popkov, as the personification of power, got what he deserved - "removed", "arrested", "shot". This rumor was a kind of people's verdict of the authorities, and the degree of its spread was an indicator of the general attitude not only to the person, but to the institution that he represented ... It is amazing that the people blamed the Germans, who organized the blockade and famine, much less than the Soviet government "4.
Spy mania was added to word of mouth, reaching incredible proportions at the beginning of the war. “Spies were looked for everywhere,” said Dmitry Likhachev. - As soon as a person went to the bathhouse with a suitcase, they detained him and began to “check”. So it was, for example, with M. A. Panchenko (our academic secretary). There were many stories about spies. There were some supposedly automatic beacons that began to signal just at the hours of the raids.Such beacons, according to rumors, were located in the chimneys of houses (they were only visible from above), on the Champ de Mars, etc. Some grain of truth in these rumors, perhaps, it was: the Germans really knew everything that was happening in the city "...
Each of the survivors of the blockade has its own memory of it. And each of the diaries and memories included in this book has its own destiny, its own story. Gathered together, side by side, they surprisingly complement and confirm each other. And this means that all together, both diaries and memoirs, can nevertheless bring us closer to a true picture of the blockade days ...
A significant part of this book is made up of the blockade diaries of three adult residents of Leningrad - doctor Ekaterina Glinskaya, journalist Xavier Seltser and Maria Vasilyeva, as well as two teenage children - Galina Zimnitskaya and Elizaveta Veide.
A view from that time is confirmed by memoirs written almost seventy years after the siege. This book contains the memories of the children of besieged Leningrad, who survived the most difficult days of the 900-day siege - Dmitry Semenov, John Fedulov and Vladimir Morgachev.
Doctor Ekaterina Prokofievna Glinskaya kept her diary from December 12, 1941 to the end of the blockade. When the war began, she worked as a surgeon in the Obukhov hospital, then headed the surgical department of the infectious diseases hospital of the Frunzensky district, on Lazaretny Lane near the Vitebsk railway station. The unique illustrations for the diary are drawings by an unknown artist, made in the hospital. Some of them depict Ekaterina Glinskaya herself.
Her husband, a railroad worker, was far to the north, and she is here, in besieged Leningrad. Daughter Oksana is a little over a year old: she was born in October 1940. When their home at 33 Tchaikovsky Street was bombed, they had to move to Soyuz Pechatnikov Street, but they suffered the same fate there. From the spring of 1942 until the very end of the war, the Glinsky family lived at the hospital ...
It is amazing that in the midst of all this horror, hunger, bombing and shelling, she found the strength to talk about ... the beauty of the besieged city. “... The city has never seemed to me as beautiful as in these deadly days,” she wrote then, on December 12. “Such beautiful trees stand from the frost, so beautiful is the Neva and its embankments with frozen ships and frozen houses.”
It is also interesting that the mood of Leningraders was captured on the pages of the diary. Then, in the most terrible months of the blockade, people were left with only the hope of salvation and faith in a miracle, and therefore the cannonade at the front was perceived as a harbinger of imminent liberation. Alas, liberation was still very, very far away.
“The most painful was the question of leaving,” we read in the diary for March 23, 1942. Rumors and moods fluctuated like the sea. They came, they said: “Immediately run away from this doomed city. There will be no stone left on stone here.” Following others said: “They lie, scoundrels, the worst is behind us. You don't have to go. Everywhere there is hunger, nowhere they wait with fried pies, the road from Leningrad is littered with corpses. These contradictions literally tore my heart apart.”
The summer of 1942 gave hope. The tormented, tormented city gradually returned to its human form. “These Leningraders are amazing people,” Ekaterina Glinskaya wrote on June 21, 1942. “Many have the opportunity to leave - they don’t want to, they live poorly, they are starving, but they don’t want to leave the city.”
Today it may seem incredible that then, in the summer of 1942, when the enemy stood at the very walls of the city on the Neva, when the battle on the Volga was flaring up, the most incredible rumors were circulating in Leningrad. “A lot of contradictory talk about the end of the war and the second front,” Ekaterina Glinskaya wrote on June 21, 1942. - They stubbornly say that the war will end in August-September. But with us or after us, as the people of Leningrad say, it is not known ... ".
The people of Leningrad waited for the end of the war like a miracle... Would they have believed then if they knew that the war would continue for almost three more years? “The year 1943 is coming, millions of people are waiting for him to fulfill their cherished desire - the end of the war,” Ekaterina Glinskaya wrote on the last day of 1942. - What will he actually bring? ..».
But the end of the war still had to survive. “For two years Leningrad has been living under the yoke of death every minute,” Ekaterina Glinskaya wrote on April 19, 1943, trying to explain the reason for the sharp increase in “depressive psychoses” in the city. Danger lurked every minute. And this is the danger from which it is almost impossible to protect oneself, the misfortune that cannot be predicted and deceived. In the face of this threat, a person became absolutely defenseless. “A large number of civilian casualties,” she noted on July 17 of that year. “The mood is such that you walk down the street and wait for a shot in the back.” And it is no coincidence that the all-clear signal is “the best symphony of war”, and the main dream is to sleep without anxiety and walk down the street without fear, without fear of falling under fire.
"How you want to live!" - constantly, in spite of everything, sounds on the pages of the diary. Live, survive, survive this terrible time. At least for the sake of her daughter, because it was she who, in the midst of all this horror, was the main meaning of life. Whatever words Ekaterina Prokofievna calls her on the pages of her diary - “baby”, “monkey”, “girl”, “chantrap”. “Baby today is 2 years 3 months old,” Ekaterina Glinskaya wrote on January 26, 1943. He speaks poetry in a funny way and this grain grows, he himself does not know on what terrible soil, watered with the blood of suffering.
A fragment of a shell stuck in a window frame is still kept in the family of Oksana Viktorovna Glinskaya as a family heirloom. And it will be kept forever, as a memory of the blockade. A terrible instrument of death - a small piece of iron with torn, sharp edges ...
“Mom later told me about that terrible episode more than once,” says Oksana Glinskaya. - With some unknown feeling, feeling the trouble, she covered me with her back from the hail of glass falling from the broken window. But there is nothing about this in the diary - my mother did not write about her exploits, all this was taken for granted. Salvation from almost certain death - it was just like a miracle, or a sign from above. And he filled with even greater thirst for life.
“Wonderful white nights,” Ekaterina Glinskaya wrote on June 9, 1943. -You can read all night. From 11 o'clock, air barrage balloons are raised, and against the background of a gray-blue sky they swim in the air like dolphins. Wonderful days and nights, if only to live. I want to wander along the Neva, I want to live.
“In my mother's blockade diary, indeed, there are no sighs, no groans, no denunciations,” says Oksana Glinskaya. - Mom never complained that she had such a test in her life. She was very lively talented person. She wrote poetry, played the violin, drew well, was a surgeon from God "...
For almost seventy years, the diary of the Leningrad journalist Xavier Naumovich Seltser also lay in the family archive. It was kindly provided to the compiler of this book by his relative Maria Yakovlevna Murina, the daughter of a front-line soldier from Leningrad, who went through the whole war from a simple militia member of the Vyborgsky district of Leningrad to the chief of staff of a division.
Unfortunately, little is known about the author of this literary work, which he entitled "Notes under Siege": in the 1930s he was a journalist, newspaper worker, and collaborated in one of the Leningrad newspapers. When the war began, he was already over 60 years old Xavier Seltser has seen a lot in his life - revolutions, civil war, Stalin's darkness of the pre-war decade... But it was his time, terrible and at the same time happy, the one in which he lived, and there was no other ...
Despite all the tragic cataclysms, he retained his independence and critical judgment. There are a lot of sensitive topics and uncomfortable questions in the diary. Apparently, the author was far from servility to the then authorities: he sometimes speaks of her actions with irritation and indignation. It is difficult to say what would have happened if the diary had fallen into the hands of "vigilant authorities." As you know, they did not doze off even in the most terrible months of the blockade. Quite possibly, Seltzer would have been charged with "defeatism" and "counter-revolutionary agitation." But fate kept. Fortunately, among those who could know about this diary, there were no dishonorable people...
Xavier Seltser was from a generation of old St. Petersburg intellectuals. Judging by the diary, he had an undoubted artistic flair and literary talent. No wonder his diary reads like a real novel, and its main advantage is that there is not a word of untruth in it.
“The old habit of writing in front of people, which I have left from the time of reporting, helps me now,” Selzer noted in his diary. “There are old people around, and women, as usual, “talking” about anything, and whimpering mothers, and I - though with some tension - write, catch my thoughts and fix it on paper ... ”In these memoirs - a living person, with his thoughts and thoughts, anxiety and despair.Personal impressions of what is happening side by side with reflections on the fate of his native city and country.In principle, there is practically nothing to add to this diary - the author has already said everything, and we can only read through the pages yellowed from time and listen to the voice of the epoch.Reading these records, it is as if you are immersed in the tragic world of a besieged city - famine, bombing, death.At the same time, you feel a strong desire of people to survive, against all odds, the belief that this whole nightmare will end sooner or later and life will be different - definitely better than before the war ...
The blockade diary of Maria Vasilyeva, like many others, has never been published before. Being a family heirloom, it is kept in the home archive to this day. It was kindly provided to the compiler of this book by the St. Petersburg historian Vsevolod Abramov.
“The Vasilievs, our relatives, lived on Dostoevsky Street, almost opposite the Kuznechny Market,” says Vsevolod Valentinovich. - I often visited them, listened to the stories of Maria Alexandrovna, my grandmother's sister, about life in the blockade. In besieged Leningrad, she lived with her two daughters Vera and Maria and 14-year-old granddaughter Olya. One of the two sisters, Maria, kept a diary. She started it on January 19, 1942, and the last entry is dated May 18 of that year.
“The blockade history of this family is interesting and important in that it allows you to understand; as without food supplies, Money or values, people withstood hunger and survived in the most difficult conditions, - Vsevolod Abramov believes. - And the secret is simple: in a family, as in any team, in a difficult situation, a leader is important, solving the most important issues of life. She became such a leader in the family; Vera Alekseevna (by her husband Savitskaya), an accountant at a small plant in Leningrad. Even when I was still very young, I remembered this aunt, strict to the point of being sour, who does not tolerate whining, whims and other weaknesses ... ".
In addition to her main job, Vera was a local air defense fighter, she was on duty on the roof of her house. Even before the famine began, she took into account all the products. Not everyone understood this, but soon Maria wrote in her diary: “I am very grateful to our genius Verus, who managed to stop our burning appetites and put everything in a strict framework of division, and, most importantly, food at a strictly set time and with everyone together. The second rule of Vera was that everyone should move, work, have some kind of constant duties, she made sure that everyone bathed, washed clothes (even bedding), washed the floor, got firewood for a small stove, brought water. in the most difficult first blockade winter.
There is a lot of despair and bitterness in the diary, there is no heroism here, but there is a genuine sense of the tragedy of the inhabitants of the city, trying to survive with all their might...
The diary of the Leningrad schoolboy Dmitry Semenov is dedicated to the first months of the war. From the first day of the war, he kept a diary, which has survived to this day in his home archive. A simple student's notebook, with neat notes made in ink. Thirteen pages of small text.
When the war began, Dmitry Semenov graduated from four classes of the 2nd secondary school of the Vyborgsky district of Leningrad. His school profile, issued to him just after the fourth grade, has been preserved. “A capable boy, but lethargic, phlegmatic during answers. He speaks very quietly. He quickly gets tired of listening, gets distracted by extraneous things, starts pushing neighbors, talking to them or completely forgets the cool environment and thinks about something of his own. Gets sick very often. Performs public work meticulously. He is friendly to the guys, but he starts to make friends with the quietest students.
Maybe in some ways the teacher was wrong about an ordinary Leningrad teenager from an intelligent teacher's family. Moreover, the child, without any doubt, is not only very well-read and brought up on the best examples of Russian classical literature, but also gifted with literary and artistic talent in general.
Mom, Natalya Pavlovna Semenova, was a teacher of music, drawing and physical education, she taught all subjects in the zero (preschool) classes. Father, Vasily Ivanovich Semenov, taught Russian language and literature. Grandmother, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Zakharova, was also a teacher.
“On June 28, 1941, I turned twelve years old,” says Dmitry Vasilyevich. - I immediately began to write everything as it was, as I imagined and saw it, without any outside help. I wrote a little, then very hard times began, and I stopped writing. Before that, I already had some “literary experiments”, but they were devoted to more prosaic things - for example, the life of a cat. And I made the first notes at the age of six.
At first, the war was perceived by him as something happening somewhere far away, and the evacuation seemed like an exciting adventure, like a trip to a pioneer camp. And only after the bombing of the echelon comes the tragic understanding that the games are over, there will be no more fun adventures, that the war - terrible, ruthless, cruel and merciless - has decisively and irrevocably burst into life. The former life will no longer be, and you will have to fight not for life, but for death, and you can’t stay on the sidelines in any way ...
In those days, Dmitry Semenov almost fell victim to a tragedy similar to Lychkov's. As you know, in the village of Lychkovo in the present Novgorod, and then Leningrad, region in July 1941, an echelon with children from Leningrad came under enemy bombing. For a long time after the war, the Lychkov tragedy was hushed up, and only in recent decades has it ceased to be a "blank" spot in history. Although Lychkovo itself did not forget about that terrible story, and on the grave of the Leningrad children who died in that bombing there are always flowers, toys and sweets ...
However, Lychkov's tragedy was not a single episode. There were many similar cases when Leningrad children became martyrs of war. One of the reasons for this was a fatal mistake, or rather, a fatal delusion that led to a monstrous tragedy. As you know, shortly after the start of the war, the evacuation of children from Leningrad began, but “at the top” in the first weeks of the war they were sure that Leningrad was in danger from Finland, so the children were sent to those places that they considered safe, namely to the southern regions Leningrad region. Therefore, a large number of evacuated children ended up in Demyansky, Marevsky, Molvotitsky, Valdai and Lychkovsky districts of the then Leningrad region. As it turned out, the children were taken straight towards the war...
The train, in which Dmitry Semenov returned from the Valdai evacuation to Leningrad in August 1941, also came under bombardment. Until now, among the family rarities of Dmitry Vasilyevich, a military relic is kept - a fragment of an enemy bomb that fell into the car during that bombing. And next to it is an inscription made by my father's hand: “A fragment of a bomb dropped from a German plane on our train at the Burga station during the return to Leningrad from Borovichi. August 1941"5.
In addition to the diary, during the Valdai evacuation, Dmitry Vasilyevich made sketches, where he depicted in great detail the places where he happened to be. And he not only captured the views of the surroundings, as well as the characteristic personalities he met (portrait of a shopkeeper), but also drew an exact plan called: “The area where we lived in the evacuation. Summer 1941”, marking villages, individual houses and roads, mills and factories, rivers and bridges, lakes and rivers, fields and forests with conventional signs ...
John Fedulov at the very beginning of the war, among the thousands of Leningrad children, was also evacuated to the southern regions of the Leningrad region. In July 1941, by the will of fate, he found himself in the thick of it - at the Lychkovo station. I saw with my own eyes the death of a train with Leningrad children ...
The diary of Galina Zimnitskaya has never been published either. In the year of the fortieth anniversary of the Victory, in 1985, Galina Karlovna turned to one of the Leningrad newspapers, but came across a strange wall of alienation. “Now there are so many memories of the blockade,” she was told, “that we have much more interesting diaries than yours.” Indeed, at a time when military-patriotic education was one of the pillars of Soviet ideology, such a diary, in which there were “too few” feats, did not fit into the official, heroic interpretation of the Leningrad blockade.
In this diary, all 900 days of the siege are presented through the eyes of a simple teenage girl. Two months after the start of the war, she turned 14 years old. The war forced her to grow up early and, of course, she did not want to stay away from "adult" life. At first, everything looked like a game, because the war was somewhere far away, and the city lived, though not the same, but still quite a peaceful life. On the third day of the war, June 25, the attic was being prepared for fire protection. “After work, I wanted to swim, wash off the sweat. We are lying on the beach in Ozerki. The sun is hot, the sky is bright blue. But even here the war reminds itself: the serene heat is interrupted by an air raid siren. “I look at the sky: everything is calm, clean. Suddenly, a policeman appears on the beach and drives everyone into the bushes and under the trees. For what? We think this is redundant. There are no planes."
But it soon turns out that it is not at all superfluous. Record dated August 6, 1941: “Alarms have become more frequent. The city is changing its face. Storefronts were filled with sandbags. “Every day it’s getting harder and harder for me to write a diary,” Galya wrote on August 15. - Will I quit? True, these days pass monotonously, without special events. If you look into our souls, then, for sure, everyone wants to experience at least a little bit of the combat situation (bombing) and try their skills on the wounded. It's stupid though."
“It became really bad with food,” we read on September 9, 1941. “The food is very scarce and monotonous, and the appetite is increasing every day.” In diary entries - hunger and constant shelling. From the roof of the native house on Serdobolskaya Street, the highest in the district, one could see far away. Everything is visible - both the death of people under the bombing in the park of the Forestry Engineering Academy, and the treacherous signal rockets that an unknown enemy sends somewhere very close.
Death became everyday, but it was still impossible to get used to it. And in the midst of this realm of death, there is a stubborn belief that these horrors will end sooner or later. October 10, 1941. The other day, my mother and I went to the Vyborg department store to see what was there. We saw bathing suits made of black satin with blue trim and flirty elastic bands on the sides of the panties and on the bra. Bought a bathing suit. The saleswoman looked at my mother and me as if we were crazy or knew the great secret of the end of the war. No, we don’t know anything, we just want to live until peaceful days.”
The most poignant in their tragic records are dedicated to the first blockade winter. "Hunger sucks day and night." Thoughts only about how to survive in these inhuman conditions. Mother exchanges things for bread on the black market. “Lord,” the grandmother exclaims, “this is stolen bread! For this now execution, and you will go as an accomplice. “I understand,” the mother replies desperately. “But I can't see how we're all approaching death. How else can we survive?”
Entry dated December 11, 1941: “I saw a terrible scene in the bakery during the day. A boy of about ten snatched a ration of bread from an old woman and immediately began to eat. The women rushed to take it away, and he lay down on the floor, face down, and, ignoring the falling blows, finished the bread on the dirty floor. The worst thing is that no one stood up for the child. After lying down for a while, the thief got up, wiped his tears and blood with his sleeve, and left dirty, ragged, completely alone. Now I feel sorry for him to the point of pain in my heart. Where was I then? She stood, looked and was silent.
In the direction of the Shuvalovsky cemetery, through Poklonnaya Gora, residents carry coffins on sledges or corpses sewn into a sheet, “resembling the pupae of some huge insect.” There is simply no one to bury them at the cemetery itself; the unburied dead lie behind the fences and on the paths...
And another scary picture from that winter. December 26, 1941. ...On the way home, we saw a dead young woman in the snow. She was lying on the roadway of Lesnoy Prospekt, apparently, she fell from the wagon when the sleigh with the dead tipped over a bump. At first it seemed to us that it was a mannequin from a broken shop window - this woman was so beautiful. She was wearing a dark, light dress with a deep neckline. Beautiful swarthy hands were folded on his chest, like a singer. Gorgeous dark hair scattered across the muddy snow. Her lovely, not emaciated, slightly bony face with thick eyelashes surprised. My mother and I stood and looked with great pity at this lost beauty, and people walked by and no one stopped ... "
And in the midst of all this besieged hell - an exclamation: "Lord, when will all this end?". When, finally, that terrible first blockade winter was gone, it seemed that nothing could be worse than it, that now the worst was over. Death continues to multiply around, but life still takes its toll. Ahead - youth, ahead - first love. And thoughts are not only about the war. “October 20, 1942. I want to go to the Forestry Academy to dance, but what to wear? From my old dresses, I have long grown. A friend came to the rescue and offered her outfit. “I got dressed and looked in the mirror. Yes! I'm already a girl. No matter how many dresses I have later in my life, I will never forget this first adult dress.
Another siege year passes. It has a lot of things - service in the fire regiment, admission to the FZO school. And although death from brutal shelling lurks at every step, it is felt throughout that the end of the blockade is already close.
“October 3, 1943. The offensive of our troops now cannot be stopped until Berlin itself! Everyone says like that. The mood is good, upbeat. I often go to the hairdresser on Liteiny, I do curling with tongs. Dreams about needing dress shoes. You can't dance in strangers all the time! To buy beautiful shoes on the black market (they are not available in stores), you have to sell a sewing machine. Trips to dances and going to the cinema are under fire. How unnatural death seems now, when love reigns in the soul. And the meeting of the new, 1944, in the circle of "cavaliers" ...
The entry dated January 3, 1944 read: “How exhausting these shellings are, how sick of it all! After all, life has improved, trams are running, electricity is on, cinemas are working. But shelling sometimes completely crosses out all plans, and sometimes life. How to come to terms with this? Survive the entire blockade - and almost die during shelling at the very beginning of January 1944, just a few weeks before the “Leningrad victory”! ..
And finally, on January 27, 1944. “The mighty voice of Levitan: “Sovinformburo message. The complete liberation of Leningrad from the enemy blockade!" it is such a long-awaited and joyful news. There will be fireworks in the evening! No, I can’t write, I’m crying with happiness. ”And the record of the next day:“ The salute was grandiose. on the back, it was so solemn and beautiful. There were as many people as there were enough eyes, many were crying "...
In the diary of Elizaveta Georgievna Veide, there is a unique chronicle of all those ordeals, hardships and sufferings that befell a simple Leningrad girl from Grazhdanka. Before the war, she managed to finish six classes. The diary began in the spring of 1942 - with the evacuation from Leningrad to the Caucasus, includes the occupation and export to work in Germany. The diary was completed in the summer of 1945. This is a witness of the era, allowing even today, after more than sixty years, through the eyes of a teenage girl, to see and feel the terrible drama that has fallen on the family. We are confident that it will be of interest to readers, so we have brought it here almost completely, without cuts and almost without editorial corrections. This is not just a chronicle of the tragedy, it can be called a real confession, addressed to himself, and to contemporaries, and to descendants ...
“Were Leningraders heroes? No, that’s not it: they were martyrs…”, noted Dmitry Likhachev. "Second World War gave rise to three symbolic cities, - Daniil Granin continues this thought. “Hiroshima is like the horror of the atomic bomb, Stalingrad is a symbol of resistance and Leningrad is a symbol of the suffering of innocent people.”
P.S. Illustrations for blockade diaries and memoirs are unique photographs from family and home archives, as well as from Vladimir Nikitin's album “Unknown blockade. Leningrad 1941-1944" (St. Petersburg, 2002).
1 Siege Diaries and Documents St. Petersburg, 2004. P. 237. A. I. Vinokurov’s diary was published in the same place, p. 238-291.
4 Lomagin N.A. unknown blockade. Book. 1. St. Petersburg, 2002. S. 285. 12
5 Burga - a village in the Malovishersky district of the Novgorod region and the same name railroad station 18 km southeast of Malaya Vishera.
Boris Ivanovich Kuznetsov is my father. Born September 20, 1928; passed away November 28, 2010 A few years before his death, he decided to write memoirs about his childhood under the siege. Most likely, he did not have time to say everything he wanted, but what he did, he did. He died from cancer, he knew what awaited him, and if he missed something, then I think that the rest is not fiction, especially since my father told me some episodes before. And before death, they usually do not lie, especially to their loved ones, for whom these memories were originally intended. Then dad allowed me to acquaint with a part of his (and not only his) life and everyone who is interested in it. So one of his stories appeared on the Internet.
FAMILY TREE
We, the Kuznetsovs, were unlucky with the “tree”: of the St. Petersburg Kuznetsovs, I was the only one who managed to keep the surname (four sisters, and my brother died in his youth).
Maybe somewhere in the west of the Pskov region, a branch of the Kuznetsovs has been preserved, but I don’t know anything about them. I know, from the stories of sister Lyudmila, that in St. Petersburg, somewhere at the end of the 19th century, my great-grandfather appeared, became an average merchant, then my grandfather Andrey. Father, Ivan Andreevich, grabbed mustard gas in the First World War, somewhere he married a Polish woman - Dora, in baptism - Daria. They lived together, suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, made children. I was the last, the sixth. My father worked at a car building plant, and we lived somewhere nearby. Life, obviously, was difficult - a lot of children, a worker - one. Mom, when she was not sick, worked somewhere, at work she became friends with Alexandra Alexandrovna Fedorova (nee - Larina). That accepted
she took part in our hardships and took me and Zhenya to her (for food, probably). She lived with her husband and had no children.
In 1933, my mother died - I don’t remember her at all. The Fedorovs took custody of me and Zhenya. Since then we have lived in the Fedorov family. For us, they became mom and dad, and in the future, for simplicity, I will call them that.
His own father managed to get married, got a decent apartment on the street. Tchaikovsky, 36. I rarely visited them, the Fedorovs did not encourage contacts with other relatives. My father retired from work due to illness. He was still a good ladies' tailor and at home he slowly earned money for a living. I remember him sitting on a large table with patterns. In 1937 he died. I remember his funeral: a hearse with horses, with an orchestra, behind quite a lot of mourners. He entered before my birth
in the CPSU (b), was on the "account". Probably because of this I was not baptized, or maybe they were christened secretly, I don’t know.
In those days, it was customary - they buried with dignity, even processions passed along Nevsky - a hearse with horses, seeing off ...
I will not describe the details of my life. There was everything, good and sad. There were many more good ones. I was never hungry, the summer was always warm and sunny, there were good friends. I felt bad when my mother harshly reminded me that I was not native, I was “Kuznetsov's offspring”. Zhenya was older, sometimes she ran to Tchaikovsky, to her father. But she was brought back.
Blessed memory of my "dad Fedorov", Leonty Dmitrievich. The kindest man, we were on an equal footing, friends.
I remember how I stood impassively at the coffin of my father and someone tried to convince me that this was my dead dad. And I almost happily objected: “No, my dad is alive, here he is,” pointing to my guardian.
The rest of the details of my pedigree can be found in the profiles I have specially saved. I have made many of them in my life. Any transition to another level was accompanied by writing a questionnaire and biography. Access to secret work also required this ritual, even more detailed. I have permission first.
to “form 4”, then “3”, then “2” and, finally, to form 1. All this “got me” - I had to remember all my scattered relatives every time.
I once made a copy of my works and then rewrote them. One copy is somewhere.
Childhood ended, probably, with the beginning of the war. I will talk about this period of my life in the next chapter.
The war did not come as a surprise to me. We were prepared for war from early childhood. Already in the second grade, we were ordered to chirp in textbooks the physiognomy of the leaders, who turned out to be “byaks”. In the 4th grade, I already knew what mustard gas, lewisite, phosgene, diphosgene were and received the first badge of distinction - BGTO - “Be ready for work and defense” (no, the first was “October”). Then - TRP ("Ready for work and defense").
They explained to us that there were enemies all around, that the people of the whole world were groaning under the yoke of the capitalists, they had to be helped through the International Society for Aid to Revolutionaries. There were gratuitous donations. There was a phrase “in favor of MOPR”, this is when they took money somewhere. Films: all around spies and enemies of the people. Songs: “If there is war tomorrow”, “Three tankers”, “Death of the squadron”, “Beloved city” ... Everyone attacks us and we quickly defeat everyone. Life is training air raid alerts (as in The Golden Calf, an exact copy). In general, psychologically we were ready.
Now about the "decorations" in which the war began for me.
We live at 23 Zhukovsky Street, apt. 3a. Entrance from the street, 2nd floor. The closest neighbors (common first hallway) are a Jewish family: mom, dad and a fat 3-year-old daughter. We are not friends, sometimes we fight. (Dad once called a neighbor a Jew.) There is another apartment on the site. There is also a Jewish family there: Tsilya Markovna Kneller, Vladimir Moiseevich Tendler and their son Boris. Their apartment goes into a 2-storey outbuilding and passes through a common corridor to another apartment where the Makhovs live. Kuzma Ilyich, a strong man, fought in the "citizen" with the Basmachi. Wife, hairy-eyed Armenian and son Ilya, my friend.
One floor above is a communal apartment, two Russians and one Jewish family. There are six Russians, one Armenian and one Tatar family in the yard.
We live (guys) together, sometimes we fight, we play lapta, shtander, “12 sticks”, “daughters-mothers”, “Cossacks-robbers”.
Mom is a housewife, dad works as a chief accountant in the 104th post office on the street. Nekrasov, almost next to the house. Zhenya studies, then (I don’t know the reason) she began working at the same Yegorov factory where her father worked, as an upholsterer (upholstered furniture). Zhenya has a boyfriend - a graduate of the Frunze School, the submarine department, Gennady Pupkov. A tall guy from Siberia. They meet, they come to visit. And I finished the 5th grade. My school is beautiful, it used to be something for someone (Vosstaniya, 10?). Two halls, White and Blue, wide corridors, large classrooms, good teachers, nannies wipe snot and fasten buttons.
Dad loved our city very much. I think he is
continued here for several generations. He dragged me around all the museums, just along the streets, where he knew the history of all the interesting houses.
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, the two of us sailed to Peterhof on a river tram. The day was warm and sunny. It was not the first time I was in Peterhof, but dad knew how to tell something new every time. Loudspeakers are hung around the park, such tetrahedral pipes. The people quieted down, grouped near these pipes. I didn’t hear the beginning, the end is clear: “Our cause is just, the enemy will be defeated, victory will be ours,” Molotov’s speech. People began to disperse, we went to the pier. The return flight was not canceled, we went to the city. On the sea channel, not far from Kronstadt, I saw a ship standing upright, like a float, with the stern up. After the war, having accidentally stumbled upon an article about the work of EPRON (underwater expedition), I read that German merchant ships that left the city on the night of June 22 threw mines into the fairway, and our dry cargo ship blew up on one of them.
Outwardly, nothing has changed in the city. I was looking for signs of the outbreak of war, and I saw soldiers walking along the street, holding green inflated balloons ten meters long and two meters in diameter by ropes.
There was some tension with the products. I remember that my mother and I were walking along Mayakovskaya, selling something from the stall. Small queue. Mom says: "Let's stand." I say: “Mom, why stand, the war will end soon and everything will be fine.” Persuaded, fool. In July - a card system, but commercial stores opened at higher prices. Dad came home from work, said: “I was taken into the army as a volunteer.” His age was no longer quite draftable, but troops were organized through the Ministry of Internal Affairs to fight the alleged saboteurs-paratroopers. And dad became a fighter of the fifth destruction battalion. They explained to him that the time is difficult and they will take it anyway, and the volunteer will receive almost all of his salary. It was 500 rubles. Not bad for a non-working family.
The battalion was based on the Field of Mars (Square of the Victims of the Revolution), in the building of the current Lenenergo. On the square they were taught the art of walking in formation.
Once dad came in his clothes, but crossed with machine-gun belts (with cartridges), with a foreign rifle with a pouch and two RGD grenades on his belt. Mom was indignant: “You didn’t hold anything in your hands more menacing than a stick, and then you dressed up.” (According to other testimonies of relatives, Leonty Dmitrievy and my father's father fought together in the First World War: they met there. K.D).
Dad kissed us silently and went to fight. The battalion was immediately thrown under the Neva Dubrovka.
And Zhenya went to the sanruzhina (a fighter of the MPVO, local air defense), to a barracks position, she was rarely at home. Her fiancé, Gennady, was released from the school with a diploma, the rank of lieutenant and two graduation suitcases - a uniform, underwear. He came to us with suitcases, but Zhenya was not at work. He let me play with a dagger and a pistol, then we went to the Colosseum. As soon as we sat down, we were alarmed, we were asked to leave, we managed to run into an ice cream parlor nearby. Under the howl of sirens, just ate ice cream and the end of the air raid alarm, we went home.
Air raid alerts were often announced, people were herded into bomb shelters or doorways.
The guys were interested. When the alarm was announced, we rushed to the house office. There was a siren there - a metal cane, a drum with a handle on top, a nest for a leg at the bottom. Lucky ran out to the middle of the yard and twisted the handle. A piercing howl came from the drum. The craftsmen changed the tone by turning the handle at different speeds. Impressive howls were obtained, even when the broadcast was not turned on. Then they fled
to the next yard and repeated the "concert".
The end of July, the alarms are still sound. Commercial shops are still open. The Germans are getting closer, but there is still no obvious anxiety, no one is smashing shops, there are no protest rallies.
I went with my mother to the Big House to receive my father's salary (500 rubles). We went to a commercial store, it was almost empty. We bought a jar of black caviar (500 grams). Last purchase outside the cards.
Then the evacuation began. They called my mother to school, they said that all students were evacuated with teachers who had children. A day is appointed, a list of things is given. Mom collected a backpack (homemade), an “eternal” pen, bought an electric flashlight, which I was very happy about. I feel independent. Children and mothers are crowding in the square near the school. My mother ran around somewhere, found out that the children of many teachers do not leave, and in general it is not known where they will take us. She said: "Borya, let's go home." I was disappointed. Mom was called, but she said that she was only a guardian and therefore ... in general, she dissuaded herself. (They were taken, it seems, somewhere near Luga, right under the German offensive. I never met any of the guys from that echelon). August went by in a blur. My school was turned into a hospital, I was assigned to the 206th school - in the courtyard of the Coliseum cinema. I started studying in the sixth grade. There were few guys.
September 8, in a quiet sunny evening, hanging out in the yard. Air raid, normal. Planes appeared in the clear sky. They walked straight, in rows. Anti-aircraft guns barked all around, fluffy clouds of explosions spread between the aircraft rows. I realized that they were Germans, I was surprised that everyone was safe and walking smoothly, like on a walk. Toward evening, a huge black cloud rose into the sky near the Lavra. The rumor has passed - the Badaevsky warehouses are burning, where almost all of our food is. I didn't go, but people, I heard, raked streams from burnt sugar.
From the first days of the war, a first-aid post was established in the household. Household - three houses: 21, 23, 25.
25th left the corner on the street. Mayakovsky. The corner of the first floor before the war was the "red corner". This is a room where residents of houses could come, read newspapers, listen to the radio (which was not available to everyone at that time) or a lecture like “Is there life on Mars” or about bad bourgeois, spies, starving our foreign class brothers. This room was given over to the medical center. In a large room with mirrored "shop" windows overlooking Zhukovsky and Mayakovskaya, they put several made beds, hung a cabinet with first aid items - iodine, bandages, pills, etc. Mom, as a non-working housewife, was appointed head of this sanitary unit. On alarm, she went to the first-aid post to wait for patients.
On September 8, after a daytime raid, the sirens began to howl again by nightfall. Mom went to her post, I went to bed.
The war has really come to our house. The roar of anti-aircraft guns, heavy explosions of high-explosive bombs, the house shakes. Mom came running and told me to go to the bomb shelter. In house 21, a courtyard wing, there was a printing house with a floor made of reinforced concrete slabs. In the basement under it, a bomb shelter was equipped - they put bunk beds, a tank of water, kerosene lamps, and a first-aid kit.
I got dressed. Mom was waiting. And a growing howl hit my ears, almost a rattle. We pressed against the wall, I looked at the window. Our windows were large, high, curtained with thick green curtains made of thin cardboard. What happened next I saw in slow motion. The blackout curtain is slowly torn to pieces, fragments of window glass fly into the room, all this against the background of a crimson glow. It seems that I did not hear the explosion itself, I just pressed myself against the wall. And a moment of ringing silence. Mum and I ran up the stairs. The first floor corridor leading to the front door is mangled by an extruded inner wall. Went outside. The first is a bright moonlit night, all over the street in the houses there are brightly glowing windows (glasses and disguise flew out of everyone). To the right, obliquely, are some ruins fantastic in the moonlight, the lights of lanterns flicker in them, screams are heard. Let's go to the bomb shelter, glass crunches underfoot.
In the morning, after lights out, they returned home. The glass is all broken, uncomfortable. There is a slight turmoil in the yard - the residents are exchanging impressions. Our janitor Uncle Vanya is quite "old-fashioned". In the evening he locks both the front door and the gate. Returning after midnight, after a call to the janitor, he unlocks, receives a ruble in gratitude. On holidays, he goes around all the residents with congratulations, performs minor repairs - fix the lock, insert glass ...
Mom to him: "Vanya, insert the glass!" I heard the answer myself: “What are you, Madame Fedorova! The Germans are in Ligovo, tomorrow they will be here, and you are glasses!
In order not to return to him again: in December, passing to his home, he noticed in concrete ring with sand for lighters, a solid ham wrapped in paper. I took it and brought it home. The ham turned out to be female. With a cry, he ran out into the yard, called people to make sure that the ham was completely frozen, not his work. And at the beginning of 1942, a truck drove up, loaded with all kinds of belongings, and Uncle Vanya drove off to be evacuated, through Ladoga. I don't know if it arrived.
I will return to the topic. From that first day of the blockade, there were alarms every day, or rather, in the evening. With German pedantry, the first raid began at 20.30. With short breaks, the alarms continued until midnight, then, probably, everyone went to rest. People somehow found out where, how and how much. After the first bombing, we found out that four thousand-kilogram high-explosive bombs were dropped that evening, one of them hit a 5-story residential building on Mayakovsky Street. She turned half the house to the bottom and demolished a completely two-story corner building - the ISORAM hostel (Visual Studio of Working Youth - approximately). About 600 people died - in their homes and were killed by the blast on the streets and in the entrances.
Our "first-aid post" was completely smashed, if my mother had not followed me, I would have been left alone.
Relatives who died at home were not dragged to the stack and left on the street, along the fence. Afterwards, the weekdays of the blockade began. In the morning I went to school. There were fewer kids every day. In November we already went for a bowl of soup. The soup was getting paler. I remember the last school soup - warm water clouded with flour. Paid 4 cents. The school was not heated, we studied in the basement, it is a little warmer there. A bunch of guys gathered, who were dressed in what, one burned a torch, the teacher hastily explained what to read at home, and dispersed. Not far from school - along Mayakovskaya, to the left along Nevsky to the Coliseum. I pass by the fence of the hospital. Kuibyshev. The bodies are brought there. Near the arch on the right side they are stored. A stack 20 meters long and human height high. Many died the last time, going to school, I saw my classmate crouching in the snow. I recognized him by his fiery red hair. He also went to school. I turned back home, went to bed and hardly went out until spring, only for bread and water.
I must say that my mother and I were lucky. The windows in the apartment were somehow boarded up with plywood, but it was impossible to live in it in winter, especially since the winter turned out to be cruel - frosts were under 40, there was no electricity, kerosene, water. But there were friends. Nearby neighbors somehow quietly left even before the bombings, and never returned. In the family, on the site opposite, Vladimir Moiseevich went into the army. He knew the Polish language excellently, and he was introduced into the Polish army being created in our country as an officer, sent near Murmansk.
His son went to the front, Tsilya Markovna went to the barracks in the hospital. Even before the war, Makhova's mother and son left for the summer to visit relatives in Kashin, and Kuzma Ilyich was drafted into the army - first to the front, but soon, probably due to his age and merit, he was appointed commandant in Pargolovo, where he comfortably commanded until the invasion of our troops in Germany (where he also served as commandant in a small German town).
Both families left us the keys to the apartments and offered to live with them. Each family had its own corner in the basement where firewood was stored. We went to live in the Makhovs' apartment. Firewood was enough until spring. When the famine began, they stopped going to the bomb shelter. At night, he huddled under the covers and listened. At first, after the siren goes off on the radio (the broadcast worked throughout the war), there is silence, then the characteristic intermittent rumble of the German Junkers is heard in the sky, then the anti-aircraft fire chorus enters, the final chords of high-explosive bomb explosions. Thoughts alone - will carry or ... And again silence, until the next alarm. In the morning they found out anywhere, if it was close, they went to have a look. Zhenya rarely appeared, at night she dug in the fresh ruins, pulling out the wounded, the dead, and slept during the day. They fed them a little better, but still hungry, worse than in the army.
Once Kuzma Ilyich (Makhov) stopped by and brought some bread and a piece of horsemeat - their horse was killed. Something he and his mother quarreled with. Kuzma Ilyich took out a pistol, shouted: "I'll kill you!" Mom calmly said: "Kill, there will be something to brag about after the war." Then they hugged and cried. It seems that his mother hooked him by sitting in Pargolovo.
Came up New Year. Mom and I alone (Zhenya was not released, or did not want to, with her comrades, probably better). We have a light on! Our house was connected
to the cable supplying the hospital (Kuibyshev hospital). Uncle Gena came, Gennady Pupkov, lieutenant, commander of the Shch (Pike) series submarine. He hoped that Zhenya would be at home, but Zhenya did not think that he could come. Brought a whole loaf of bread, something else. The three of us met the New Year, it was quiet in the sky. We saw him for the last time. Our fleet was locked in the Neva Bay, the bay was stuffed with mines from both warring sides. Only light warships and submarines tried to fight. Probably, in one of the sorties for Kronstadt, Gena's "Pike" was blown up by a mine.
At the end of the war, a letter came from Gennady's parents, from Siberia. They received a funeral, but they hoped, knowing from their son's letters about his love, that a grandson suddenly remained in Leningrad ... We wrote to our parents, sent a parcel of his modest property.
January was very difficult. I was lying in bed, thinking about something, more about food (“Well, how could I not like semolina!”). Lice appeared. Worried, bitten. I somehow indifferently caught them, crushed them. Mom realized it, got water, heated it, washed it, changed clothes. I must especially say about my mother - her character saved us both. She set a strict regime - she divided our miserable food ration for breakfast, lunch, dinner. At least a piece, but three times a day, without looking ahead. Many died because of impatience for hunger - they managed to take bread “forward” on the card, and then nothing. Already in November 1941, she exchanged everything that we had, which was valued in those days, for food. She had a friend - a God-fearing old woman from Rybatsky, from the outskirts of the city. For her father's gold watch, she gave half a bag of small potatoes. For dad's weekend suit, something also made of vegetables. I remember, somewhere in September, this old woman came to us, we drank tea. A daytime raid, everything is shaking and rumbling, the window was pierced by a fragment of an anti-aircraft shell. Mom and I pressed against the wall, and our stucco cornice crumbled from above. The guest calmly sits with a cup of tea at the table and says: “The Lord God said - where you found yourself, stop there” ... Tsilya Markovna gave us an address on Chekhov Street, nearby. A certain Nodelman, before the war, the director of a grocery store, assessed the situation in time and bought up the rest of the products in his store, not forgetting and not offending the workers. They went to him. There were sacks of cereals and sugar in the apartment. We bought once 1 kg of millet for 400 rubles and something else, I don’t remember. Mom traded her gold watch for food, we didn’t have anything else for sale. I wandered through our three apartments in search of pre-war edibles. Found under the table in the hallway of our cat, lying stretched out to attention. Somehow, in the turmoil of all the cases, we forgot about him, it seems he left. It can be seen that he, feeling that everyone was not up to him, crawled into a secluded corner and died. And at Tsili Markovna’s buffet, I found a two-liter jar full of lumpy large sugar! She lived in the hospital, almost did not appear at home. He knew that it was not good, he stole a piece, shook the jar to make it seem bigger, and licked this piece under the covers.
Dad returned in mid-January. Overgrown with a beard, quite alive. He was recalled because there were almost no postmen left in the city - some died, some were called. They handed him the keys to the post offices of the Kuibyshev region (abandoned, closed) and all the postal affairs in the district. What's the deal? Basically, he stayed at home and starved more than we did after a fuller soldier's ration. I remember how my mother caught him eating our common stock and scolded him very much - my father cried and asked for forgiveness.
But it was time for spring. Mom got a job as a janitor - a work card (400 gr. Bread). By the way, the house managers lived well. It's like the heads of small housing offices. Three houses, she (or he) receives and issues ration cards to tenants for a month. They have coupons for every day of 125 gr. bread for dependents and children, 200 for employees, 400 for workers. If you hide the dead, and there were them! .. In general, the dead souls fed the building managers. The building managers also had the keys to the apartments of all the evacuees. There's a lot left. People left hoping to return soon. From our apartment they took, with skill, Chinese porcelain, of which there was a lot. (At one time, my mother served in bonds with the countess, after the revolution, good relations remained. The countess was cut off in living space and many knick-knacks migrated to us. Then she was exiled to Karaganda, and her son, a pilot, was repressed.) the most fierce time in the apartment was music and dancing with guests - officers. With those who got caught, the authorities cracked down brutally. Our house manager disappeared unnoticed, the new house manager was shot (I learned this from the newspaper). He visited Professor Belenky's apartment (at 25) and stole some rare book from his library. And then, in 1942, when the antique book store on Liteiny had already begun to operate, he handed it over there for sale. The book was on the state account. In general, there was a lot of dirt, but this is nothing compared to those who survived, worked, fought.
The most difficult times were remembered clearly, like frames from a movie. Here I am standing in line for bread rations. In the bakery, by candlelight, the saleswoman cuts out coupons for bread, sticks them to a piece of paper for a report, cuts off a chunk from a damp black loaf, puts it on the scales, adds or cuts off. On the side of the queue stands, swaying, a shadow - a dystrophic. A sudden jerk, a twisted hand grabs bread from the scales - and into the mouth. A person, or what is left of him, falls to the floor, covers his head with his hand and eats this piece, and the nearest kick him with their feet ...
In September, in a bomb shelter, we met a mother and daughter - a charming 4-year-old girl who lived in house 21. In January, we learned that mother ate her daughter after her death.
The winter passed in famine, there were no heavy bombings, only shelling.
Spring came. April 4, I remember that it was Easter, a sunny day and an air raid. They beat, mainly, on the ships of the Navy, stationed on the Neva. Dive bombers worked. The roar was such that we, already accustomed to the noise, jumped out into the yard and watched how, falling on the wing, the German planes were falling at the peak.
I also remember a raid on hospitals, then in one day bombs were dropped on several hospitals, including our neighbor, the Kuibyshev hospital.
I don’t count the shells, we hid from them under the arches and in the front doors - as if from rain.
Since that time, more than sixty years have passed, due to the poverty of memory, I remember everything in fragments, but what I remember is what happened.
Spring, May. School No. 206 came to life, gathered the surviving students. We quickly and painlessly passed the exams for the 6th grade and we were sent (those who wished) to the state farm "Vyborzhsky" ("Vyborzhets"?).
Before departure, I went by tram (he had already begun to walk in some places) to the outskirts (Murino) to collect quinoa and nettles for food.
State farm. There are about thirty of us in the hall of the state farm club. Weeding ridges. Depending on the type of weeds, the norm is 200-300 m of the ridge per day. Beds with wood lice are good - the earth is softer there, and you can eat. We take salt with us. A bunch of grass in salt and in your mouth. When the vegetables ripened, life became more satisfying, we gnaw carrots, turnips, and bake potatoes without leaving the garden. Remembering the house, we are trying to get something to the family, we hide some carrots and potatoes under the mattresses, in the corners. Roundup! The director (in general, the head) of the state farm rode up on a dashing horse (not on some kind of nag), ordered to search our housing. The henchmen are raking a bunch of vegetables on the ground near the porch. The chief, prancing on a well-fed horse, playing with a whip, explains to us how badly we are doing. We understood. They dragged several carrots and hid them no longer in the house, but in a ditch, by the road to the tram.
Somehow we are working in the field on the beds, suddenly - an airplane, a German makes circles above us at an altitude of 50-100 m. We quieted down, hid. The pilot, almost at low level, turned over us, leaned out, waved his hand, threw a pack of leaflets, folding books. The leaflets contain photographs from the life of our prisoners of war. Well-fed former soldiers play volleyball with the Germans, cooks bake pies in the kitchen, in general - a sanatorium idyll. By the way, about the leaflets, I reviewed them, such pinkish pieces of paper the size of an envelope. Primitive creepy, like comics. Here are some "poems" that I remember.
The commissar leads the fighter to fight the German to the end.
But as soon as he saw a German, our commissar fled to the rear.
And before us are two soldiers (Russian and German)
They joke and smoke like two brothers.
Let us remember, brothers, how we were all called to war.
Let's remember how political officers sent us into battle.
Only we are not fools, brothers, it turned out.
And when they met with the enemy, they surrendered to him.
We live in Stalin's paradise
It's been over twenty years now
And the Russian peasant has neither food nor a home.
All Soviet teachings and all the nonsense of Ilyich,
I will give without regret for two fresh rolls.
Leningrad ladies, do not dig your dimples.
German tanks will come, bury your dimples
(This is about defensive work with the participation of citizens).
And in each leaflet "Passierschain", a pass for the transfer of captivity with a picture of "Bayonets to the ground."
For reading and keeping such sheets one could pay with one's life, but I hid it somewhere for memory. Mom must have burned it.
In the club where we slept, the rats ran over the guys at night, nibbling the vegetables we had stolen. I fell ill, barely crawled on the beds. They decided to take the temperature, sent home. Jaundice. I got sick quickly - no jaundice can cope with such a “diet”. I went to the state farm for "calculation". I earned turnipsina, 3-4 kilograms.
The second blockade winter has come. There were already three apartments in our use, but the manager of the house gave us another one to use, in house 21 in the wing.
3-room, 2nd floor, blocked from shells. The belongings of the owners were dragged into one room and sealed. A beautiful tiled stove, however, it became bad with firewood. They put a potbelly stove, firewood was mined with dad, if possible. Once they pulled off a huge wooden staircase thrown by someone. The owners of the apartment left a bunch of pre-revolutionary Niva magazines. Read and chew.
Then some schools were departmental. Mom "arranged" me for school number 32 Oktyabrskaya railway, on st. Vosstaniya, d. 8. There were no problems with firewood - OZhD threw it up. They drowned, they pricked themselves. And there was a dining room, something was added to the ration. For lack of guys, our class, the seventh, was the senior, so before graduation we were the seniors. There were 16 of us.
And I turned 14 years old. I joined the Komsomol. The Nazis are nearby, but I have no doubts, it’s not scary. District Committee of the Komsomol on Nevsky (in the courtyard of the current Palace Hotel, or nearby). Top floor. The floor is surprisingly warm and light. They ask me something, I answer. They hand me a Komsomol ticket, I go home, I iron a modest gray book as I go.
Somehow he immediately became the secretary of the Komsomol organization of the school. I must have done something useful. I remember how I admonished the boobies from the lower grades on the subject of "learning is light." With my methods...
But I'm already a nomenklatura. On New Year's Eve, the Komsomol activists of the district were gathered somewhere on Pushkinskaya Street in a warm basement. The tables are laid, everyone has a large plate of meat pasta soup (a lot of pasta!), a large mug of beer and a glass (100 g) of vodka. Before the war, we always had vodka in a decanter at home - dad insisted on hot peppers in it with pods, but I never even thought of trying it, but then ... I doubted, but the neighbors cheered me up - once they poured it, you have to drink it! Drank and ate everything. Returning home, I thought about how to show my “drunkenness”. I remembered that dad sang and danced on holidays. I limited myself to somersaulting in snowdrifts, and when I came home, I was surprised that my mother had not noticed that I was drunk. I could not stand it, I told my mother that I drank vodka. Mom slapped me and sent me to bed.
In the new year, 1943, we gathered at the “holiday” table, there was already something on the table, and my mother, to my father’s surprise, put a glass for me, saying something like this: if the Komsomol poured him the first glass, then it’s not a sin at home. And something else, about the time to stop.
I want to write about 1943, but I return in my thoughts
by 42, there are so many things left unsaid, details that at that time meant to live or not to live.
Here I am lying on the bed, almost motionless, remembering the well-fed times. Tsilya Markovna comes, says: "Come to the hospital tomorrow, I'll feed you." I came to the lobby, and there they dragged a dying dystrophic from the street. I remember the doctor said, "Give me a shot of morphine." Dali, he perked up and, it seems, he was escorted out. The hospital is for the military. Tsilya Markovna worked there as a housekeeper. She took me to her closet and brought a large bowl of soup. And once her husband, Vladimir Moiseevich, managed to smuggle a parcel from Murmansk. I remember how she came to us with an unopened parcel: "Let's see what's in there..." And there was butter, and sugar, and cheese, and something else. The first thing she did was put a thick slice of butter on a thin slice of Leningrad bread and gave it to me. I took a couple of bites and... passed out.
Dad works, category "employee". This is 300 g of bread. Pre-war firewood ran out. Went with dad in search of fuel. It manages several post offices of the Kuibyshev region (now Central). All of them are closed, dad has the keys. They opened, broke wooden racks for parcels, loaded onto sledges. We're taking it home. We already live in our fourth apartment, in house 21. Here we have a potbelly stove, there is not enough firewood for a beautiful tiled stove. The Niva magazine has already been burned.
Somehow, imperceptibly for me, my older brother Igor died, he lived on the street. Tchaikovsky 36, with the rest of the Kuznetsovs. I only remember how at the end of 1941 one of my sisters came to us and said that they were very hungry. My mother and I had half a bag of small potatoes, which my mother exchanged for my father's gold watch from a "girlfriend" from Rybatsky. Mom was not at home and I poured a bag of potatoes ... Mom did not swear when I told her.
From the Moscow region from Blagodatny Lane
our relatives the Koptyaevs, aunt Tonya and her son, my age-mate Volodya, came to visit us. Aunt Tonya's husband, Uncle Kostya, worked at Elektrosila before the war, immediately after the start of the war he was sent to the front as a political commissar, and aunt Tonya soon received a notice that he had "disappeared." The area of Blagodatny became a frontline zone, everyone was evicted, they asked us for shelter. They lived together for about a year, then they were allowed to return home. With Volodya, I went to the Neva for water, to the right of the Liteiny Bridge there was an ice-hole. They took a sled, two buckets - enough for two days.
The descent to the Neva - granite steps, from the constant splashes from the buckets iced over, the steps were barely guessed. Supporting each other, they got up from the Neva, sat down to rest. I remember how in slow motion - a person is trying to crawl up the icy steps. exhausted, almost black face. And hands, frostbitten hands with broken nails, cling to the icy steps. Together with Volodya somehow helped him overcome the last steps. Lie next to us. I caught my breath. He said that according to his article (?) they were released from the Crosses - there was nothing to feed. We moved it to the other side. He went, holding on to the wall of the house, turned the corner, to Liteiny.
I remember well the spring of 1942. After a bitter cold, a stormy spring has come. And now, on the streets of the city, littered with snowdrifts, on stairs and yards filled with sewage, people appeared. There were, of course, appeals on the radio, in the newspaper, but the townspeople themselves understood that it was necessary to clean the city. I remember how my mother pounded the ice with a crowbar, and I scraped it on the pavement with a shovel.
I still remember our first gardening experience.
In 1942, residents of the city were allowed to dig, plant, and even harvest. Papa was given 100 m2 somewhere near Murinsky, and even some seeds. We arrived (the tram was already going there), dug up the ground, sprinkled it with seeds, and in the fall we came to look for a harvest. Not found.
In 1942, there was a department store on Nevsky Prospekt. They traded all sorts of things left over from peacetime and objects of besieged life - oil lamps (a vial with a tube in which the wick), bags of flint, flint (steel bar) and tinder - a piece of cotton wool. Glowing icons different shapes even with drawings.
So, 1943. Bad, but I remember. I study at the 32nd school of the October Railway. Teachers of the good old school. I am a school commissar. Komsomol load - we go to the Moscow railway station: we clean the paths - roads leading nowhere for the time being, but we believe that "our mournful work will not be lost." On the sidings is the carriage of Admiral Tributs, commander of the Baltic Fleet.
Two naval officers come to the lesson and very politely say that after our help in clearing the tracks from the admiral's car, the plexiglass handle (a rarity at that time) disappeared and it would be nice if it returned to its place. This story ended happily.
On May 1, I am going to dine at the Palace of Pioneers, as a Komsomol activist weakened by health. From st. Zhukovsky on the street. Mayakovsky, along the Nevsky and to the palace across the Anichkov bridge. Over Nevsky in the sky, red clouds are flying - the Germans are hitting with shrapnel - a salute for the townspeople. True, there are not very many people - on Nevsky, the interval between people is on average 100 meters. But at the tram stop near Sadovaya (trams then ran along Nevsky) it was worse - those leaving the tram were covered with shelling. Smoke from explosions, bodies... And I'm going to have dinner.
To the topic: very quickly a person gets used to the terrible. I walked past mountains of frozen corpses, past bodies torn apart by shells... Probably, a protective mechanism is triggered, otherwise how could one live after all that I saw.
In 1943, dad was given 100 m2 for a garden near the Mill. Lenin and 100 m2 right in the bowl of the stadium. Kirov. We planted potatoes at the stadium. There, it seems, the soil was - one sand, and the potatoes turned out to be good, they collected a bag or two. Vegetable seeds were planted near the mill (they gave them out somewhere). Traveled and cared for. But they began to steal. I, already experienced with ammunition, had a plan of defense - a wire to a mousetrap, and instead of cheese - a live cartridge. It worked once, there were no obvious victims, and we collected carrots.
Like all normal boys, he loved everything that shoots, explodes. Having learned that a whole echelon of ammunition exploded on Rzhevka, I got there with a friend. And it’s true what kind of placers we found there. We walked over piles of rifle cartridges, over pasta from artillery shells. Packed full bags. At home, I had several bottles filled with gunpowder from rifle cartridges (and it was not too lazy to loosen the bullet, pour out the gunpowder). At my school friend, Yura Tamarsky, in his huge apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, we fired from a German machine gun along the corridor at a woodpile. At school (may the teachers forgive us) we arranged complete hooliganism: a bullet from another was attached to a live cartridge on a cardboard ... In general, I will not disclose our technologies, but all this exploded at the right moment, rumbled: stoves exploded in the classroom, in during the lessons, the lights went out, the contents of the inkwells flew up like a fountain. Even the teacher's desk sometimes became the object of our terror. So, despite everything terrible, life went on. People believed, hoped, loved, and laughed and joked too. Faith, Hope, Love helped us.
shelling. There are no bombs, I don't remember. In the spring I was sent with a group of schoolchildren to the Pargolovsky state farm. I still don’t understand why I was the only one from our class who went there. It is also true that the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad" was awarded (from our class) only to me.
It worked well in Pargolovo - either the summer was warm, or the health got better. We went to the field through the "false airfield".
Now, when we are driving from the city to Vyborg, fields crossed by the Ring Road stretch to the left of Pargolov. This is where the airfield was. “Runways” were mowed in the grass, there were even three real planes (apparently decommissioned), even real bombs were lying around (we rolled one for a long time to put it in the middle of the road). On one of these planes, I somehow lay (on the wing), watching a sluggish dogfight.
By the way, nearby, closer to Levashovo, there was a real airfield and twice I happened to be present at the crash of our flyers. Once, over our heads (we lived in the building of a state farm club), a Cobra fighter plane (England), two landing gears on the sides, the third in front, seemed to hang in the air and crashed about 100 meters into the woods near the club. The guys ran up, the pilot was lying 20-30 meters from the plane. Literally nearby was a field bakery - several barracks fenced off with wire. An officer jumped out of there and, firing upwards, shouted to disperse. Pilot Goryachev, we read his last name on an obelisk - in a cemetery located not far from us (now it has probably merged with Severny).
From this aircraft, we then pulled out tapes of shells and large-caliber cartridges. They blew it up.
The second, in the same summer, LI-2 (our "Flying Fortresses"), before my eyes, suddenly dropped sharply when approaching the real airfield in Levashovo, blew a field with its belly, crawled over the road to Pargolovo station and sat down on the other side of the road. Running up, we saw bombs sticking out of the walls of the ditch, not very large, we also saw a pilot saying all sorts of obscene words, and the second pilot did not speak, but groaned and his forehead was already bandaged. This plane was taken away quickly, and the first one remained in the forest. I asked the LI-2 commander why the bombs had not exploded, and he already quite politely explained why.
In the summer of 1943 we were no longer starving. I wanted to eat constantly, but it is quite tolerable. We already played, climbed trees, blew up shells from the Cobra. Once, the commandant of Pargolov Kuzma Ilyich visited me, brought me a loaf of white bread, then we went to the army shoemaker, and he made me chrome boots - at that time "fashionable".
The workers of the bakery (which was next to us) slipped bread under the wire, masked it with grass, moss - for their own, who then seized it. We also had our own game - to find these caches.
We worked with integrity. From weeding to cleaning. Then I happened to follow a horse with a hiller - to spud potatoes. The work is hard.
By the New Year, he was invited to the Palace of Pioneers for a Christmas tree. It was light, warm, interesting. There were gifts, there was a film "The Three Musketeers" in a comedy version, allies were visiting - the Americans, the British, they were photographed together.
Life gradually improved. With additional coupons, more and more often something was issued - either American stew, or even a bar of chocolate.
And finally, January 1944.
RELEASE OF THE BLOCCADE
When on the evening of January 27 I walked along Zhukovsky, Liteiny, Belinsky to the Field of Mars, I already felt: something grandiose was happening, a moment in history.
Then it seemed to me that the city itself had run out of patience and it spoke. The continuous, growing rumble of guns hung over the entire city for several hours. The city roared, but shells did not burst on the streets, houses did not collapse. The city went on the offensive.
Hundreds of people flocked to the Field, dozens of guns stood on the left side, it was dark, only the flickering of blue street lamps. And suddenly everything exploded, guns roared, thousands of rockets lit up everything: both the city and joyful faces. There were no festive fireworks then, but everything was firing - both the cannons on the Field of Mars, and on the Neva, and the continuous fires of rockets. Rockets were launched both by special installations and soldiers from hand-held rocket launchers - from the streets, from the roofs of houses. It seemed that the whole city was on fire, recouping for 900 days of fear.
Little by little life is getting better. There is electricity, but the norms are very strict, I remember, 4 kWh per month. We moved to our pre-war apartment and lived to see Victory Day. Sister Zhenya began to work as a nurse - first at the Comedy Theatre, then on the train "Leningrad - Moscow", then at the sanitary and epidemiological station, in the city health department. I finished school, entered VAMU. In 1948, the card system was abolished.
The memory of the past is still strong, but many details have already been erased. Dad's letters from the front disappeared somewhere, small objects of the besieged life were thrown out as unnecessary. Our house on st. Zhukovsky was closed for major repairs. My wife and daughter Nina were given an apartment in Vesyoloy Poselok. Moving from the city center, and then “perestroika” broke my sister’s psyche, she could not accept the new rules of life, enter into it ...
I remember my life in the blockade more with interest than with horror... Together with my many years of work in the Arctic, where there was also enough of everything, life is remembered as a struggle with difficulties, and this is interesting.
More than 60 years have passed, it would seem that everything should be overgrown. But sometimes at night, with insomnia, fragments of the war are recalled:
Here I am walking along our street and in front of the facade of the house bursts fire, smoke, roar. Projectile.
My mother and I in the courtyard at the back entrance to the store saw cereals spilling out of the bag. A little, mixed with road dirt. They collected it with their hands, then washed it, baked cakes. Sand crunches on teeth.
A truck full of frozen corpses passes by, being taken to the cemetery. The women sit on top.
In the winter of 1942, house 5 on Zhukovskaya caught fire. The fire broke out on the top, 6th floor. The house burned from top to bottom for several weeks - there was nothing to extinguish. There is a short article in Leningradskaya Pravda - a worker of such and such a plant left his felt boots to dry at the "potbelly stove", fell asleep, because of this the house caught fire. The worker was sentenced to death.
On Nevsky (then still Prospekt 25th October), corner of st. Marata, a very large bomb fell, but did not explode, it went deep into the asphalt. In the summer of 1942, when the tram was already running, they began to remove the bomb. Fenced off close to the tram tracks. Trams along the fence walked "on tiptoe".
In the spring of 1942, for the first time during the blockade, my mother cooked porridge - millet, thin. How delicious it looked!
The yeast factory learned how to make yeast almost from sawdust. They were sold without cards, by weight, as well as in cans. We fried them in a pan. Disgusting, even for that time. In the summer of 1942 he killed a crow with a slingshot. Welded. The broth is cloudy, the meat is tough, tasteless. Despite being hungry, he could not eat.
A boy from our class died of starvation already in 1943. He sold his ration of bread at a bakery on the corner of the street. Vosstaniya and Nevsky. He boasted of a thick wad of money... By the way, after the blockade was lifted, a decree was issued - all transactions in exchange for products were declared illegal and, if there was evidence, things and valuables were returned to the owner. I don't know if this law was in effect.
After the war, thousands of captured Germans led a column along the Nevsky. People watched in silence, there were no special emotions. Leningrad was quickly recovering, German prisoners were working, the object was fenced off, sentries were standing. The Germans are a disciplined people: the war is lost, so obey.
Over time, the regime of protection weakened. One summer, we got a call at our apartment - a German, frail, quiet (they were restoring the house opposite us). Politely asked for something to eat. My stern mother poured him a bag of potatoes, about 2 kilograms. The next day he came and returned the bag - washed, almost ironed. He didn't ask for anything, he just said thank you.
There are many passages like this that come to mind.
Another phase of life has begun. Study, interesting work, family, children, grandchildren, old age.
Close memory fails, I look for glasses sitting on my nose, I forget the names of long-gone friends, but I remember my childhood...
An ice cream man with a blue cart at the corner of Zhukovsky and Mayakovsky. Puts a round wafer into the mold
with names: Igor, Lena, Borya, Dima, Seryozha, Alyosha ... Ice cream with a spoon on top, another waffle - Dima, Tanya, Luda ...
We ask for your prayers for repose from the Eliseev Readings website).
From the son: Thank God that the father managed to confess and take communion at home a few days before his death. Kingdom of heaven to him.
P.S/ If someone was touched by my dad's story, then I had an idea to tell about other interesting episodes of his life that he told me - about his work in the Arctic, for example.
But this is if the readers wish.
Unfortunately, here it is impossible to insert several photos in one work, and this greatly loses the design.
Although, I may not have figured out such nuances yet, and this is possible.
All health and peaceful life.
Dmitriy.
The year 1942 turned out to be doubly tragic for Leningrad. In addition to the famine that claims hundreds of lives every day, an invasion of rats was added. Eyewitnesses recall that rodents moved around the city in huge colonies. When they crossed the road, even the trams were forced to stop, according to Day.Az, citing F4B.
The siege survivor Kira Loginova recalled that "... a crowd of rats in long ranks, led by their leaders, moved along the Shlisselburg tract (now Obukhov Defense Avenue) straight to the mill, where they ground flour for the whole city. They shot at rats, they tried to crush them with tanks, but nothing worked: they climbed onto the tanks and safely rode on them further. It was an organized enemy, smart and cruel ... "
All types of weapons, bombing and fire of fires were powerless to destroy the "fifth column" that ate the blockade fighters who were dying of hunger. The gray creatures ate even the crumbs of food that remained in the city. In addition, because of the hordes of rats in the city, there was a threat of epidemics. But no "human" methods of rodent control helped. And cats - the main rat enemies - have not been in the city for a long time. They were eaten.
A bit sad but honest
At first, those around condemned the "cat-eaters".
“I eat according to the second category, so I have the right,” one of them justified himself in the fall of 1941.
Then excuses were no longer required: a cat dinner was often the only way to save a life.
"December 3, 1941. Today we ate a fried cat. Very tasty," a 10-year-old boy wrote in his diary.
"We ate the neighbor's cat with the whole communal apartment at the beginning of the blockade," says Zoya Kornilyeva.
“It got to the point in our family that my uncle demanded the cat Maxim to be eaten almost every day. When we left home, my mother and I locked Maxim with a key in a small room. We also had a parrot, Jacques. Good times Our Zhakonya sang and talked. And then with hunger all peeled off and quieted down. A few sunflower seeds, which we exchanged for my father's gun, soon ran out, and our Jacques was doomed. The cat Maxim also barely wandered - the wool crawled out in tufts, the claws were not removed, he even stopped meowing, begging for food. One day, Max managed to get into Jaconne's cage. Otherwise there would be drama. Here's what we saw when we got home! The bird and the cat were asleep in the cold room, huddled together. It had such an effect on my uncle that he stopped encroaching on the cat ... "
"We had a cat Vaska. A favorite in the family. In the winter of 1941, my mother took him somewhere. She said that they would feed him fish there, we can’t ... In the evening, my mother cooked something like cutlets. Then I was surprised where we got meat from? I didn’t understand anything ... Only later ... It turns out that thanks to Vaska we survived that winter ... "
“The glass in the house flew out during the bombing, the furniture was stopped for a long time. Mom slept on the windowsill - fortunately they were wide, like a bench, - hiding with an umbrella from rain and wind. Once someone, having learned that my mother was pregnant with me, gave her a herring - she so wanted salty... At home, my mother put the gift in a secluded corner, hoping to eat it after work. But when she returned in the evening, she found a tail from a herring and greasy stains on the floor - the rats feasted. It was a tragedy that only those who survived the blockade would understand " - says an employee of the temple of St. Seraphim of Sarovsky Valentin Osipova.
Cat means victory
Nevertheless, some townspeople, despite the severe hunger, took pity on their favorites. In the spring of 1942, half-dead from hunger, an old woman took her cat outside for a walk. People approached her, thanked her for saving him.
One former blockade survivor recalled that in March 1942 she suddenly saw a skinny cat on a city street. Several old women stood around her and made the sign of the cross, and an emaciated, skeleton-like policeman made sure that no one caught the animal.
In April 1942, a 12-year-old girl, passing by the Barricade cinema, saw a crowd of people at the window of one of the houses. They marveled at the extraordinary sight: on the windowsill brightly lit by the sun lay a tabby cat with three kittens. “When I saw her, I realized that we survived,” this woman recalled many years later.
furry special forces
As soon as the blockade was broken in 1943, a decree was issued signed by the chairman of the Leningrad City Council on the need to "discharge smoky cats from the Yaroslavl region and deliver them to Leningrad." The Yaroslavl people could not fail to fulfill the strategic order and caught the required number of smoky cats, which were then considered the best rat-catchers.
Four wagons of cats arrived in a dilapidated city. Some of the cats were released right there at the station, some were distributed to residents. Snapped up instantly, and many did not have enough.
L. Panteleev wrote in the blockade diary in January 1944: "A kitten in Leningrad costs 500 rubles." A kilogram of bread was then sold by hand for 50 rubles. The watchman's salary was 120 rubles.
For a cat they gave the most expensive thing we had - bread. I myself left a little of my rations, so that later I could give this bread for a kitten to a woman whose cat had lambed, - recalled Zoya Kornilyeva.
The cats that arrived in the dilapidated city, at the cost of heavy losses on their part, managed to drive the rats away from the food warehouses.
Cats not only caught rodents, but also fought. There is a legend about a red cat, which took root in the anti-aircraft battery near Leningrad. The soldiers nicknamed him "the hearer", as the cat accurately predicted the approach of enemy aircraft with his meow. Moreover, the animal did not react to Soviet aircraft. They even put the cat on allowance and assigned one private to look after him.
Cat mobilization
Another "batch" of cats was brought from Siberia to fight rodents in the cellars of the Hermitage and other Leningrad palaces and museums. Interestingly, many cats were domestic - the inhabitants of Omsk, Irkutsk, Tyumen themselves brought them to collection points to help the people of Leningrad. In total, 5 thousand cats were sent to Leningrad, which coped with their task with honor - they cleared the city of rodents, saving the remnants of food for people, and the people themselves from the epidemic.
The descendants of those Siberian cats still live in the Hermitage. They are well taken care of, they are fed, treated, but most importantly, they are respected for conscientious work and help. A few years ago, a special Hermitage Cat Friends Foundation was even created in the museum.
Today, more than fifty cats serve in the Hermitage. Everyone has a special passport with a photo. All of them successfully protect museum exhibits from rodents. Cats are recognized in the face, from the back and even from the tail by all museum staff.
There is no fiction in these stories. Except that the names and surnames are different.
When the war started, we moved to the fifth grade. When the Nazis blockaded Leningrad, we were thirteen.
Those of us who survived the first blockade winter went to school in the spring, and in the summer, not far from the city, grew vegetables for the defenders of Leningrad.
Many of today's guys have the following idea about us then: the fascists pour incendiary bombs on the city - and we extinguish these bombs. The Nazis send spies into the city - and we catch these spies ...
All this was - both bombs and spies. But not everyone managed to put out the bomb or catch an enemy infiltrator. The enemy tested us not only with bombing and shelling. He tested us with hunger and cold. He tested our character and will, our honesty and friendship, our human dignity.
These tests were not easier, and sometimes more difficult.
Vitka Nekrasov
On the square, on the sunny side - a flea market. Disabled people, soldiers, sailors, wounded from hospitals. There is a change: tobacco for bread, bread for cigarettes, cigarettes for vodka, vodka for tobacco, tobacco for matches ... Who needs what.
The crowd is thick, but quiet. By the wall where the bakery is, sits a legless man. The overcoat is turned over, the floors are cut unevenly, the stumps are wrapped with scraps. He sits with closed eyes and mumbles:
- Tobacco, to whom tobacco ...
I do not have the courage to step into this slowly flowing crowd, to start: "Snuff, who needs tobacco ..." As in cold water to come in.
Finally I decide. I hold a pack of terrycloth in the palm of my hand - the last one left from my father.
- Makhorka, who needs shag ...
From below, they lightly beat on the arm. Bang - and the palm is empty. I look around, under my feet - there is no my mahr, and the crowd is pushing, pushing, scolding that I am standing like a fool.
- Do not yawn, spine, they will take your head away! The eyes are completely blue - point blank.
- Oh, you, salaga ...
A midshipman with a broken visor, a women's knitted jacket, a chicken neck sticking out of the collar - that's what I managed to make out. The boy failed.
I got out of the crowd and - to the house. Such a failure...
- Hey, wait!
I look around - Knitted sweater. Catches me up. Lame, sort of. Wide bell-bottoms, one trouser leg torn to the knee. Caught up with. Looks.
- You, is that how they trade!
What am I standing, what am I silent? He stole, of course.
Do you think I am? On, search!
He pulled up his jacket and sticks out his bare stomach in scurvy spots. So I believed - I already sold my shag to someone.
Turns out pockets. Nothing but burning glass. Throws glass, catches and says:
- See how it works.
Limping, he walks to the corner where the sun bakes. I follow him. He points the glass at the jacket, the jacket smokes and stinks,
- I saw it! Hyperboloid!
What rejoices? Think glass...
Then he begins to dance on the spot, waving this glass of his, and shouts in an impudent voice:
- Soldiers, sailors! Who to smoke? Why waste money on matches? Come on, who's first...
The foreman with a bag over his shoulders came up first. He put in a cigarette.
- Come on, hurry up.
- Now, comrade foreman.
The makhra at the end of a thick cigarette curled up and began to smoke. The foreman greedily lit a cigarette, drawing in his unshaven cheeks. His eyes watered.
- Order...
He ran, then returned, rummaged through the pockets of his overcoat for a long time, finally took out a piece of sugar, covered in tobacco crumbs, put it in a knitted jacket - on! - and go.
- Did you see it? Clean work! Volga-Volga! Knitted jacket shone. I looked at him like a magician in a circus.
- Who to smoke, who to smoke? Free smoke, straight from the sun! Come, who has no matches!
Few have matches. Rare thing. The commander came up. He smiles condescendingly - let's, they say, indulge. He held out a cigarette, Kazbek.
- Oh-oh-oh ... - Knitted jacket took the cigarette carefully, like glass - the world!
- Do you smoke? the commander asks. – What is your name?
- Victor ... I'm not, dad smokes. The commander takes out another kazbechin.
- This is for dad. And thanks for the prank. He smiles, as if Knitted jacket is a relative of him. And he is glad, shouting in pursuit:
- See you soon on Victory Day! Two sailors are sailing. Hugging. On peakless caps - "Cruiser" Kirov ". One takes the glass from Vitka, points it for a long time, the hand does not obey: "Oh, fuck you ..." He lit a cigarette, gave the glass, looks at Vitka with heavy eyes, then - pat on the shoulder! - he so sat down.
- You will come to the ship, ask Vasiliev Peter, understand? Peter. Understood? We have Nikolai Vasiliev, it's not me ... Got it?
Vitka rubs his shoulder, and he himself - I see - he himself is pleased. Still would! Lucky man. I wonder where he put my shag? .. Or maybe not him? Maybe someone else? Most likely. Otherwise, why was he chasing me?
- Sell, boy, a piece of glass ...
- Not corrupt, light it - please.
- Eh, light a cigarette ... Summer is on the nose, there is a lot of sun, but there are no matches ...
- What, checked out?
The soldier nods instead of answering left hand She's in bandages...
- From Leningrad?
- Kolpinsky.
- Okay, take it, if Kolpinsky ...
The soldier carefully hides the glass in the pocket of his tunic, fastens the button, pats his chest with his healthy hand:
“Well, thank you,” he says, “thank you.” And this is for you. Hold on. Enze!*
He hands Vitka a piece of bacon, covered in coarse gray salt, two hundred grams per piece! Vitka weighs it on his hand and puts it in his pocket.
His pockets were bulging: there are crackers, sugar, pea concentrate, and now more bacon ... The soldier says goodbye to Vitka by the hand. I can't stand it.
– How now?
- What are you talking about?
- Well, he gave the glass - why?
- To hell with him! Look - a full deli! Volga-Volga!
“Wait, I’m running to my dad, I’ll be right back.” Confused in flares, he walks past the flea market, greets someone, whispers to someone, argues - everything along the way. So he came to the legless one, squatted next to him, emptied his pockets ... And the legless one laughs, is pleased.
Then Vitka comes back to me, wrinkling his forehead.
- Dad wanted to smoke Kazbek, but there was no glass ...
- You know, - I say, dumbfounded by my own kindness, - let's go to my place, I have a photocopy, there is a magnifying glass. Screw it out - and that's it!
- Well...
- Let's go, let's go!
I'm afraid that Vitka will refuse.
“I don’t need this photojournalist at all, honestly!
It seems that there are two panes of glass - even better: we will stand together in the square, on this hot corner. You won't get lost with Vitka.
We walk along Red Street towards the house. I'm asking:
- Why don't you go to school? It has been open since May 1st.
“No time,” Vitka replies.
- And you come tomorrow, we have a dining room, they will feed!
- Well, yes? I will come!
... In the room we have collapse, dust, dirt. We are still living in the kitchen. But this is nonsense, now almost everything is like that.
Just entered - Vitka to the bookcase: moves his lips - reads the titles.
- Volga-Volga! How many here - a thousand?
“Four,” I say, “do you want to read the ladies?” Do you want Treasure Island?
- Don't... Listen, you can make money on this business, - he points his finger at the books, - I give a tooth ...
I do not understand how you can make money on this business. Before the war, my father went to bookstores every Sunday. And the janitor Aunt Masha consoled her mother:
- Why are you upset! My man drinks, and that's okay ...
In short, I knew how the last money was spent on books. And here...
“You don’t understand,” Vitka says. - OK. I'll bring the professor to you. You'll understand right away.
Oleg Rymov
Vitka did not deceive: he brought the "professor". It turned out to be Oleg Rymov. I met him at our school.
Rymov was clean, tidy, well-fed. He greeted him politely, took off his corduroy jacket, and for a long time did not know what to do with it. He grimaced before hanging his jacket on a chair. For the first time I felt ashamed of the confusion and dirt in the room. And he was angry with himself for it.
Rymov took the books with disgust, with two fingers, as if he was doing a favor by looking at them.
“Books need to be wiped down,” he remarked, and blew off the dust.
I felt superfluous here in the room, but it was he who came to me - not I to him!
- I'm taking this one, - said Rymov, - I'll burst into tears tomorrow, at school.
He didn't even ask if I agreed. He was absolutely sure: he wanted it. I did not understand what this confidence was based on, but I could not resist it.
Rymov carried Andersen's fairy tales under his arm. Old book. Babushkin.
We handed over our food cards to school and ate in the canteen: breakfast and lunch. It was called UDP - fortified baby food or "you die a day later." Then even three UDPs would not have been enough for us.
Before breakfast, Rymov came up:
- Sit with me.
There were four of us at the table: me, Rymov, Vitka and Valka Kamysh. Kamysh pounded his spoon on the table and shouted:
- I wanna eat!
Vitka to him - thin voice:
- You're lying!
Rymov looked out of the window indifferently. Then he said:
- Shut up, you.
They fell silent.
My head was spinning. I didn’t have to read the menu, because I already knew what would be for breakfast: it smelled of slightly burnt millet porridge, bread and meal cakes - it’s like curds made from soy milk.
I swallowed my portion at once. Rymov slowly, as if reluctantly, ate the porridge, and when the cakes were brought, he pushed them towards me.
- Eat.
I didn't force myself to ask. At recess, Rymov took out a paper bag from his briefcase.
- Oh, this is a book.
I unrolled the bag. There were dried vegetables: tomatoes, onions, potatoes, beets, carrots. I chewed a dried tomato - it was extraordinary! My mouth felt sour, sweet and salty all at once. I immediately ceased to regret the book and was ready to immediately take Rymov to my place and give him everything he wanted.
Rymov began to come to me two or three times a week. He was never late. He will say - at three - and will come at three, no later. He rummaged through books for a long time and always chose the worthwhile ones. Rymov never forgot about the bags and gave them away somehow by the way, so that no one would notice. And I was grateful to him for that.
I couldn't bring the bags home. Where did you get it from, mom asks. What will I say?
After lessons I stayed in the classroom or went outside the school to a deserted stadium, and there, sitting under a statue of a discus thrower, black from coal dust, I ate my bag: first potatoes, then onions, then beets, carrots and tomatoes for a snack. Each time I vowed to myself to end it all. Today. And forever. And never let Rymov in again.
But the morning came and everything started all over again.
Once Rymov noticed a radio receiver under my bed. Brother did not have time to collect it to the end, and he was gathering dust under the bed next to a bunch of textbooks and notebooks on radio and electrical engineering.
The brother was a cousin. He studied in Leningrad and lived with us. And he went home for the holidays, to the Urals.
I remembered that on winter evenings my brother sat at the table and made this receiver. Quietly whistled and mastered. I fell asleep to the hiss of the soldering iron and the smell of rosin. I liked this smell.
Rymov pulled the receiver out from under the bed. It was the first time I saw him so excited.
“Listen,” he said, “give me this receiver ...
- It's not my.
“Come on,” said Rymov, “it’s a war, why regret something.”
- Brother will return, I will get ...
“He won’t be up to it if he comes back. Writes?
“He writes,” I lied.
“Listen,” Rymov winked, “but give me some time, not for good.” I will collect.
I can. I have drawings. The brother will return, and you, please, are a ready receiver for him!
Time is another matter. Why not give it time? And if it doesn't come back...
- Everything will be chin-chinar, - said Rymov, - I will not remain in debt. Come to me tomorrow whenever you want. I won’t go to school either - I’ll collect the receiver. You can eat breakfast for me. Just bring sugar and bread. And let Vitka eat dinner. Vitka will also come with us on Sunday. Forgot about Sunday?
No, I didn't forget about Sunday. On Sunday I have to stand at the school gate. And Rymov, Kamysh and Vitka will climb into the basement for an electric motor.
Rymov said that he had scouted everything: in the basement there was a school physics room, all the instruments, and if he wanted to, he would have taken everything away! But he only needs an electric motor, and there they are heaps. And if anyone thinks that this is theft, he is a fool, because the war, everyone forgot about these motors a long time ago, and there is water in the basement, and the appliances only rust.
... I have never been at Rymov's house. I entered a large bright room, and my eyes ran wide: books in glass-fronted cabinets, flowers on the windowsill, models of ships on the floor, on chairs. There is even one hanging from the ceiling! My receiver is on the desk... And it's warm. Unusually warm.
- Well, that's what, - said Rymov, - I have no time. You go to the kitchen - there is a green pot of pasta - eat.
Behind a colorful curtain is the kitchen. On the table are kerosene stoves, a primus stove, various saucepans. And green. I lifted the lid: leftover pasta, white as snow, had dried to the sides and bottom of the pan. Apparently, they forgot to interfere. I mechanically counted pasta: ten, fifteen, seventeen...
“The spoon is there, on the table,” said Rymov. He hummed a song: - Early in the morning, fishermen gathered by the river ...
I took a spoon, peeled the pasta from the bottom of the pan - it was burnt on the other side - and put it in my mouth. The pasta was very bland, as if it had been boiled without salt.
“You and I are even,” Rymov said cheerfully, “I ate breakfast, ate it, eat pasta, eat it.” And get a receiver. And I work. Don't finish before autumn.
I chewed on cold burnt pasta and it became salty. The green saucepan floated in the fog, my throat tickled, my face became wet, and I realized that I was crying. I couldn't stop eating that salty slippery pasta and it made me cry even harder. I tore off the pasta and chewed it furiously, as if they were to blame for everything.
And when there was no more pasta in the pan, I seemed to wake up and clearly, distinctly understood: everything, I reached the point. It would be better for me to choke on this pasta, and not see a receiver like my own ears, and no one will help me, I have to get out myself.
"Early in the morning by the river, tra-la-la-la-la..." Rymov bent low over the table. He did not even hear how I left the room, how I was looking for the front door in the dark corridor.
... The morning sun began to bypass the yard from this corner. We came to school early, an hour before breakfast, sat down on the boards that lay along the wall, leaned against the already warm plaster and basked in the sun.
So it was this morning. I came and sat down in a free place, leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. It was a blissful state when you think about nothing but the upcoming breakfast - it looms ahead like a holiday.
Someone pushed me hard on the shoulder. I open my eyes - Kamysh.
- Ale, - says Kamysh, - the professor ordered me to transfer - tomorrow at twelve. Here in the yard.
So tomorrow... Tomorrow is a damned Sunday.
...Kamysh has a round, shiny face, all freckled. Kamysh goes to the Andreevsky market every day. Maklachit. What he sells there is unknown, only he always returns with a loaf of bread in his bosom. He waddles across the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge, and we stand on the embankment and fish. When he passes us, we turn our heads in his direction, and he breaks off the crust and throws it in his mouth ...
“Tell your professor that I won’t come,” I say in someone else’s thin voice.
Kamysh's eyes widen.
With a quick movement, he grabs my legs.
Don't move. Reed leans towards me and hisses:
- Will you come?
- Let go.
- Will you come?
I want to spit in his face, but there is nothing to spit - my mouth is dry. He starts to carry me on the ground.
- Will you come?
- No!
- Will you come?
- No! No! No! I scream and suddenly feel free.
I rise from the ground and see: a boy on crutches is standing against Kamysh. Rather, on one crutch. With another he swung at Kamysh:
- Get out.
Quietly and calmly he said: "Get out."
Kamysh spits angrily, picks up his bag and, shaking his fist at me, leaves the yard.
“Don’t drift,” the boy tells me, “they didn’t turn their noses like that.” And where is the food here?
His face seems to be thick, and if you look closely, you can see that it is swollen.
“Here,” I nod at the dining room windows. “They will open at nine. What are you, injured?
- Legs? No, scurvy. They sent me from the orphanage. In a week I'll go with you to the back room. I will eat grass. The scurvy will pass...
So I met Vanya Voinov.
Herring
I get off the tram at the monument to Suvorov, turn onto Khalturin Street and walk towards the Hermitage. I have a green soldier's sack behind me, it contains ten turnips and twenty-four potatoes. For two weeks I dragged them from the field in my bosom and hid them under my mattress. The bag pulls the shoulders.
Here is the house, third from the corner. front door. Nikolai Petrovich descends towards me. He is Aunt Sonya's second husband. She broke up with the first before the war.
Nikolai Petrovich stops. I tell him:
- Hello! and lower my eyes.
Now he will say: "Ah, he appeared. Well, we did not expect such nasty things from you. A good guest, there is nothing to say ..."
“Sofya Nikolaevna is at home,” he says dryly, “and I, excuse me, am in a hurry.
"Sorry, I'm in a hurry..." I hate this politeness! It would be better to say directly: you are a thief, you have robbed our children, I despise you.
I slowly go up the stairs. I stand on every step. I'm standing on the platforms. Six months have passed since I was here.
If only she didn't scream. Let him ask how it happened, I'll tell you everything. Let her at least start: "We were sitting in the room ..."
Yes, we were sitting in the room, right in our coats, it was cold. Kostya and Kira lay in their beds. Kira was sick. She found some harmful pills in the closet and ate them out of hunger.
“Yes, yes, those were terrible days,” Aunt Sonya will say, “thank God, everything is behind us.” Well, and then...
Then I began to fidget in my chair and you said: “Go to the kitchen, there is a bucket. It’s terrible that we drink so much. Wear it from the fifth floor, can you imagine ...” “You have to control yourself,” said Nikolai Petrovich. I could no longer control myself and went into the kitchen.
The bucket stood by the window, and I immediately saw these herrings on the windowsill: a whole one, a little more than half from the other, and separately - a tail.
“Yes, yes, Nikolai Petrovich was then given out at work,” Aunt Sonya will say. - It was such a holiday!
If I eat a ponytail, I thought, they will immediately notice. We need to find a knife. I turned around and saw a kitchen knife. He lay on the table next to him. I listened and carefully cut off a piece of herring. I ate it so fast I couldn't even taste it. And then he returned to the room. "How long have you been walking," said my mother. She told how to make linden blossom cakes.
“I remember, I remember,” Aunt Sonya will say, lime blossom cakes ...
“These are wonderful cakes,” my mother said, “eat three pieces and you feel that you have eaten. You can fry on drying oil ...”
Tortillas, I thought then, no matter how much you eat them, you won’t get enough. Here's a herring... And I began to fidget in my chair again, this time on purpose. I made grimaces to be noticed and pitied. "Be patient," said Mom, "we'll go now, it's impossible, they have the fifth floor..." "You let him drink too much," said Nikolai Petrovich. how swollen you are. I only hold on to self-discipline." "I give Nikolai Petrovich half of my ration," you said. “That's right,” said Nikolai Petrovich, “under these conditions, a man needs twice as many calories and vitamins. It will be worse if I fall down.” 
I kept fidgeting in my chair until you said: "Come quickly to the kitchen, it hurts to look at you..."
How much more can you cut off without being noticed? Very little. I ate this slice and I wanted more. I aimed at the tail, and then it seemed to me: someone was coming. Come what may, I decided, and put the ponytail into my coat pocket. I ate it afterwards, at home.
“How early Misha died,” Aunt Sonya will say, “how could he have thought ...
Misha is my father, Aunt Sonya's brother.
Now is the time to untie the bag and dump all my wealth on the floor.
- What is this? - Aunt Sonya throws up her hands. - Where does it come from? Just a miracle!
...Aunt Sonya does not open immediately. She fumbles for a long time with the valve, the key, the chain rattles.
“It's you,” she says calmly, as if she knew in advance that I would come today. - Come in, I'll close the door. The kids are sleeping, let's go to the kitchen...
No, not just in the kitchen.
– Just a minute, Aunt Sonya, just a minute... I brought it...
I pull the bag off my shoulders, it doesn't come off, I'm in a hurry. Damn straps, hooked! At least she screamed, or something.
Finally, the bag is in my hands. Now - untie the ribbon.
“You’re tanned and stretched out,” says Aunt Sonya. - How are you fed?
“Fine,” I say, “the food is wonderful, I have enough, very enough, so I brought you a little ...
Aunt Sonya takes the sack from me and unties the ribbon.
- How did it come to your mind? she says sadly.
Aunt Sonya looks at me very carefully. Will start now. Just to hurry up.
- What would I like to treat you to ... do you want some porridge soup or a piece of herring? Nikolai Petrovich received at work.
I grab the sack from her and dump it on the floor with a crash.
Thanks, I'm full. They gave us for work, they will give us more ... This is Kostya, Kira, they are sweet as sugar, honestly!
I thrust two purple turnips into her hands. Kostya leaves the room with his big red head tilted to one side. What a big head!
He silently holds out a thin hand.
“Now, Kostya, now,” Aunt Sonya says, “no, there are so many here, I just don’t know ...
“Is it a lot,” I say joyfully, “it’s very little. We are full of it!
I retreat to the door.
“How early Misha died,” says Aunt Sonya. Could he have thought...
Slowly, slowly, the door closes. It would close sooner. I hate that hairy door with bits of felt sticking out in every direction. I hate the stairs I climbed, and the potatoes, and the herrings, and the freight train that I went to Leningrad with. And myself - why do I stand and do not run away from here.
Vanka Warriors
We have a strange relationship with him. I'm afraid of him. I'm afraid he'll say something hurtful to me. Suddenly he will say: "Well, why are you following me?"
From the day Vanka stood up for me, I began to follow him. And he acted like nothing happened. As with everyone, so it is with me. No better, no worse. I then realized: if someone else had happened in my place then, Vanka would have acted in exactly the same way. And the next day - and I forgot to think. This is such a person.
I must have looked creepy. 
He agreed no matter what he said. Laughed when he laughed. Silent when he was silent. Sang when he sang. I even cursed, although it was disgusting to me. But he was cursing!
I felt like I was being carried somewhere. I was his shadow, only with the difference that no one notices the shadow, and Vanka noticed his own shadow and got angry.
I imitated him in everything. I liked the way he ate—slowly and neatly. I liked the way he worked - deftly and quickly. I liked the way he sang - sincerely and selflessly.
And yet - he knew how to look for mushrooms. In the forest, I followed him on his heels and was surprised: nothing but fly agaric and rotten russula. And he has a full basket, but what!
Independence - that's what distinguished him from everyone and raised him above everyone.
Adults singled him out among us and treated him with respect, especially the teacher Vera Nikodimovna. She just loved him; otherwise, as Vanya, Vanechka, and did not call.
How I envied him! How I wanted to be loved in the same way, called in the same way, consulted with me in the same way, pranks were forgiven in the same way ...
That day I was on duty in the kitchen, washing dishes. Vitka Nekrasov looked through the kitchen window.
- Go to the station! The platforms have arrived! Out of pain...
I dropped everything and ran to the station. Opposite Zhenya. Under the arm is a pot-bellied pillowcase.
“Run,” Zhenya shouted, “otherwise it won’t be enough!”
I started running.
There is a long train at the station - the head is not visible. On the last platform, the guys are swarming. I climbed up too. The guys crawl along the boardwalk, raking handfuls of gray dust. I scooped it up, tried it: viscous, stuck to the palate - and in fact flour, real flour!
I pulled off my T-shirt, tied it in a knot and began to rake the flour into this homemade bag. Carefully I rake: flour on top with a thin layer, and under it - sand.
I rake and keep looking around: others have more than I have, much more.
I hear them shout:
- Ale! Went!
I waved it off. Someone's head disappeared over the side of the platform. I already have half a T-shirt, but everything seems to me not enough, I still want more.
The platform rocked. I grabbed onto the side. The switchman's booth crawled back. I looked around: one on the platform! Gray flour dust shudders underfoot.
- Jump!
Vanka Voinov is standing on the rails and waving to me. He is very close, I can see his face.
- Now! I shout and feverishly rake gray dust into my T-shirt. My heart is beating, the wheels are beating - and I am rowing with both hands, more, more ...
- Jump!
Vanka runs after the train. I no longer see his face.
- Jump!
Fear in the stomach. Sweet nauseating fear. How to jump? Vanka runs between the rails.
- Drop the bag! Jump!
I feel sorry for throwing, it will crumble after all. I hop over the tailgate, find a buffer with my foot, stand up and carefully lower the T-shirt with flour down. I see her flopping to the ground, a puff of dust rising where she fell.
- Push harder! Jump!
I push off, jump and... run on the ground after the train. Run, run and stop. It's so cool! I wave my hand to Vanka and shout:
- Whoa! E-ge!
I immediately forgot about the fear. It was as if he didn't exist. I am bursting with joy. I walk along the sleepers and smile. I want to sing.
Vanka is sitting next to my bag. He takes off his shoes and taps his boots on the rail, shakes out the sand. Without looking at me, he says:
- You are an idiot.
- Why? I ask smiling.
- Look...
Vanka puts his hand in his T-shirt. There is some dirt, rubbish on his palm... What about flour? Where is the flour! I grab the sack, drag it aside, pour it out onto the smooth, hard-packed earth—that's right! God knows what! Stones, sawdust, dust...
- Well, sift, - says Vanka, - put it in a cap and shake it. The flour will remain on top.
I tried it, it really works. Mixed with sand, but still ...
- Where is your bag? I ask.
- What bag?
- Well, with flour.
- And why is she to me? What am I going to do with her? he says kindly. - I have no one to bake pancakes.
I shake my cap and automatically repeat to myself: "There is no one to bake, there is no one to bake ..."
The locomotive hummed, the same one. How far has he gone! I suddenly vividly remember how I was raking flour with both hands, how I was in a hurry, how I was afraid to jump, and Vanka ran after the train and shouted: "Jump!" And everything that was with me on the platform, and then: the joy that it didn’t crash, the flour that is in the cap - everything, everything fades and recedes before this “there is no one to bake”.
- Well, I went home, - says Vanka, - for now ...
He says "home". And Vitka says - "to the camp." And Zhenya - "to the ward." Pre-war.
What a house this is!
Home means home. House alone. This is Leningrad. A street, a house, an apartment... But Vanka, it turns out, doesn't have a house. He, then, has no one to bake pancakes ...
He walks along the sleepers, his hands in his pockets, he walks slightly hunched over, his cap with a button on the top of his head, he walks and spits - now to the right, then to the left, then to the right, then to the left.
No one - and that's it.
__________
* NZ - emergency reserve.
Drawings by L. Tokmakov.
