![]() Survivors talk about having been “like stones” or “like wolves”, without feeling. And fourth, as severe malnutrition took hold and bodily functions began to fail, came the loss of all emotions save an overwhelming craving for food. Third - as public transport and utilities packed up, personal stores dwindled and friends and family began to fall ill - came fear. How, people asked themselves when they encountered their first dead body lying in the street, could this be happening? Famine, in the words of the critic and memoirist Lidiya Ginzburg, belonged “in the desert, complete with camels and mirages”. Second, once the siege ring had closed and government food stocks began to run low, came disbelief. ![]() Others took the opportunity to rent cut-price dachas for the summer holidays. Some panic-bought - prudently, as it turned out. Individuals havered between staying or going. First, as the Germans approached, came denial, bolstered by official insistence that the fashisti were on the run, and food stores full to bursting. Suggested reading The truth about lockdown in LeningradĬivilian behaviours during the first siege winter that led to mass death went through distinct stages. One can’t imagine a modern European city the size of present-day Chicago losing up to a third of its population to simple lack of food. But the large majority died of starvation. Some were killed by bombs or artillery, others by dysentery and typhus. Starting in September 1941, when the Germans ringed the city, and ending in January 1944, when the Red Army finally smashed German lines and started pushing towards Berlin, the siege of Leningrad killed somewhere between 650,000 and 800,000 people. And though the crises are so different as to make direct comparison absurd, in the silence faint - very faint - echoes can be heard of Leningrad’s great urban Calvary of nearly eighty years ago. ![]() ![]() The playground - like the whole street - is oddly quiet the school closed and neighbours behind doors so as to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Sitting in my office, working my way through dozens of heart-wrenching siege diaries, the cheerful noise of children in the school playground opposite came as a blessed relief. A few years ago I wrote a book about the siege of Leningrad, a brutal chapter of World War II history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |