Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (14 page)

We spent a pleasant evening around the supper table that night. The colonel was again pulling Dangulov’s leg with
kishmish
and other standing Caucasian jokes. But in Leningrad, sooner or later, the conversation always seems to get back to the black days, to the winter of 1941. Major Lozak, with his pale face, eyes and hair, and Roman nose, and aristocratic little burr, recalled what Comrade Semyonov had told us at the factory that day. ‘It’s quite true,’ he said, ‘in those days there
was
something in a man’s face that told you at once he would die within the next twenty-four hours. Life had become terribly cheap.’ The major had lived in Leningrad all his life, and he had his parents in Leningrad too. ‘They are old people,’ he said, ‘and I had to give them half my soldier’s ration or they would certainly have died. And as a staff officer I was, naturally and quite rightly, getting considerably less than the people at the front – 250 grammes a day instead of 350. I shall always remember how every day I’d walk from my house near the Taurus Gardens to my work in this part of the town, a matter of three or four kilometres. I felt very exhausted. I’d walk for a while, and then sit down for a rest. Many a time I saw a man suddenly collapse on the snow. There was nothing one could do. One just walked on. And I remember how, on the way back, I would see a vague human form covered with snow on the spot where in the morning I had seen the man fall down. One didn’t worry – what was the good! People didn’t wash for weeks; there were no bath-houses and no fuel. But at least people were urged to shave. And during that winter I don’t think I ever saw a person smile. It was frightful. And yet, there was a kind of inner discipline that made most people carry on. A new code of manners was evolved by the hungry people. They carefully avoided talking about food. They tried to talk about all sorts of things. I remember spending a very hungry evening with an old boy from the Radio Committee. He nearly drove me crazy – he
would
talk all evening about Kant and Hegel. Yet we never lost heart. The Battle of Moscow gave us complete confidence that it would be all right in the end. But what a change all the same when February came and the Ice Road was opened! Those tremendous parcels that suddenly started arriving from all over the country – parcels of honey and butter and ham and sausage! Still, our troubles are by no means at an end. This shelling can really be very upsetting. I was in the Nevsky once when a shell landed close by. And ten yards away from me was a man whose head was cut clean off by a shell spinter. It was horrible. I saw him make his last two steps already
with his head off
 – and a bloody mess all round before he collapsed. I vomited right there and then, and I was quite ill for the rest of the day – though I had already seen many terrible things before. I shall never forget the night the children’s hospital was hit by an oil bomb, many children were killed, and the whole house was blazing, and some perished in the flames. It’s bad for one’s nerves to see such things happen; our ambulance services have instructions to wash away blood on the pavement as quickly as possible after a shell has landed.’

The major said that he often visited the front lines, and as he also knew German well he saw a lot of German prisoners. ‘At first, you know,’ he said, ‘our people didn’t much believe in German atrocities until they saw them with their own eyes. At Tikhvin, where the Germans were for a month, they hanged a lot of people. When I talk to war prisoners now, I am struck by the remarkable change in their attitude to us. In 1941 and even in 1942 they were arrogant, almost without exception. Now they have deteriorated both physically and mentally. They are verminous to the last degree; and an infantry officer whom I questioned the other day, said,
‘Wir leben im Dreck. Es ist aussichtslos.’
(The infantry people are terribly jealous of the Luftwaffe who have an easier life, much better food and better quarters.)

‘In the past, the most one could ever get out of a German was a recognition of our having guts. But at heart every German remained convinced that, technically, we were vastly inferior to them, and that sooner or later our guts would give way, and then it would be quite easy, and Hitler would win the war. But they’ve learned a lot of things. They know that it wasn’t only tremendous guts but wonderful organisation that enabled us to hold Schlusselburg fortress throughout the blockade. And they’ve learned a lot of other things at this front – not to mention Stalingrad and all that’s been happening since the 5th of July this year. They know that our guns and mortars are better than theirs and our fortifications as good as theirs, and our tanks at least as good, and our infantry about as well armed as their infantry. And now they also know that there’s superb confidence in victory on our side and only
Dreck
on their side. They’ve got very tough troops, though. Their S.S. troops took a big part in the Mga operation this summer, when they made their last desperate bid to break through to Leningrad. But the general level is much lower than it was, and they’ve been diluting their own troops with a lot of international rabble. There’s a lot of rabble at this front. There are, for instance, the Spaniards. The Falangist officers are about as low a bunch as you’ve ever seen. They spend their days gambling, and take bribes from the soldiers for all sorts of little favours. And the Spanish troops – they are a mixture. About half of them are composed of anarchist rabble from Barcelona while the rest are political prisoners who have been released on the condition they go to Russia to fight. A lot of them try to escape to our lines. But it’s difficult, because they are carefully watched, especially by the Germans. Recently a tragic thing happened. Seven of these Spanish Republicans tried to come over to us but just before they had reached our lines they were discovered, and six were killed; only one got across, and wounded at that. Others who often try to surrender and sometimes succeed are the Alsatians. But this is a very static front, and it is much more difficult for them to come over here than it is on the southern front where the war is so much more mobile. But it is comic some of the things that do happen these days. The funniest thing is the latest German leaflets. They must be hard up for new ideas, for do you know what they put in their leaflets now? ‘The Duce has been rescued!’ They drop these in thousands over our lines. Our soldiers’ comment has invariably been, ‘So what?’’

Major Likharov, our other host, said that in September, when the Germans were approaching Leningrad, his wife got into a slight panic and bought ‘just in case’ an enormous eight-kilo tin of fresh caviare. ‘When I saw it I said to her, ‘the stuff will just go bad; I think you had better take it back to the shop,’ which she did. Oh, Lord! didn’t we regret it afterwards. Throughout the months of the famine we were haunted by the memory of that eight-kilo tin of caviare. It was like Paradise lost!’ Likharov, though unpoetic to look at with his rough-hewn face and heavy jaw, was a good poet, but as he said, he was now working almost entirely on propaganda, writing articles and sketches for front newspapers; this meant a lot of travelling about the front and seeing a lot of people, and he was collecting masses of material which he would use after the war. Altogether he thought there would be an enormous crop of literature produced in Leningrad after the war. A lot of people had kept diaries throughout these two years which would make first-class material.

‘It was certainly a job travelling about during the worst days of the blockade,’ he said. ‘I shall always remember my journey to Tikhvin in December 1941. The Germans had just abandoned the town after holding it for a month. They abandoned it on December 12th. It was dreadfully cold, and I travelled there on board a railway engine – had to stand practically all the time. The journey took thirty-six hours – a day and a night and a day. The words ‘I’m from Leningrad’ were magic words. You can’t imagine the way people outside Leningrad reacted to them. They overwhelmed you with kindness. I remember how at night our railway engine arrived at a little station; I was hungry and I hadn’t been in bed for weeks; the engine-driver and the stoker were terribly dirty; but when a railwayman heard we were from Leningrad, he took us to his little house and insisted that I sleep in his clean white bed, with its lace cover and its embroidered pillowslips. He produced the food he had hidden away from the Germans, and gave us a meal the like of which I had not seen for months. I had by that time already lost sixty pounds in weight. He also insisted that my two companions should sleep in his house and have a good rest. All three of us were complete strangers to him – but we were from Leningrad. It was like a passport and a ration book all in one. It warmed my heart to feel how deeply the rest of the country had been worrying about us during those critical weeks of October and November.’

The south side of the Obvodny Canal to the east of the Warsaw Station used to be one of the worst slum areas of old St. Petersburg. It was here, in one of the streets off the canal, that we visited the next morning a large modern school that had been built in 1936. The rest of the street looked very different from what I had remembered this district to be. Most of the houses were modern brick houses; it was really a brand-new part of Leningrad. It would have looked even better but for the rather extensive damage caused by shelling. For one thing, there was hardly a whole pane of glass anywhere; plywood, which gives houses that dead blind look, was in all the windows. Usually, only one small glass pane per window was put in for giving the room some light. The school in Tambov Street was a large brick building with long white-washed corridors, decorated with portraits of Stalin and Zhdanov and posters. A girl of seventeen or eighteen with dark hair and bright-red cheeks, very lovely and as fresh as a Canadian apple, and wearing a Pioneer uniform with a red neck-tie, very like the uniform of the Girl Guides, took us into Comrade Tikhomirov’s office. He was the headmaster and had the very unusual distinction of ranking as a ‘Teacher of Merit of the U.S.S.R.’ in the Golden Book (or whatever it is called) of the Commissariat of Education.

Tikhomirov was an elderly man with a grey moustache, and a kindly intelligent face. He had started life as an elementary-school teacher under the old régime back in 1907, and had fought in the German war (for that’s what 1914–18 is usually called in Russia now) and in the civil war, but had after that returned to the profession he loved most. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I never thought that when I started teaching I’d ever have to face the problems we have all had to face these last two years! But I’ll tell you about that later; there’s an arithmetic class on just now, wouldn’t you like to go in?’ Since the recent abolition of co-education this was now a purely boys’ school; the boys now attending were aged eight to thirteen; the older boys wouldn’t start coming to school until October 1st. We went into the classroom, there were about forty twelve-year-olds there; they all stood up as soon as they saw the headmaster and the rest of us come in. I did not think an arithmetic class would be very exciting, but even arithmetic, as I soon discovered, was used as war propaganda. The maths teacher, standing on a little platform below the blackboard, was an elderly woman with bobbed grey hair, tired yellow skin and a reddish nose; she obviously felt fatigue and strain, and yet – every word she said was uttered with great animation bordering on exuberance. She wore a smart black skirt and a white blouse and neck-tie, and good-quality black shoes. Her job was to make the lesson sound interesting, and with genuine exuberance she presented the problems to the boys in the following manner: ‘Now boys, I want to tell you about a young girl in a factory who decided that she must celebrate somehow the glorious victory of our Red Army at Chernigov. So what do you think she did? No, she didn’t go to the pictures. She decided to increase her output. The first day she exceeded her norm by fifteen per cent, the second day by twenty per cent …’ I forget all the details of the problem, but soon after the teacher had stated it several boys put up their hands and announced, with obvious approval, that the answer was this: ‘In one week the girl exceeded her production norm by 184 per cent.’ ‘Quite correct!’ said the teacher, ‘and in doing so, the girl proved that she was a real Stakhanovite, and that she really loved her country.’ The rest was much on the same lines. The boys were all in excellent physique, and most of them seemed very bright.

The same was true of another class of thirteen-year-olds, where the headmaster said I could take the teacher’s chair and ask them any questions I liked. This was very sudden; I saw the boys surveying me with critical interest as I sat down, and I had an attack of acute stage-fright. However, I pulled myself together and after talking of the fall of Smolensk I asked one of the boys where he thought the Germans would retreat to now. ‘They will retreat all the way to hell!’ the boy exclaimed. ‘And they’ll get to hell out of Leningrad, too,’ another one spontaneously cried. I didn’t think the strategic discussion was getting us very far, and turned to vegetable growing and wood cutting – questions on which the children were great experts. I picked the boys at random and was astonished at the ease and fluency with which each of them gave a detailed account of how he had taken part in planting cabbages and in watering and looking after them. Then I asked some personal questions, but soon had to stop this because the first boy said that his father had died in the famine, and the second one that his had been killed at the front, and the third one that his father has also died in the famine.

Then I asked one of the boys what he knew about England. He said he didn’t know much, and then pondering for a moment, he added, ‘Oh, no, I do know a few things; one is, that London is the capital of England, and that it was bombed by the Germans,’ ‘Quite right. Anything else?’ He didn’t know any more. But another boy raised his hand. ‘Yes?’ ‘I also know,’ said the boy, ‘that the English haven’t opened the Second Front yet.’ Several boys laughed. Another hand went up. ‘The English have a very good air force, and they bomb the hell out of the Fritzes, and they also have a good navy.’ This sounded more encouraging. ‘Can anybody tell me anything about America?’ Two hands went up. One of the boys said, ‘They’ve got skyscrapers 150 storeys high.’ ‘They make a lot of trucks for the Red Army.’ ‘We get American chocolate.’ ‘The Americans are very rich,’ came the replies. ‘Have any of you ever seen an American?’ Nobody had. ‘Had anybody ever seen a German?’ A whole forest of hands went up. They had seen German prisoners. ‘And what were they like?’ ‘They looked just like Germans – a lot of
svolochi,’
one of the boys said, and the other boys laughed. I felt that these boys had the minds of boys but the character of grown-up men. They had learned hatred at a very early age. They hadn’t been taught it, they had learned it from life itself.