Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (15 page)

It was one of the points Comrade Tikhomirov made when he took me back to his study and talked to me about the school in general. Before that he took us through the ‘military cabinet,’ with a large display of brochures on elementary military training, and with an impressive collection of rifles and hand-grenades and even one machine-gun. ‘At fourteen they start getting their elementary military training,’ he said, ‘they learn to use a rifle and to throw grenades; and they also have bayonet practice. Moreover, they receive a rudimentary knowledge of the machine-gun, and also some elementary facts about tanks and artillery. That, by the way, is one of the reasons why our government decided to abandon co-education. The curricula for boys and girls are going to be rather different now, at least they will be from next year.’

Then, taking me into his study, he said that the school had been smashed four times by shelling, but only once very badly – that was in October 1941 – at the worst possible moment. The boys cleared away all the glass, bricked up the walls that had been smashed, put plywood in the windows. ‘On the next two occasions the damage was relatively slight, but on May 1st this year a shell landed in the yard, and one of our woman teachers was killed. Eighty-five per cent of the children’s fathers are – or were – at the front; I say ‘were’ because many of them are dead. Nearly all the mothers are working in factories in Leningrad, or on transport, wood cutting, or A.R.P. Nearly all the fathers are actually on the Leningrad front; so there is the closest contact between our school and the front lines. These boys are terribly grown up for their age. We don’t have to teach them political consciousness – or hatred. They have learned it all in the hard school of life.’

‘Can you tell me something about this school during the famine?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can tell you a few things, and then I’ll show you something that’ll interest you.’ Then he said earnestly, ‘We stuck it, and stuck it well. We had to be worthy of our city. We had no wood, but the Lensoviet gave us a small wooden house not far away for demolition, so we could use the timber for heating. The bombing and shelling used to be very severe in those days. We had about 120 pupils then – boys and girls – and we had to hold our classes in the shelter. Not for a day did the work stop. It was very cold. The little stoves heated the air properly only a yard around them, and in the rest of the shelter the temperature was below zero. There was no lighting, apart from a kerosene lamp. But we carried on, and the children were so serious and earnest about it all that we actually got better results out of them than in any other year. Surprising, but true. We had meals for them: the army helped us to feed them. Several of the teachers died of undernourishment, but I am proud to say that all the children in our care survived. Only, it was pathetic to watch them during those famine months. Towards the end of the year they hardly looked like children any more. They were strangely silent, with a kind of concentrated look in their eyes. They would not walk about, still less run about; they would just sit. But none of them died; and only some of those pupils who had stopped coming to school, and stayed at home, died, often together with the rest of the family.’

Comrade Tikhomirov pulled out a drawer of his desk and produced from it a large hand-bound volume. ‘This is our Famine Scrapbook,’ he said. ‘It has copies of a lot of essays written by the children during the famine, and a lot of other material.’ I asked – and it was asking a lot – whether I could borrow it till the next morning; and, after receiving every assurance from our majors that it would be safely returned, the headmaster, a little nervously, agreed that I could take it away.

We were seen to the car by the headmaster and by the Pioneers’ guide, the lovely child with the dark hair, lively dark eyes and fresh red cheeks. Pointing across the courtyard, she said, ‘That’s the place where one of our woman teachers was killed by a shell on May 1st.’ And as we went out into the street, with its eyeless houses, she said, giving me a friendly feminine smile and a friendly manly handshake, ‘You will come to see us again next time you are in Leningrad?’ And as we drove down towards the Obvodny Canal with its cabbage-tapestried slopes, I felt that here was one of those Russian girls who in no time can set a man daydreaming, and suddenly make him think of his life in terms of ‘ifs’ and ‘if only’s.’

That evening I looked through the large scrapbook bound in purple velvet, and with margins composed of rather conventional children’s watercolours depicting soldiers, tanks, aeroplanes and the like. These surrounded little typewritten sheets which had been pasted on to the thin cardboard of the scrapbook. These sheets were copies of typical essays written by pupils – mostly girls – during the famine, and a survey written by the headmaster himself. I wrote a few at random.

One young girl wrote: ‘Unlike June 22nd everybody had work and a good life assured to him. That day we went on an excursion to the Kirov Islands. A fresh wind was blowing from the Gulf, bringing with it bits of the song some kids were singing not far away, ‘Great and glorious is my native land.’ And then the enemy began to come nearer and nearer our city. We went out a dig trenches. It was difficult because a lot of the kids were not used to such hard physical labour. The German General von Leeb was already licking his chops at the throught of the gala dinner he was going to order at the Astoria. Now we are sitting in the shelter, round improvised stoves, with our coats and fur caps and gloves on. We have been sewing and knitting warm things for our soldiers, and been taking round their letters to the friends and relatives. We have also been collecting non-ferrous metal for salvage.’

Valentina Solovyova, an older girl of sixteen, wrote: ‘June 22nd! How much that date means of us now! But then it seemed just an ordinary summer day. … Before long the House Committees were swarming with women, girls and children who had come to join the A.R.P. teams, the anti-fire and anti-gas squads. … By the end of September the city was encircled. Food supplies from outside had ceased. The last evacuee trains had departed. The people of Leningrad tightened their belts. The streets began to bristle with barricades and anti-tank ‘hedgehogs.’ Dug-outs and firing-points – a whole network of them – were springing up around the city. As in 1919, so now, the great question arose: ‘Shall Leningrad remain a Soviet city or not?’ Leningrad was in danger. But its workers had risen like one man for its defence. Tanks were thundering down the streets. Everywhere men of the civil guard were joining up. … A cold, terrible winter was approaching. Together with their bombs, enemy planes were dropping down leaflets. They said that they would raze Leningrad to the ground. They said we would all die of hunger. They thought they would frighten us, but they filled us with renewed strength. … Leningrad did not let the enemy into its gates! The city was starving, but it lived and worked, and kept sending to the front more and more new detachments of its sons and daughters. Though knocking at the knees with hunger, our workers went to work at their factories, with the air raid sirens filling the air with their screams.’

Young Leningrad girl on an anti-aircraft observation post. In the background is the Admiralty.

Cabbage plots in the Champ de Mars.

From another essay on how the schoolchildren dug trenches while the Germans were approaching Leningrad: ‘In August we worked for twenty-five days digging trenches. We were machine-gunned and some of us were killed, but we carried on, though we weren’t used to this work. And the Germans were stopped by the trenches we had dug.’

And here is how, according to the same Valentina Solovyova, work continued at school during the worst time of the blockade: ‘ … It became very difficult to work. The central heating was, of course, out of action. It became terribly cold. One’s hands and feet were quite numb, and the ink froze in the ink-pots. We hid our faces inside our coat collars, and wrapped scarves around our hands, but it was still terribly cold. Antonina Ivanovna, our chemistry teacher, came into the classroom and teased us for sitting there all huddled up. Feeling a little ashamed, we put down our collars and took off our gloves. She was always cheerful, and always managed to cheer us up. She made jokes which made us laugh. … Only thanks to this moral support we received from all the teachers and the headmaster did we stick it at all. Otherwise we should have stopped coming to school. … But we had to give up using the shelter as a classroom. And the reason for this was quite simple. There was no more light in the shelter; so we had to move back to the classroom. Not that this was very bright either. For there was only one small pane of glass in the window. And so we continued to sit around the little
burzhuika
stove – and so we continued till the spring. Sometimes the stove smoked terribly. And altogether, it was dangerous to sit too close to it. Often there was a smell of burning
valenki
in the class, and gloves went on fire, and even the clothes sometimes began to smoulder.’

Another girl of sixteen, Luba Tereschenkova, described the same strange scene as follows: ‘At the end of January and in February, frost also joined the blockade and lent Hitler a hand. It was never less than thirty degrees of frost! Our classes continued on the ‘Round the Stove’ principle. But there were no reserved seats, and if you wanted a seat near the stove or under the stove pipe, you had to come early. The place facing the stove door was reserved for the teacher. You sat down, and were suddenly seized by a wonderful feeling of well-being; the warmth penetrated through your skin, right into your bones; it made you all weak and languid and paralysed your thoughts; you just wanted to think of nothing, only to slumber and drink in the warmth. It was agony to stand up and go to the blackboard. One wanted to put off the evil moment. It was so cold and dark at the blackboard, and your hand, imprisoned in its heavy glove, goes all numb and rigid, and refuses to obey. The chalk keeps falling out of your hand, and the lines are all crooked and the figures deformed. … By the time we reached the third lesson there was no more fuel left. The stove went cold, and horrid icy draughts started blowing down the pipe. It became terribly cold. It was then that Vasya Pughin, with a puckish look on his face, could be seen slinking out and bringing in a few logs from Anna Ivanovna’s emergency reserve; and a few minutes later one could again hear the magic crackling of wood inside the stove. … During the break nobody would jump up because no one had any desire to go into the icy corridors.’

In another essay the same girl wrote: ‘One day we were sitting silently round the
burzhuika
warming our numb fingers. The bell had rung several minutes before. We were waiting for our teacher of literature. Instead of him, Yakov Mikhailovich arrived and announced, ‘There will be no classes today. We must all go and take to pieces a wooden house because our wood supply is at an end, and we must get more wood in.’ Well, it couldn’t be helped. It was terribly cold outside. A piercing wind was blowing, freezing our faces and stopping the blood in our veins.’

And here is more, from another essay by the same girl: ‘The winter came, fierce and merciless. The water pipes froze, and there was no electric light, and the tramcars stopped running. To get to school in time I had to get up very early every morning, for I live out in the suburbs. It was particularly difficult to get to school after a blizzard when all roads and paths are covered with snowdrifts. But I firmly decided to complete my school year. … One day, after standing in a bread queue for six hours (I had to miss school that day, as I had received no bread for two days), I caught a cold and fell ill. Never had I felt more miserable than during those days. Not for physical reasons, but because I desperately needed the moral support of my schoolmates, their encouraging jokes.’

Not everybody could take it. Leonchukova, one of the teachers, wrote: ‘Not everybody could face all the ordeals of the war and the blockade. Some people left the city and departed to more quiet places; others gave up school and went to work in factories; some were defeated in this unequal struggle with calamity, but the strongest held out till the end.’