Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (20 page)

For the young, the raids were initially rather exciting. Igor Kruglyakov, the eight-year-old who had had his photograph taken with his father and uncles on the first day of the war, enjoyed watching incendiaries slide down the mansard roof of the Suvorov Museum, sneaked into the local cinema for free by mingling with the crowd after all-clears, competed with his friends to collect shell fragments (the rule was ‘finders keepers', even if the fragment was too hot to pick up), and was delighted when his family moved to a safer ground-floor flat in another building, because it meant that he could pet the pigs and calves which peasant refugees had penned up in its courtyard. Teenagers, firewatching through the lovely, frightening nights, had adolescent love affairs. ‘Once, during a game of
flirt
[a parlour game]', Klara Rakhman wrote after a shift standing guard at her school, ‘Vova write me a note – “What if I told you that I loved you?” I thought it was nothing but he carried on writing to me. I do realise that at a time like this it's silly to start anything, but it was his initiative . . . This evening he walked me home. I asked him whether what he wrote to me was true. He said it was.'
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Professor Vladimir Garshin, chief pathologist at Inber's Erisman Hospital (and Anna Akhmatova's lover), had no such compensations. For him, the raids meant a new sort of cadaver:

 

Shapeless lumps of human flesh, mixed with bits of clothing and brick dust, all smeared with gut contents. Relatives flooded in, some with faces motionless as masks, others screaming and shouting. It was hard to calm them down and make them answer questions, but we had to because there were death certificates to be filled out, and instructions to be taken on how to bury the dead. Those hours and days in the mortuary after raids I can never forget. Not the corpses – I saw lots in my decades of work – but the relatives . . . To a certain extent I was accustomed to taking on part of the burden of grief and horror, but there it went beyond all limits. By evening your soul was paralysed; I would catch myself wearing the same sympathetic expression and using the same formulaic words. You were left feeling completely empty.
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Leningrad had no underground system, and the government never provided equivalents of the mass-produced, do-it-yourself Morrison and Anderson shelters with which Londoners reinforced their homes during the Blitz. Instead, Leningraders took to the boiler rooms and stairwells of their apartment buildings, or to trench-like shelters dug in public parks and squares. They became accustomed to endlessly interrupted nights and days, to leaving cups of tea half drunk, pulling on coats and galoshes, dozing on benches and mattresses in dark, crowded basements (‘rats ran along the pipes like tightrope-walkers') and to climbing back upstairs to a cold stove. In the deeper basements, the aeroplanes and anti-aircraft guns were hardly audible (such was the case in the Hermitage, though there were doubts whether Rastrelli's arches would hold), but in most, Leningraders braced themselves to the rising whistle of each approaching bomb (‘one wanted to squeeze oneself into the ground'), to the thud and thunderclap of impact and explosion, followed by the drawn-out roar of collapsing buildings, tinkling glass, brick dust, screams. ‘Everyone thinks “This one's for me”', wrote Berggolts, ‘and dies in advance. You die, and it passes, but a minute later it comes again, whistles again, and you die, are resurrected, sigh with relief, only to die again over and over. How long will this last? . . . Kill me all at once, not bit by bit, several times a day!'
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Morning journeys to work, for those who had not decamped permanently to their factories or offices, turned into tallies of familiar landmarks damaged or destroyed. Bomb-sliced apartment buildings resembled stage sets or doll's houses, their banal domestic innards – sofa, cornflower-patterned wallpaper, coat hanging on a peg – brutally exposed. ‘The cross-sections', wrote ever-analytical Lidiya Ginzburg,

 

illustrated the storeys, the thin strata of floor and ceiling. With astonishment you begin to realise that as you sit at home in your room you are suspended in space, with other people similarly suspended over your head and beneath your feet. You know this of course – you have heard furniture being moved about upstairs, even wood being chopped. But that's all in the abstract . . . Now the truth is demonstrated in dizzying, graphic fashion. There are skeleton buildings which have kept their façades . . . the sky shows through the empty window-sockets of the upper storeys. And there are buildings, especially small ones, whose beams and floors have collapsed under their crumbling roofs. They hang at an angle and look as if they are still sliding downwards, perpetually descending, like a waterfall.
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Vera Inber and her husband moved into the Erisman, allotting themselves a small room with two iron bedsteads, a cylindrical stove, a desk, a bookcase and an engraving of Jenner giving the first inoculation for smallpox. The ancient poplars in front of the windows, they tried to persuade themselves, would help protect them from blasts. Previously somewhat detached from events in Leningrad – her thoughts more with friends and relatives left behind in Moscow – the move put Inber at the centre of the hospital's life, which she was faithfully to record throughout the siege.

On 19 September, the day of one of the worst daylight raids (280 planes dropped 528 high-explosive bombs and about 2,000 incendiaries) she went to visit an old friend from Odessa, who she found sweeping her floor of fallen plaster while dead and wounded were carried out from the building next door. It was a long way from their shared pre-revolutionary childhood. ‘I remember her', Inber wrote the next day, ‘in the autumn of 1913, in Paris. She was so young, so gay, so attractive. A whole crowd of us went off to some fair. We ate chestnuts, rode on a carousel, looking out at Paris through falling leaves.' That day bombs hit the Gostiniy Dvor (an eighteenth-century shopping arcade on the Nevsky) killing ninety-eight, as well as four hospitals and a market in Novaya Derevnya (‘New Village'), an old-fashioned working-class district of timber yards and nursery gardens on the north bank of the Neva estuary. Inber saw fifty wounded brought in, ‘one a child of about seven years old. She kept complaining that the rubber tourniquet on her leg hurt. People comforted her, telling her that the pain would soon ease. Then she was anaesthetised, and the leg amputated. She came round and said, “Wonderful. It doesn't hurt any more.” She had no idea that she had lost her leg.'

Four days later, at half past ten on a golden autumn morning, a huge bomb landed, but mercifully failed to explode, in the grounds of the Erisman, burying itself next to the fountain in the hospital's central courtyard. ‘The strange thing', wrote Inber, ‘is that I hardly felt the impact. My first thought was that a heavy door had banged.' She spent the tense ten days it took sappers to defuse it reading to wounded soldiers:

 

I was sitting on a stool in the middle of the ward, reading aloud a story by Gorky. Suddenly the sirens began to wail; the sound of anti-aircraft fire seemed to fill the entire sky, a bomb crashed, the windows rattled.

I sat on my stool, unable to lean back, as there was nothing to lean back against . . . surrounded by windows, and by the wounded – helpless people, all looking at me, who alone was healthy and mobile. I summoned up all my will-power. I let the drone of the aeroplanes go past, and read on, anxious that my voice might shake with fear. When I got home I felt so weak that I had to go and lie down.
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Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht's heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. Worst affected were the factories to the south of the city, including the massive Kirov defence works and Elektrosila power plant, both situated just behind the front at the end of tramline no. 9. To the end of November the Elektrosila's buildings were hit seventy-three times. Fifty-four thousand residents and the whole or part of twenty-eight factories were moved northwards out of immediate firing range, into buildings emptied by evacuation. The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.

 

The danger from overhead was not all that occupied Leningraders, of course, for mid-September was also when the city seemed likeliest to fall. Though people could now hear the thump of artillery fire for themselves, most still did not know exactly where the fighting was going on. Sovinform's reports were as vague as ever: more reliable, the joke went, were the news agencies OBS – ‘
Odna Baba Skazala
', or ‘One Gossip Said', and OMS – ‘One Major Said'. That the front was very close was obvious, both from the shells landing in the streets and from the hundreds of peasant families camping out, together with their livestock, around the railway stations. More would have reached the city centre had the railway administration not been ordered to prevent them from boarding suburban trains.

One source of news was the thousands of civilian volunteers still building defence works in the outskirts of the city, among them seventeen-year-old Olga Grechina. After an unhappy stint bookkeeping in a munitions factory, where she had been bullied for her gentility and innocence (‘You're like something out of a museum', her boss told her), she went back to trench-digging, this time in the north-eastern suburbs, near the present-day Piskarevskoye siege memorial. Conditions were much harder than in July, and the mood more sombre:

 

It quickly began to get cold, and though it was only the beginning of September we woke up to frosts. The food was poor – one bucketful of soup, mostly lentils, to feed everyone . . . Our women got no letters from their children in evacuation, nor from their husbands at the front.

One evening we were sitting in our landlady's room, listening to her only record, ‘
Little Blue Scarf'
. Everyone started weeping inconsolably. This banal song, popular before the war, brought back so many memories. For each of the women its subject – separation from loved ones – had suddenly become very real.

Twice we were allowed to go home to wash, since many of us were infested with lice from the dirt and cold. It was the first time this had happened to me and I was alarmed and disgusted. I borrowed half a litre of kerosene from a neighbour (it was already unobtainable in the shops), and rubbed it into my hair, then spent until almost 2 a.m. trying to wash it out again with barely warm water . . .

After visits home people returned to the trenches in a sullen mood. It was getting even colder and we were digging horribly heavy blue clay. Lifting just one shovelful was hard. And even when stupid Tanka started modelling penises from this clay, it wasn't funny any more, and people began to get annoyed with her.

 

Stupid Tanka, though, gave sheltered, slightly snobbish Grechina what was to be the first of many lessons on the virtues of the Socialist Republic's working class. On Tanka's initiative the two girls dodged guards to steal two sackfuls of potatoes from an abandoned field. Together they lugged their booty to the nearest tramstop and caught a ride into the city. Chatting to Tanka on the way, Grechina was amazed to discover that she supported a widowed mother and crippled sister. A burning factory brought the tram to a halt, and they had to get out and walk. ‘I was exhausted', Grechina remembered, ‘and about to drop my sack, but Tanka said, “Have you gone mad?” and hoisted it on to her back . . . And then I began to understand how crude my judgement of other people had been before.'

On 14 September the brigade was ordered to stop digging and return to Leningrad. Grechina visited the university's languages faculty, where she had been due to start a degree. But academia now felt self-indulgent and naive. ‘How on earth can you discuss abstract concepts with fires and bombing all around? I felt like a working person who suddenly finds herself in the company of the leisured.' Slipping out of a lecture early, she went to the faculty canteen and swapped ration coupons for horsemeat and
kasha
.
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Even official news sources now acknowledged that the city was in peril. On 16 September, a day of horizontal rain and the day on which Pushkin was abandoned,
Leningradskaya Pravda
ran a near-hysterical editorial, written by Zhdanov himself, titled ‘The Enemy is at the Gates! We Will Fight for Leningrad to Our Last Heartbeat!' ‘Each must firmly look the danger in the eye', it urged, ‘and declare that if today he does not fight bravely and selflessly in defence of the city then tomorrow he will lose his honour, freedom and his native home, and become a German slave!' Next day's lead carried the clunking headline ‘Leningrad – To Be or Not to Be?'
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Factory militias were being trained in suicidal street fighting. ‘Destruction of a tank', a manual promised,

 

is first and foremost achieved by presence of mind, bravery, and decisiveness. One must not procrastinate, but display swiftness and dash . . . The fighter, having taken suitable cover [lamp posts, bollards and advertising pillars were suggested] should let the tank approach within 10–15 metres (at this distance the fighter will be in dead space; the tank will not be able to fire at him), swiftly break cover, throw the bundle of grenades under its caterpillar tracks, and just as swiftly take cover again. Exactly the same technique is used with inflammable bottles, the only difference being that the bottle is thrown at the rear part of the tank.