Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (11 page)

Unlike the Elagin, which was a great public park, the Kamenny was really a suburban area – though those who lived there would have hated to be called suburbanites. It was stylish to have a villa on the Kamenny Island, and to live there all the year round rather than in Petrograd itself; but it was not very good style, really. Like the Kamennostrovsky, the Kamenny Island had something of the hallmark of the
nouveau-riche.
The father of one of my schoolmates had a huge villa on the Kamenny Island, and he used to ask us out there in winter to skate and play hockey and to toboggan down an enormous artificial ice mountain. The boy was a Swiss and his father was one of the two most expensive tailors in Petrograd. Most of the new villas – and they were nearly all new – were owned by very wealthy shopkeepers or business men.

The Kamenny Island looked beautiful on that sunny autumn morning, with the river dark-blue, a few little white clouds high in the clear blue sky, a cool breeze blowing from the nearby sea, and the trees in the island green and brown and golden and yellow. The island had not changed much except that many unnecessary fences had been removed, and many villas had been smashed by shells, and others completely destroyed by bombing, back in 1941. Here and there whole trees had been smashed by a direct hit. The Huns had concentrated on the Kamenny Island perhaps because they knew that at that time several of the Leningrad hospitals had been moved here. But now the island was Children’s Island. Or rather it had been until September 1st. Now the chief purpose the island was serving was that of a rest home for adolescent workers. Fifteen villas were now being used as rest homes. In the summer nearly all were being used as children’s holiday homes. The Kamenny was, indeed, a good illustration of the work done by the Leningrad authorities to keep the children of the city fit. Many hundred children had lived here for forty-five days in summer, just as many thousands more had been sent for the same period of time to similar if simpler holiday homes in the
datcha
places north of the city – on the way to Finland – to Pargolovo, Levashovo and Ozerki. Moreover, many children whose health was not very strong were now living in the country all the year round – there were now fifteen or twenty thousand of them, and the
datchas
had been adapted to winter conditions.

By the way, the mention of Pargolovo with its enormous cemetery suddenly reminded me of the fact that all my paternal grandparents and great-grandparents, besides a variety of great-aunts and grand-uncles, were buried there.

We drove up to a sumptuous villa near the water edge on the south side of the island and were welcomed here by two young women. One was tall, fair, rosy-cheeked with a well-chiselled little Roman nose, and a coquettish playful expression, a little like a young and rather inexperienced English schoolteacher who wants to be popular with the children. She wore a large black velour hat and a smart tailor-made costume. The other was more Russian, more Leningrad, despite her non-Russian surname. She was only a little older than the other, but far more mature. She had one of those beautiful pale Russian faces, rather round, with large luminous grey eyes, and a full, well-shaped mouth with large white teeth. This girl – she was twenty-four or maybe twenty-five – was the boss of the fifteen rest homes. She also had on a tailor-made suit and a small brown hat which she wore with that natural smartness which the other girl just missed. She took us into a large room, overlooking the river. ‘You haven’t come on a very good day,’ she said. ‘This being Sunday, a lot of the children are away. Several have gone to the children’s matinée to see
Wedding in Malikovka
and some of the others have gone to the zoo.’ ‘The zoo!’ I said. ‘Have you still got a zoo in Leningrad?’ ‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘it isn’t really much of a zoo now. The elephant was killed in an air raid – you may have seen it in the Leningrad documentary – and some of the other animals have died, but in spite of everything we have tried to keep the zoo going. The great attraction for the children is the hippopotamus.’ We were sitting in the drawing-room or ballroom of what was once the villa of somebody called Neuscheller, who was chairman of the great Treugolnik rubber factory in St. Petersburg. Marble caryatids supported the ceiling and around the walls there were large mirrors and marble statues of Greek gods: there were also bronze candlesticks on top of the huge fireplace and an enormous crystal chandelier was hanging from a ceiling with more paintings of Greek gods. Catherine Evgenievna Borschenko – for that was her name – said she was a ‘pædagogue,’ that is, simply, a teacher, and she had been sent down here and had worked here now for over a year. She said that the organisation of rest homes for adolescent workers was something to which the Leningrad Soviet attached the greatest importance. There was no doubt about it: the physical and nervous strain of working in Leningrad, for instance in a place like the Putilov works which was almost in the front line, was very considerable, and it was essential to give these young people a break from time to time. They came down here for a fortnight or a month, and the purpose of this rest was to take these boys’ and girls’ minds off their daily routine – often a pretty grim routine – and to pep them up physically.

‘We have fifteen villas here, some for girls, the others for boys of about fourteen to eighteen years of age. We give them plenty of recreation and extra-good food rations. They get up at 8 a.m., then for five minutes they do light physical exercises; then there’s breakfast consisting of
kasha
or a hot vegetable dish, or rice milk pudding, and tea with lots of bread and butter. Altogether they get plenty to eat – meat and fish and thirty grammes of butter a day, cheese and jam, a good ration of sugar and a daily bar of chocolate, sometimes English chocolate, you’ll be interested to know. They like English chocolate! Then, after breakfast, there is recreation, music and dancing for those who like it; others go on excursions, others still play football or volleyball, or billiards, and there is also a good library. The girls also do sewing and needlework if they wish. This place here used to be before the war the rest home of the Leningrad metal workers. Now we have between eighty and one hundred young girls staying here, and there are about as many girls or boys in each of the other fourteen villas.’

After taking us past a beautiful Sèvres vase in the hall, Comrade Borschenko and the other girl conducted us upstairs where we saw the beautifully tidy dormitories. We then went into a room where about a dozen young girls were drawing or playing a children’s card game. They were all neatly dressed except for their shoes which were all on the shabby side. We stayed with them for quite a while. I remember chiefly two of the girls, Tamara Turunova and a girl called Tanya. Tamara was a little girl of fifteen, very pale, thin and delicate, obviously run-down, with dark hair tied in a knot. On her little black frock was pinned the green-ribboned medal of Leningrad. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked. A faint smile appeared on her pale little face. ‘I don’t know what he was called,’ she said. ‘An uncle with spectacles came to the works one day and gave me this medal.’ ‘What works?’ ‘Oh, the Kirov works, of course,’ she said. ‘Does your father work there too?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘father died in the hungry year, died on the 7th of January. I’ve worked on the Kirov works since I was fourteen, so I suppose that’s why they gave me the medal. We’re not far away from the front.’ ‘Doesn’t it frighten you to work there?’ She screwed up her little face. ‘No, not really. One gets used to it. When a shell whistles, it means it’s high up; it’s only when it begins to sizzle that you know there’s going to be trouble. Accidents do happen, of course, happen very often; sometimes things happen every day. Only last week we had an accident; a shell landed in my workshop and many were wounded, and two Stakhanov girls were burned to death.’ She said it with terrible simplicity and almost with the suggestion that it wouldn’t have been such a serious matter if two valuable Stakhanovite girls hadn’t lost their lives. ‘You wouldn’t like to change over to another factory?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I am a Kirov girl, and my father was a Putilov man, and really the worst is over now, so we may as well stick it to the end.’ And one could feel that she meant it, though it was only too clear what terrible nervous strain that frail little body of hers had suffered. ‘And your mother?’ I asked. ‘She died before the war,’ said the girl. ‘But my big brother is in the army, on the Leningrad front, and he writes to me often, very often, and three months ago I saw him when he and several of his comrades came to visit us at the Kirov works.’ Her little pale face brightened at the thought of it, and, looking out of the window at the golden autumn trees, she said, ‘You know, it’s good to be here for a little while.’

Tanya was different. She had a bright-green jumper and rosy cheeks, and was much less in need of a holiday than the other girl. She was bright and talkative, and said that everybody at her shell factory was sure that the Germans would be chased away from Leningrad before long. ‘Have you ever seen any Germans?’ I asked. And, chattering away, she told the story of how she had taken part in the capture of German parachutists in the summer of 1941. ‘We were staying in the country at Lychkovo, and there were lots of Leningrad kids – forty of us – and we hunted parachutists. We caught three of them. To be truthful, it was the boys who caught them; the girls were very frightened, for all the Germans had tommy-guns. There was one hiding behind a bush and he was firing all the time, no one could get near him. Several of the boys crawled up to him from behind, pounced on him, bit him and took away his tommy-gun. But he had time to kill one of the boys. This one they handed over alive to our troops, the other two they killed. They would have run away – there was nothing else to be done.’

I liked the story. It showed that the Russian children of Leningrad had never been defeatist – not even during those fearful days of the summer of 1941 when the giant Nazi war machine with its vast superiority in tanks and planes was crawling like a steam-roller towards Leningrad, and when helpless terror would have been such a natural reaction among children. For these boys who were hunting and disarming parachutists, and to whom it was a sort of rough sport, were children of ten, eleven and twelve years of age. There was in all this something of the same daredevilry as was shown by the Moscow boys who, during the first raids on Moscow in the summer of 1941, cheerfully used to grab incendiaries with their bare hands until they were taught a safer method. But parachutists were worse than incendiaries, and there was much bewilderment around, even panic, but the boys were not impressed.

We went on to another of the villas; here, in a classical white drawing-room with chandeliers and white marble pillars and eighteenth-century portraits that looked English, some thirty girls were dancing to the tune of an old-fashioned waltz being played on the grand piano by an elderly woman; it was really an old Varlamov song turned into a slow waltz. Comrade Borschenko explained that once a week the girls received a visit from one of the ballet people who taught them old drawing-room dances. The girls were all in their Sunday best – some in embroidered silk dresses. We did not want to disturb them so we went on to another villa. Here we found that all the boys had gone off on an excursion for the day. In all these villas there were primitive brick stoves ‘1941 model,’ but they were there now only for emergencies, as the central heating was going to work in winter. Outside each villa there were large piles of logs. We then walked round the vegetable plots which had been cultivated by the children. In the distance, between the trees, I caught sight of the pretentious red-tiled tower of the Tailor’s Castle where I used to play hockey as a schoolboy, and then walked along the river with its separate ‘beaches’ for boys and girls. ‘Good bathing here in summer,’ said Catherine Evgenievna, ‘and we seem to have had a much warmer summer here this year than you had in Moscow.’ Just as we were about to take leave a beautiful child of six, a little girl, came running up to Comrade Borschenko crying, ‘Mamma! Mamma!’ and, burying her face in Catherine Evgenievna’s skirt, began to sob. ‘It’s pathetic,’ said Catherine Evgenievna in a whisper, stroking the child’s hair and taking her up in her arms and giving her a kiss. ‘Her mother died in the famine and her father is at the front, so she calls everybody “Mamma” now.’ Then, aloud to the child: ‘Now don’t cry, Galya, let me dry your tears for you, and now say how’d-you-do to these uncles.’ Galya, a beautiful child, rosy-cheeked, and with silky fair hair and little dimples, now smiled happily and shook hands with us ceremoniously.

I should have liked to stay longer in the children’s colony but Colonel Studyonov said we were already behind schedule, and looking at his watch remarked that we were expected at the fighter airfield in two minutes. So we said goodbye to Galya and the two women and drove north, first through the golden alleys of the Kamenny Island – ‘what a really good purpose,’ I thought to myself, ‘these villas are now serving’ – and then through the narrow belt of the northern suburbs of Leningrad into almost open country. I noticed, off the main road, the large building of the covered tennis courts which had been built in recent years. After a while the soil around grew sandy, and the damp vegetation of the Neva delta was replaced by pine trees. It was like a continuation of the sand dunes of Sestroretsk and the Finnish coast. Among the pine trees were numerous little
datchas.
‘Very healthy air here,’ said Major Lozak, ‘thousands of people used to come and spend the summer round these parts.’ The Finns were only some twenty miles away, but since the Russians had recaptured the old frontier station of Beloostrov the front here had become quite stabilised for more than eighteen months. One did not feel the nearness of the front here as one did on the south side of Leningrad. At length we turned off the main road and, after passing several sentries, to whom Major Lozak showed the necessary papers, we stopped outside the airfield. A soldier on duty went to fetch the major, and the major, a gruff, boisterous middle-aged man – or did he only look middle-aged? – then took us to the officers’ mess. ‘You’ll have some roast goose and potatoes,’ he said, in a tone that excluded refusal on our part. ‘We had breakfast quite recently,’ one or two of us ventured to remark. ‘Nonsense,’ said the major, ‘you will have our roast goose and potatoes, and some hot milk with it. It’s good for you.’ So we all struggled with the enormous hunks of goose and the good parsleyed potatoes and drank the hot milk, while the major talked about things in general pending the arrival of the colonel, the commander of the airfield. ‘Why do you think,’ I said, ‘the Germans are still so determined to hang on to Leningrad?’ Sublimely, the major replied: ‘They want to hang on to Leningrad
BECAUSE THEY WANT TO PERISH
.’ We laughed.