MAIN
MENU SOLDIERS AT WAR DOCUMENTS BATTLES TANKS ARTILLERY 
|
MAIN
MENU SOLDIERS AT WAR DOCUMENTS BATTLES TANKS ARTILLERY |
The Vyritsa train stations was about 50 km from Leningrad on the Vitebsk Railroad. That's where the biological station of the Leningrad A. I. Gertsen Pedagogical Institute was located.
Professor V. I. Arnold-Aliabiev was managing summer practice for the students of the Geography Department. I worked as a laboratory assistant for him - ensured the equipment's readiness for classes, helped conduct practical training, managed students' shifts at the meteorological station.
It was the third week of the practice. In the afternoon of June 22 rumors of war came from somewhere. Vyritsa was not that far from Leningrad, but neither the biostation nor surrounding houses had a radio, or a broadcast listening station, or a telephone. Only late at night did an idea come to find something out in a resort several kilometers from our base.
A group of students went to the resort. I went with them. The gates of the resort were locked, the guard announced categorically: "What war - everyone's asleep already!" The guys climbed over the fence. After some time sleep was interrupted, a radio was turned on, people assembled around the loudspeaker... War!
Several days passed. Our group decreased by more than half. Students were disappearing one after another: some at the summons of a military commissariat, others volunteered, not waiting for the summons.
We set up 24 hour duty shifts at the biostation, near the phone connected to a temporary line laid there. I was put on the duty roster because I was considered to be part of the station's staff. During the daytime, instead of classes, we dug holes for cover against possible bombings. Then we received an order to halt the practice and close the base.
Everything was familiar from the 1939-40 period in the city. Strips of paper were glued crosswise to the windows of buildings. People with gas masks were on duty at every building entrance. There was no question of black-outs yet - you could see everything during a white night even without light. Otherwise, the city was calm. Many walked with gas masks, but public transportation was working precisely, stores were full of merchandise, there was brisk trade in carbonated water with various syrups at every street corner - a heat wave began on June 22, it was the first really hot day in Leningrad during that summer.
My mom and brother, who were in Bolshaya Izhora on June 22, told us about what had happened during the first night of the war. They had a good view of Kronstadt (main naval port in the Baltic - trans.) from there. They saw the air raid, saw anti-aircraft fire from the ships and forts of Kronstatdt, but they thought those were exercises.
In the first half of June my brother and I, as a part of a group organized, as far as I remember, by our School No.245, went to dig trenches. We rode in commuter cars pulled by a steam locomotive, but without a schedule, as a "special train". We unloaded at the Veymarn station, near Kingisepp. Then we walked for about an hour. Our job was to dig an anti-tank ditch. Work schedule - dig for 8 hours, then rest for 4 (right there on the ground), food (bread and canned meat), then 8 hours of work again, and so on.
 People digging trenches. An anti-tank ditch construction in the area of Ivanovskoe to the south of the village of Kingisepp. Middle of July 1941. Drawing from memory. (E.Monyushko artwork) |
The ditch was approximately 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, triangular in cross-section. Templates had been made from boards to check its dimensions. There were a lot of people assembled, but work was progressing slowly - no one had any experience. Apparently, one of the teachers escorting our group was in the army sometimes in the past - he was dressed in a semi-military uniform without any insignia. People were constantly asking him various questions because of that, demanding his advice. He waved them away saying that he wasn't in the military, he was a fireman. This caused doubts and suspicion...
On July 14, my birthday, in the middle of the day, an order was passed along the line of diggers from somewhere on the left: "Everyone is to assemble immediately and go toward the railroad." People, initially with distrust, then faster and faster, started to collect things strewn about, started walking...
A long line of people was stretching toward the station, my brother and I were also walking with everyone, but knowing about possible air raids, about what low-flying air attack was, tried to walk separately from the crowd, not on the road but parallel to it, through the brush and woods. Our things were packed not into suitcases and bags, like the majority of people, but into a traveling-bag with shoulder straps - backpacks were still pretty rare in those days. Possibly, our behavior and the way we looked attracted everybody's attention. We were asked to show our papers. It's a good thing brother had his passport with him, because I didn't have a passport yet due to my age, I only became sixteen on that day.
We encountered soldiers running through an unharvested wheat field in a column one after another. They waved at us, gesturing that we should walk faster, and ran in the opposite direction themselves. A group of our SB aircraft flew in the same direction above us. One of them, flying at a low altitude, suddenly broke apart in the air, its wing separated. The plane and its wing fell separately, reaching the ground almost simultaneously. Explosion! I didn't see the cause: maybe Germans were shooting from the ground, or their fighter passed unseen by us... That was the first aircraft downed in front of my eyes. Some of the people who saw it maintained that the plane was German, mainly reassuring themselves, but I knew aircraft silhouettes pretty well and was sure it was an SB.
The train station appeared in the distance, but it was too risky to approach it: locomitives parked there were sounding an air raid alarm with short and frequent whistles. Only late in the evening of July 14 did the uncoordinated groups of "diggers", my brother and I among them, start to make their way to the station. We found a two axle platform coupled to a locomotive there. Aircraft technicians were using it to bring several aircraft engines closer to Leningrad. We rode this platform to a place where transportation system was still working. We got home only in the middle of the day of July 15 to the great joy of our mother and all the relatives. They had been worried about us, and it wasn't without cause. There were losses among "diggers" and, as I found out after the war, one of my classmates, Liusia Afansieva, was captured by the Germans in a similar situation and was liberated only at the end of the war in Hamburg by the Allies.
We also had to ride out to defense line construction around Strelna after our trip to Veymarn. That was really close to Leningrad, and now is inside the city limits.
We spent nights taking shifts being on duty in our 245th School on the Griboyedov Canal. The school's military training teacher Fiodor Grigorievich Ivanov was in charge of this. He was a reserve officer, tall, somewhat round-shouldered, with a strange gait: when walking he turned his soles outward. Possibly, it was the result of some disease or old wounds. He wasn't young, might've been a participant of the Civil War, and probably this was why he was still not taken into the army in the field. Ivanov gave out "arms" to the students on duty - a pneumatic rifle. Periodically we would walk around the school building, from the side of the street and the yard. Our main task was not to allow light signals from windows in case of an air raid. But there hadn't been a single air raid yet.
When I wasn't on duty at the school, I was on duty on the roof of our building, where a local air defense group was also created. Lone German planes started appearing. They didn't bomb, but our AA gunners fired at them, and shell fragments sometimes fell on our roof. The roof was made of metal sheets, but couldn't protect against them. I found an old cast-iron plate and decided to fix it under the roof beams. I barely had enough strength to lift it to its place and affix it with metal spikes - now I had a place to hide if the metal "rain" became dangerous.
During the long periods of attic duty I recalled my mom's, her borthers' and sisters', stories about the times of the Civil War, about how it was "tough" with food and warmth. An idea came that the approaching winter would also be hard. Air raids became frequent and I had to spend a lot of time in the attic. So that I wouldn't be wasting that time I started making a metal stove - "burzhuyka" - out of the remains of roof metal sheets left over from past repairs. The first ever experience of metal work convinced me of the truth in the proverb: "The eyes are afraid, but the hands just do it."
At first I was ashamed of the low quality and feared accusations of alarmism, so I didn't let anyone see my work. But when I did haul it home, I was pleasantly surprised by the approval of the entire family. This "burzhuyka" faithfully served us through the entire winter of the siege.
 The "burzhuyka" metal stove that faithfully served us through the winter of the siege, 1941-42. My first attempt at metal work. (E.Monyushko artwork) |
I wasn't a KOMSOMOL member yet, but I was given a task to participate in the examination of residential buildings through the school's KOMSOMOL organization. This work was conducted by the district VLKSM committees on the order of the people in charge of the city's defense. Our task was to get a realistic picture of free or sparsely populated residential space in order to have a reserve for relocation from houses destroyed during bombings. The residential registration data in possession couldn't serve for this. First of all, many of those who left for the summer hadn't returned to the city yet, and second, many people already had relatives and friends who ran away from the western areas of the country living with them.
A group of five people, including me, was allocated a house on the corner of Ekateringof Avenue and Kriukov Canal, between the Mariinskiy Theater and the garden of the Nikolskiy Cathedral. It was a huge house of glum, dark grey, almost black color, with a multitude of entrances. We walked through all apartments in turn, recording. We were greeted differently. Some feared the reduction of their quarters, grumbled, tried to pass their condition as more difficult than it really was. But I don't remember a single case when anyone tried to bar our checks - our mandates worked. But still the majority of residents willingly showed us their apartments and told us of how many people they could accept if the need arose. We submitted the collected data to the October District KOMSOMOL Commitee, located in a building on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Voznesenskiy Avenue. In the same building, after almost 50 years, I was given a document about the right to receive a "Citizen of the Besieged Leningrad" badge.
I had regularly attended the Leningrad Pioneers' Palace for almost four years prior to the war, where a meteorological station was set up in the geophysics sector. The classes were conducted by the already mentioned V. I. Arnold-Aliabiev. The second month of the war was coming to an end, but schoolchildren were still taking shifts at the station; like before, they came to make observations, recorded readings from the instruments. Sometimes I would run by and take a duty shift. Although, previously impossible cases of observers not coming to their shifts appeared. Then our laboratory assistant Iraida Aleksandrovna Martynova would take the shift instead.
I remember well that artillery shells were the first to start exploding in Leningrad, and bombs came later. Approximately in the middle of August, a rumor about a shell falling somewhere in the area of the Moscow Railway Station circulated. I "detoured" there while returning from the Pioneers' Palace and saw a hole in the wall of a large building on the Basseynaya Street, around the third floor, approximately 20-25 square meters in size. You could see the inside of a room mutilated by the explosion through it. The few passers-by were exchanging comments. The majority, as if they were experts, maintained that it was a bomb from a plane, although the nature of the hole spoke differently. People didn't realize yet how close the Germans approached the city. I didn't know that either, but I knew that during the First World War, Germans shelled Paris from the distance of 120 km. That's why, even supposing that the Germans were still far, I wasn't surprised by the bombardment - guns with the range of 200 km could've appeared by this time. I had no idea that the enemy was significantly closer. Their real range needed to be only 20 km.
September came. The talk of our continuing to go to the 10th grade dropped as something obvious. Tolia went to work at the A.Marti Factory, where our father worked, and learned the profession of a lathe operator in a short amount of time, and I applied to the Hydrological and Meteorological Service Directorate, since I had a qualification as a technician hydro-meteo-observer from the classes at the Pioneers' Palace. Some time passed while the question of my appointment was being decided.
Despite the white nights effect being unnoticeable in September, I remember that two or three nights in the beginning of September were strangely light. Possibly, these were far flashes of the Aurora Borealis. It's hard to say who benefited more from this. On the one hand, the city was visible despite the black-outs, but on the other hand, an aircraft was also visible in the light sky. But these nights were calm.
Literature says that the first bombs fell on the city on September 6. I didn't know about it then, and always thought that the first bombing occurred on September 8. Here's how it was.
In the middle of the day I, as always, climbed to the roof at the signal of the air raid alarm. Incidentally, I want to note the difference between Leningrad and Moscow in the alarm. As far as I know, in Moscow they announced: "Citizens, air raid!" We had a siren and then words: "Air raid!" As if this was designed to underscore the absence of differences between the military personnel and civilians. After all, it would seem strange if AA gunners' or a warship's alarm signal began with the word "citizens".
We had a good view in the southern direction from our six-story wing. The northern side was blocked by the seven-story facade part of our building. There, in the south, heavy AA fire started. Aircraft appeared between white clouds of explosions covering the sky. Not single planes like before, but a whole formation of them - tens of aircraft from the look of it. They flew at a low altitude - you could clearly see their engines, shining disks of spinning propellers, details of their tails. The aircraft dropped their bomb loads on the southern side of the city, and proceeded north without changing direction, as if on parade. Where the bombs fell a wall of dust and smoke appeared, rising higher and higher. The smoke didn't settle, didn't dissolve when the planes left, on the contrary, it grew thicker and thicker. When it started to get dark, the lower part of the smoke cloud became colored red, becoming brighter as the darkness arrived. Finally, tongues of flame appeared between the buildings' silhouettes.
The fires continued through the night, and there was smoke above that area even the next day, although considerably thinner. It became known later that Badaev storehouses with food reserves were burning that night. Judging by the width of fire and smoke, not only the storehouses were burning, but the nearby residential and industrial city blocks, right up to the commercial port.
I'll repeat again: as far as I know that was the first bombing in Leningrad. Regular raids started after that, usually at night. A massive daylight air raid was repeated only in the spring of 1942, in April. But I'll talk about that in its own time.
On September 9 a heavy bomb hit a residential building on the corner of the Maklin Avenue and the Griboyedov Canal. The house had been built by the A.Marti Factory and its residents had moved in not long before the war. A five story wing overlooked the canal with its side wall, and the building facade of 16 windows looked at the Maklin Avenue. The bomb pierced all floors of the building's end farthest from the canal and turned the range of 4 windows in the facade into a pile of bricks. Walls covered in wallpaper of various colors with rugs, pictures, photographs could be seen in the remaining part of the building... The distance between our house and the point of impact was 300 meters in a straight line. The explosion shook us hard, but all windows remained intact. Some scribblers aiming to present all actions of the Soviet government in black light ridicule the recommendation to glue strips of paper over windows. They only display their incompetence with this. Of course, paper strips would not protect during a nearby explosion, but still the radius of damage to glass would lessen significantly.
On September 11, when it was already completely dark, I was on the roof during the latest air raid and the heavy AA fire, and saw a shadow of some object descending with a parachute flash nearby. The parachute could be seen with sky illuminated by searchlights as background, and only for several seconds at that, until it disappeared behind some buildings. I decided that it was a pilot of a downed German plane and immediately dived into the attic window to sound an alarm. But I didn't even have time to let go of the window frame when our house shook, somethig crashed...
When we returned home after the "All clear" signal (all of us had our posts), we found that the shock wave threw the kitchen window open and a large pot of water standing on the wide window-sill fell to the floor. But the windows' glass remained intact again. It's fortunate that I wasn't on the roof any longer during the explosion, or I could've been thrown off to the ground. I inspected the place of the explosion in the morning a realized what had occurred.
 A house on the corner of the Malkin Avenue and Griboyedov Canal. This is how it looked 2 days after it had been hit by a bomb during a night air raid of September 9-10 1941. Drawing based on a 1941 sketch. (E.Monyushko artwork) |
A naval mine dropped with a parachute missed the Neva River and fell pretty far from it, on the embankment of the Griboyedov Canal, in the center of a semicircular plaza at the intersection of the canal with Lermontov Avenue. All three buildings with facades looking at the plaza were completely destroyed, and the wooden Mogilev Bridge over the canal was damaged and became accessible only to pedestrians. Later, in 1942, it was taken apart for firewood by a decision of the district council. It was rebuilt only in 1954.
The start of the air raids on the city gave rise to fears of a possible chemical attack. The Air Defense Headquarters required a way to determine the possibility of the spread of chemical substances through the city depending on wind's direction and velocity. A worker of the Leningrad Institute for Experimental Meteorology David Lvovich Leihtman proposed to experimentally determine the dependency of air currents in the city streets on the direction and velocity of wind measured in two or three base points of the city. But this experiment required simulteaneous measurements of wind at base points and at a large number of points in different parts of the city over a significant period of time. The work itself was not complicated, but required a large number of trained personnel. The Meteorological Service could not provide them, and D. Leihtman, who also taught meteorology at the Pioneers' Palace before the war, asked us to participate. Instruments needed were also found, besides the Meteorology Institute, at the Pioneers' Palace and V.I.Arnold's department at the Pedagogical Institute.
In practice, this work consisted of taking readings of the wind's direction and velocity in a multitude of points throughout the city every 15 minutes. The duration of this wind measurement was supposed to be just enough to cover all most likely wind variations at the base points.
 The general view of the Pioneers' Palace building. The left dome of the main wing is marked by an arrow. An aerometrics observation post was located there in the autumn of 1941. In 1941 trams still ran in the Nevsky Avenue. (E.Monyushko artwork) |
As a rule, we were on duty in pairs, and served shifts alone only in the most conveniently located points. I got a post on the roof of the main building of the Pioneers' Palace (former Anichkov Palace), at the intersection of the Fontanka River with Nevsky Avenue. The left wing of this building had the geophysics sector premises, V.I.Arnold's office, and there was an exit to the roof in the small dome, inside a wooden booth. Every fifteen minutes I had to raise an anemometer on a two meter pole, turn it on for 60 seconds, simultaneously determining the wind's direction from a pennant or a weather-vane, take readings, calculate the wind's velocity in m/sec from the anemometer's reading, and communicate the results to the center over the phone line laid to the roof. On the very first day it turned out that during strong winds it was very hard to hold the pole with the anemometer with one hand and manipulate the on and off wires with the other. I came with tools and materials - nails and wire - to my second shift. Now the pole could be put into a special stand, and both on and off wires were fixed to hooks with "Start" and "Stop" captions. The work became easier and more comfortable. First optimization!
Many, myself initially included, thought that a post in a spot so high and open from all sides was more dangerous than others - after all, the city was being shelled and bombed. But it turned out differently. Only a shell that hit the dome directly was dangerous. If a shell fell short or overshot - it exploded somewhere far below, and the person on top of the roof was safe. But on the ground - that was different.
I observed many bombings and shellings from my high position. I saw how shells exploded on the Nevsky Avenue, on the Fontanka. I saw the explosions of heavy bombs in various parts of the city, both near and far. You can only be amazed at the miracle that none of our guys were hit by the fragments. Once Faya Samsonova and Garik Slavkin, who had been on duty somewhere on the Petrogradsaya Side, came back all bruised from brick fragments, with their clothes brown from brick dust. A bomb destroyed a house on the opposite side of the street from their post. Nevertheless, they held out to the end of their shift.
After the war I returned to Leningrad on vacation and found out that Slavkin had been drafted in 1943 and died in combat. Samsonova lived in Leningrad through all the days of the siege and survived. She worked on the fire crew of the conservatoire building during the war time.
I remember that the air raids and shellings caused some difficulties with getting to my post by the start of my shift. All movement in the streets was stopped at the signal of an air raid alert, police and Local Air Defense volunteers herded pedestrians into bomb shelters, under cover, under arches. Many times I had to cross the Anichkov Bridge by running despite the whistles and yells of a policeman so I wouldn't be late for my shift.
Late fall, when darkness fell early and it became colder, the necessary data had been recorded and wind measurement were stopped. I didn't work for some time after that and only concerned myself with keeping watch on the roof and the attic and some house work.
Bombings occurred almost every night in October, and air raid alerts were announced 10-11 times during some days. If the signal caught me at home, I had to get up to the roof every time.
Soon I was offered a temporary job as a laboratory assistant at a school for reserve officers of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. Practical meteorology training at that school was conducted by V.I.Arnold-Aliabiev, the founder and leader of the geophysics sector at the Pioneers' Palace. The classes were based in our sector and used our instruments, so it's natural that one of the sector's students was chosen as the laboratory assistant. This school worked until severe frosts began in the end of November.
By that time malnutrition started to affect me noticeably. It became harder and harder to walk to work and back, it was 5 kilometers from our house to the Palace, where the classes were conducted. Initially after rationing was instituted, the rations were large enough, but gradually they started to decrease without any announcements - store shelves simply emptied and there was nowhere to receive what you were due.
 We spent our shifts in attics and on roofs like this during cold autumn and winter nights, waiting for the "All clear" signal, which would be heard over the city's broadcast network as the sound of fanfare. Drawing based on a 1941 sketch. (E.Monyushko artwork) |
My first sign of malnutrition was that it became harder to climb out of the attic window to the roof during air raids. I could manage it in one hop during the summer or the fall, only slightly pushing against the window frame with my hands. Now I had to even make a special stand out of bricks or other attic rubbish to get out the window. Soon it became noticeably harder to climb the steep back stairs from the apartment to the attic, two floors higher. Of course, I had to dress warmer and that played a role. Daylight duty shifts were given to thsoe who didn't have a job at that time, including me. Spending my time on the roof during daylight, I knew all the entrances and passageways from one wing to another and even to neighboring buildings better than those who were there only in the dark of night.
I was on the roof of the southern six story wing during one of the night raids, and my father was on duty on the northern, seven storied one. Germans usually dropped incendiary bombs in large packages of hundreds of units, covering a large area. The bombs were small, weighing 1 kg each, cylindrical in shape with a blunt nose and a stabilizer at the tail. The were made of a flammable metal called "elektron" - an alloy of magnesium, aluminum, and zinc. If the detonator worked the bomb would burn out completely at high temperature that could melt metal. When such bombs fell from a large height and in large quantities, a sound could be heard that was similar to loud rustling and dull whistling at the same time.
That day, or rather that night, a cloud of incendiaries descended on our block. Rustling, hissing, whistling ended with frequent bangs on the metal roofs, loud pops of bursting incendiaries, and blinding bluish-white flashes. The bombs didn't touch our building if you don't count the ones that fell in the yard - they were handled by the watchers below. But an incendiary was flaring up with a bright flame on the neighboring house No. 144, it's side wing. A little more and a hole would be burned in the roof, the beams would catch fire... No watchers could be seen on the roof of No. 144. Father crossed from our facade wing to the neighboring one, but didn't know how to descend to the side one, which was one story lower. I knew that several wooden slats, which could be used as steps, were nailed to the brick wall. I ran there over the roofs and in the darkness and haste caught my foot on a support cable of an antenna mast. I fell with my open mouth onto another cable and bit it so hard that I tore the corners of my mouth and broke four teeth. A shovel that I held in my hands slipped from my grasp and fell down from the seventh floor. I got up somehow, dragged myself to the firewall, climbed over it, feeling for the slat with my foot. Father handed me special fire tongs. Having descended to the side wing, I threw the flaming incendiary down into the dark well of the yard, turned down the burned through metal sheets of the roof, put out the flames in the frame starting to catch fire.
 The putting out of an incendiary bomb on the roof of a residential building. A bomb would be grabbed by special tongs and thrown down to the pavement where it wasn't dangerous. Below, it would be put out with water or sand only for the purposes of maintaining the black-out. (To put it out with water, it would be thrown into a barrel). (E.Monyushko artwork) |
I couldn't risk to use this improvised ladder to get back - I was afraid I wouldn't have enough strength left. I got back through the attic, down then up again, to my apartment. I came in with my face bloody, all dirty and covered with soot. It turned out that my appearance was such that father didn't recognize me when he handed me the tongs on the roof.
I drew a practical conclusion from what happened already on the next day. I climbed to the roof and used a thin wire to tie strips of white cloth made out of an old bedsheet to all wires, support cables, antennas, and other similar things, which made them noticeable in the dark.
The situation with food became worse and worse. The city public transportation stopped in September, I think. But even prior to the complete shutdown trams and trolleys often stood still because of breaks in wires and damaged rails during shellings. By that time artillery shellings became more frequent and more ordinary than aircraft bombings. It was easy to see that the enemy was close, since not only the shells from heavy long range guns exploded in the streets, but also field artillery 105 mm or less in caliber. You could see the traces of shrapnel on the walls of one of the buildings on Griboyedov Canal (No. 156 or 158) even after the war - the shelling's purpose was not the destruction of some target, but the killing of people in the streets.
At that time ration cards were not yet "attached" to any specific store, searching for food demanded some running around the city. I had easier time walking than the others, and I got to be in different parts of the city during such trips.
Despite all the hardships, despite shellings, bombings, starvation that had already started, the great holiday of the October Revolution was not forgotten. There were red flags on residential and commercial buildings, there was the broadcast of Comrade Stalin's address at a celebratory meeting in Moscow and his speech at the Red Square during the parade. And there was an order of the City Council's executive committee about distribution of 200 grams of wine from remaining city stores to all citizens through their ration cards.
We received a large bottle of Massandra rose muscat for our family of four. We assembled around the "burzhuyka" on the holiday eve, had a celebratory supper where my brother and I tasted wine for the first time in our lives. The muscat was great.
It's strange that despite the already noticeable weakness I didn't feel inebriation but only pleasant warmth and sweet taste in my mouth. As if to spite the Fritzes, the holiday took place in our country, and in our city, and in our family.
We gradually adapted and got used to the living conditions dictated by the siege. All life in our large apartment concentrated in one central room. Since autumn, the windows of all rooms were covered with paper shields made of many layers of newspapers glued together. These shields, which didn't let any light through, were made to fit each window and were nailed or pinned directly to window frames, which allowed us to open each window if the need arose. This black-out system had been "developed" by us even prior to the Finnish war of 1939-40, during the Air Defense exercises that had been regularly conducted in the city. When the cold weather arrived, these paper shields significantly decreased the drain of the remainder of heat through the windows. The "burzhuyka" stood on a stand of bricks, it's pipe fed straight into the stove's chimney (we had stoves for heating in those times). All our housekeeping stuff was nearby on the table - dishes and illumination devices. First we had a kerosene lamp, then after the supply of kerosene dried up we started using candle-ends lying around, even those from a christmas tree, but later it came to a small peasant torch. During the day, when it was light, we would take the paper shield off one of the windows. While we still had power, we had to reattach the paper very securely so that not a slightest ray of light could escape. But now, when a candle-end barely lit the room, holes were not dangerous anymore in that respect.
Of course, we could not succeed in maintaining normal temperature in the room with our "burzhuyka". You would have to stoke it continuosly for that, but we ran out of firewood pretty fast. Obviously, we couldn't make the usual stores of firewood for winter that year. That's why we kept up the fire only for cooking. We burned pieces of wood picked up on the street, wood chips, paper, some books, furniture. The cutting up for firewood of our old bent "Vienese" chairs turned out to be difficult. A pair of us could barely manage to cut off a piece of a leg with a hand saw. The difficulties at the fuel front were made worse by the fact that the winter of 1941-42 was unusually cold for Leningrad. Frosts were rather severe, and there wasn't a ingle thaw, usual for this place, throughout the entire winter. As the result, the temperature in the room fell below freezing, the water inside the bucket and the kettle would be ice covered in the morning.
It wasn't easy to get water either. Running water disappeared the same time public transportation stopped working - there was no power, but you couldn't keep normal pressure in the pipes anyway because of constant damage due to bombs and shells. The residents of areas close to Neva used the river water. Our house stood on the embankment of the Griboyedov Canal, but no one would risk taking water from there since Leningrad canals are polluted even today, and in those days the water was almost not transparent. Although, toward the spring of 1942 the water in them cleared noticeably in a natural way as the result of industrial enterprises not working. That's why in areas far removed from the Neva the residents looked for different sources of water supply. Most often they were bomb craters that broke water mains. These craters were filled with water that kept coming under low pressure from punctured pipes. One of such improvised water fountains closest to us was on the Turgenev Square, about one kilometer from our house. It seems like not far, but we needed no less than one hour to bring back 4-5 liters of water - we didn't have the strength to get more. Sewage froze and became clogged due to lack of water. All waste was taken outside and froze into tall snow drifts, or was dumped in the canals, which of course also made it impossible to get water from there even for technical purposes.
There is a lot of information about the food situation in literature, the most trustworthy of which is what was published closer in time to the war years.
I would also like to note some details about what I saw and know from my personal experience. Bread ration cards were not attached to any specific store. They gave their holder the right to buy bread at any bakery in the city. The coupons on a card were dated, and you could only receive bread for the current day and one day ahead. Coupons from a past day became invalid. Of course, bread was only sold by weight, not in units. Food ration cards - separate for meat, cereals, sugar, fats - were also "free" at first, but later they were attached to specific stores according to the place of residence. Because of significant population losses, and also to guard against German attempts to disrupt food supply by distributing fake ration cards, re-registration of all cards was conducted two or three times a month. When eating at a factory cafeteria, a ration card gave the right to receive dinner without regard to where it was attached. The needed quantity of coupons for cereals, fat, meat was cut out of it upon the receipt of the meal. In the late autumn, when even a meager supply of food was not set up over the Ladoga route yet, the declared rations could not be provided, and many Leningradians still have ration cards with unused coupons as a reminder.
The most difficult period for bread supply occurred already after the first increase of bread rations, which happened on 25 December 1941. In the first half of January, due to reasons not connected with lack of flour, but because of short supply of fuel for baking and interruptions in water supply, bread deliveries to stores were disrupted, there were shortages of it, and long lines stood in the freezing cold, not dispersing even after close explosions of shells - people simply fell and pressed themselves close to building walls. You could say that people didn't stand in lines, they laid in them. Those that left the line for any reasons lost the right to return to it, and no amount of begging could help.
 A street in the besieged Leningrad. This is how store windows were coverd with boards and earth, how water was carried from the bomb craters that punctured water mains, how the fallen were carried away to their final resting places... The drawing, based on 1942 sketch, shows a building on the corner of the Malkin Avenue and the Sadovaya Street. (E.Monyushko artwork) |
Bread was delivered to stores from bakeries in sleds which had to be pulled and pushed by two-three people. Interruptions with bread supply didn't go on for long - not more than one week in our district. Still, even these days proved too much for some, and the number of victims of starvation started to increase during that time. More and more often in the streets you could encounter people pulling sleds with bodies of those that died tied to them, barely wrapped in some rags. You could also often see dead bodies in the streets.
In the beginning of 1942 clear allocation and notification was set up with food-stuffs supply. Announcements of the Trade Directorate of the Leningrad City Executive Committee that in the course of certain days a coupon of a ration card (the coupon number was given) could get you such and such amount of such and such product were broadcast and later, when newspaper publishing was reestablished, were also printed. Even if the product quantity was minimal it was available in all stores according to the number of people attached to them, and anyone could get what he was due without any difficulties. Of course, this saved the strength of starving people, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it saved the lives of many. The city's Party organization, the City Council, did everything possible to save the lives of the citizens.
Besides bread, various cereals, fats (most often plant oil: sunflower, mustard, walnut, coconut, flax oil), powdered eggs, sugar, meat, salt were distributed through ration cars, although in small quantities. As far as I remember, there was no defined monthly norm of food-stuffs distribution, it was based only on the possibilities of supply.
Besides the food received through ration cards, different surrogates were in use, pets were eaten, and I must say that a roast cat doesn't differ much from a rabbit, so no explanations are required here. But I should mention carpenter's glue. The bars of carpeneter's glue were soaked in water for about a day beforehand, then they were boiled in water until they completely dissolved (one bar per 2-3 liters of water). To mask the noticeable smell of glue bay leaves, pepper were added - many housewives kept these spices since before the war. You could eat it both hot, as a soup, or after it cooled, as a jelly, especially if you could get some mustard for it.
Something similar was also made out of rawhide, but I must say it was less edible.
For some time after rationing was instituted you could buy surrogate coffee in stores, sometimes even natural unfried coffee beans, and also various spices including mustard powder. We made some attempts to bake flat cakes out of mustard or coffee grounds - mixed it up, and fried the resulting "pancakes" right on top of the hot "burzhuyka" or in a dry pan. It was terribly bitter, but some feeling of satiety remained.
When the frosts came and the half-starved life began there was another source where you could get something to eat - before deep snows fell. The city dwellers made their way to the area of Sredniaya Rogatka and other near suburbs and looked for remains of frozen potatoes or cabbage-stalks in already harvested vegetable gardens. It was risky business because the front line was very close. On the one side you risked to get hit by stray German bullet, on the other - the risk of being arrested for violating the regulations. But if you were lucky you could make decent schi (traditional Russian soup - trans.).
I think that the prohibition of such excursions was well founded. It kept people away from danger, and at the same time was necessary for the rear area's security.
Sometimes we found something unexpectedly pleasant and useful. On the eve of the New Year we decided to raise our spirits by somehow decorating our room and dug out the box with christmas tree decorations. We found that some of them were made of some sweetly edible substance and immediately used them according to their purpose. We always had small stores for light repairs in our house, and we found natural flax paint among them. It turned out that it could serve for cooking.
Of course, as I already mentioned, pets were used as food. Our family had neither a dog nor a cat before the war. But in the late autumn or winter we were able to get cats twice. Father, who had lived in Siberia in his youth and had some experience hunting, took upon himself the difficult task of turning that game into meat that could cooked. It was also difficult because we had little physical strength left, and because we had no tools save for a small crowbar/nail puller. To tell you the whole truth I must also mention that we used not only meat but even scraped the fat off the skin - not a bit was wasted.
We also had other problems besides the hunger and cold, among which was lice infestation. Before the war we knew about that only from books about the Civil or the First World War. In the beginning we couldn't even understand the cause of the constant urge to scratch ourselves. Cold, emaciation, constant nervous tension were not conducive to us taking off our clothes and underwear, and what would we have been able to see under the dim light of a torch?
Where did lice come from? Apparently, we brought them from public transportaion, from lines, from bomb shelters. We managed to fight off this plague only in the spring, with the arrival of warmth and light.
We all became gradually weaker, our strength was leaving us. Mother held out longer than anyone. Father used his last strength to leave for the factory, and we never knew if he would come back. Brother took to bed in the end of December and couldn't even move around the room. Probably our family woudn't have avoided casualties if it wasn't for mom's sister, Aunt Galia. She was a doctor and worked at a hospital. Not getting enough to eat herself, she shared some bits of her military ration with us, bringing once every one or two weeks several rusks or two-three pieces of sugar. Heavy human losses caused special centers for help to the most emaciated people to be organized at the factories and other companies. These centers were called "statsionars". Of course, it was almost impossible to find additional rations for people that were put there. But on the other hand, the accommodations where they were deployed were warm, you could wash and rest there, but most importantly - even though the diet was meager, it was regular. Many people died because they couldn't correctly allocate all food throughtout the period before the following rations were given out, ate everything in the first days, and were left completely without food. Their weakened organism couldn't take it. Without a doubt, statsionars saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Father was also put in the factory statsionar toward the end of winter. He spent two weeks there. This helped him a lot, he came back significantly stronger and it was obvious that the main danger was past. I was also put out of commission for a while in February - took to bed. The weakness was such that it was hard to turn from one side to the other while lying in bed, painful bedsores appeared because of that. In general, Leningradians' thinness and emaciation were such that even several months after the winter of starvation, after rations had been increased significantly, many people who had desk jobs carried specially sewn pillows with them, without which they couldn't sit - bare bones on a hard chair.
As far as I remember, there were very few air raids on the city in the winter months - they were replaced by artillery shelling. Possibly, winter difficulties with landing strips were responsible, fuel shortages, or heavy fighting on other fronts, near Moscow in particular, but the air raid alerts became rare.
Spring was approaching, and the threat of an epidemic hung over the city. Despite all our efforts, there could be corpses in the streets under the snow. All snow drifts had waste poured on them, which could become a source of infection after melting. This could not be allowed to happen, the city could die otherwise.
The city's defense leaders Zhdanov, Popkov, Kuznetsov called on all Leningradians to come out to clean the city. Weak, emaciated people came out, crawled out into the streets and performed a miracle - the city cleansed itself, freshened, and it became apparent that it didn't break. All reserves of fuel were used up, power was given to the tram network, city cargo trams drove out into the streets. People manually shovelled snow mixed with dirt and garbage into them, to be driven away and dumped into the Neva, into canals, from where spring floods would carry it away to the sea. An unusual quiet settled over the city in those times. Factories, not even all of them, barely worked, there were no cars in the streets. Sound carried far in that silence. For example, when cargo trams drove in the Ogorodnikov Avenue, we, at the Griboyedov Canal, could very well hear their bells and the screeching of their wheels against the rails when turning. And the distance was no less than three kilometers. The city cleanup was not limited to this huge effort. The city streets were kept clean better than before the war, and despite the destruction and boarded up windows, the city looked majestic and solemn.
Air raids were renewed in the spring. I remember well a big raid in April. Germans thought to use the fact that ships on the Neva were not yet free of ice, didn't have the ability to maneuver, and tried to destroy our navy. The raid happened during the day. My brother, who wasn't yet recovered from extreme emaciation, and I were home. We could only see the sky completely covered with the white foam of explosions. But the din of the large number of AA machine guns installed on ships and some buildings was deafening. These machine guns decided the fate of the raid. Aiming to hit the ships, the Germans attacked from low altitude, dived toward the ships, but were hit with dense fire at point blank range, couldn't get out of a dive, crashed into ice, water, ground. The navy didn't suffer any serious losses, all damage was quickly repaired by the city's shipbuilding factories. But the losses to German aviation on that day amounted to tens of aircraft.
Spring quickly took control. The city was reanimating. During the winter there had been centers created in many stores, where you could get a glass of hot boiled water, warm yourself. They even tried to make those places somehow cozy, despite the semi-darkness due to the windows being covered with special contraptions made of boards and filled with sand. These protective contraptions reliably protected from bomb fragments, same as the boiled water saved from frosts and helped out many citizens.
Winter starvation caused scurvy to appear in the city. And so, in the same centers that supplied boiled water in the winter, posters appeared with instructions on how to make vitamin tincture from pine needles, and also how to cook various dishes with spring grass - nettles, goose-foot, and others. Soon this healing draught was made available there, free like the boiling water.
Thanks to the spring warmth, light, the city gradually reanimated, its people reanimated, us included. Soon brother was already going to work at the mechanical section of a shipbuilding factory, where he made mine casings on a lathe. I also got to work at a factory.
Preparation for winter started in the city as early as the summer. Medical commissions conducted physicals on people, directed them to be evacuated. In July I went through a medical examination by a commission. The commission's conclusion was that I was a third category invalid for the next 6 months. The doctors made the same determination for all the other members of my family, and in August 1942 we were evacuated.
|
|
Translated
by: Oleg Sheremet |
|
|
|