War: folk stories

In the blockade

Anatoly Nikolaevich Naumov

“For water, I had to go to the Fontanka, to the hole. By morning, the water in the bucket was covered with a crust of ice. The windows for warmth were hung with blankets, the room was lit by an oil lamp with a lighted wick dipped into a bottle of kerosene, which smoked terribly. We either sat near the potbelly stove when it was heating, or lay in bed under the covers. At the same time, there was no sewerage in the whole house.

The sound of a metronome from a loudspeaker and an air raid siren with a subsequent hang-up gave confidence that the city, in spite of everything, lives on. This continued through the long autumn and winter months. We did not die thanks to the fact that my mother divided our bread rations into three parts and with the addition of boiling water we always had breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I remember that at the end of autumn, like many other boys, I climbed onto the roof of our house during air raids to put out “lighters”, but then the raids intensified, and my strength diminished due to malnutrition, so I had to sit with the rest of the residents of the house hours in a bomb shelter. Everyone took some activity with them, and I took a book. Once I was reading «Two Captains» by V. Kaverin and talked about the fate of his heroes with one young woman. As it turned out later, this acquaintance saved my mother and me life.

I remember how difficult and hopeless November and December 1941 were. In spite of the bombing and shelling, no one went to the bomb shelter anymore, we sat in a dark, cold room that could not be heated by an iron potbelly stove, and there was no firewood — we stoked it with books.

All stocks have long been eaten up, wood glue and drying oil, traditional for Leningraders, a meager bread ration is not able to support the body, life is gradually fading away, one does not want to get out of bed. I think that we would have died if my mother had not met our friend from the bomb shelter one day on the street.

It turned out that her husband worked as the chief of police of the Moscow region and brought home beef bones, which they were given from the meat-packing plant named after him. S. M. Kirov. After the initial use, Valentina (that was the name of our savior) gave them to us: and we survived. This is how the fate of the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad hung on a thin thread.

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Natalya Vladislavovna Perelomova (Sukhonosova)

“Our train departed from the Moscow railway station, all the children had handbags with a surname and necessary things. In my purse and in all pockets, my grandmother put notes with the Leningrad address and the names of my mother, grandmother, grandfather and father that I had learned in advance. At the station, we were put on a train, which, as it turned out later, was moving in a southerly direction — towards the advancing fascists. Apparently, this was due to the confusion of the first weeks of the war. Our echelon in Okulovka came under bombardment and shelling, there were first casualties, several wrecked wagons caught fire. It turned out to be impossible to go further — the Germans were advancing ahead. From the bombing and shelling, we hid under the surviving wagons, in the bushes along the road. Thus, the evacuated children were the first of the Leningraders to meet the face of the war. The survivors were placed in a rural school in the nearest village, where wounded Red Army soldiers were also brought. Continued bombings, dead, maimed people and blooming school flower beds, a garden near the school… This is how I remember the first days of the war.

My grandmother, who at that time was sent to dig defensive trenches and trenches, found out about the fate of our group of evacuated children, took leave from work for several days, and by some miracle managed to find me in Okulovka. We returned to Leningrad with the last train in a freight car, the train went only to the Obukhovo station. And soon, on September 8, the blockade of Leningrad began. On the same day, the Germans bombed the Badaevsky food warehouses — the food supply was lost, which could have saved many thousands of Leningraders from starvation.

We lived in the working-class district of Leningrad, now it is the Nevsky district, not far from the railway bridge across the Neva. The headquarters for the formation of the people’s militia of the district was located in the neighboring house. Now there is a memorial plaque on this house. Our area was bombed and shelled almost daily.

Often, shelling caught my mother and me on the street on the way to get bread or water, then my mother lay down on me and covered me with her body. During the next shelling, when they were carrying water, I was wounded in the arm. After the operation, an elderly doctor took me to the kitchen and asked me to give me a bowl of soup. In the kitchen, he gave his mother a bag of potato peels with the words: «This is for a girl.» At home, we cooked soup on a potbelly stove, which the tireless grandmother bartered for — it was a holiday. Grandmother, where and how she could get food, went to the suburbs for “khryapa” — cabbage stalks with rotten leaves that remained in the fields, exchanged expensive things that were in the house for unsuitable surrogate products. The exchange equivalent was usually bread.”

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Oleg Stanislavovich Yatskevich

“Hunger is a terrible condition, and if it lasts for months, years, then a person only thinks about food or goes crazy. We could die from bombing, shelling, in the rubble, but we remember those moments when we managed to eat. We were not amazed by the corpses on the streets, but I remember the first orange in my life that was given out at school (US aid). But here is another episode that has remained in the memory forever. On a sunny September day, my friend and I were returning from school. In the silence, broken only by the chirping of sparrows, a menacing whistle sounded from the sky, and a shell hit the barbershop a hundred meters away.

The blast wave took everything out. The picture is not for the faint of heart, but not uncommon for St. Petersburg of those years! Hunger brings suffering, but also leads to madness: Nina, a neighbor, went to buy bread and ate it on her way home. Already in the corridor she was screaming that her bread had been taken away from her. Her three-year-old daughter quickly faded away.

I, too, have had a scar on my conscience all my life. Before the war, my mother told me every day: “Eat an apple — you will be healthy and strong!” I obediently bit off a piece, and sent the rest to the sideboard, under the water heater. When the famine began, I remembered the “dried fruits” and, having climbed (I still don’t understand how) into the hiding place, I began to eat a core every day. I’m embarrassed because I didn’t tell anyone about the leftovers.

But not only hunger and cold were the killers of Leningraders. The Nazis methodically fired on the city with long-range guns. Our windows overlooked the Maltsevsky market, and any hit on it would shatter the glass with a blast wave. At first we inserted new ones, but soon they ran out of them, and the windows were clogged with plywood.

Darkness has come. Communication with the outside world was limited only by a radio loudspeaker. Early in the morning the voice of the announcer sounded: “From the Soviet Information Bureau. On the First Belorussian Front, the fascist troops, bearing huge losses, continued their offensive and captured the cities … Our units retreated to previously prepared positions … «Then Leonid Utesov sang:» After all, you are a sailor, Mishka, which means // That you are not afraid of grief , no problem … ”And the metronome turned on.

Can you imagine yourself lying in the dark and listening to the seconds, minutes, hours of your life go by?

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Lev Glebovich Gorbunov

How did we survive the war? Folk stories” (AST, 2016).