Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (16 page)

None of the children who continued to go to school died. But several of the teachers did. The last section of the Famine Scrapbook is introduced by a title page with a decorative funeral urn painted on it in purple watercolour. And the text that follows is by Tikhomirov, the headmaster. It is a series of obituary notes of the teachers of the school who were either killed in the war or who died of hunger. The assistant headmaster was killed in action. Another was ‘killed at Kingisepp’ – in that terrible battle of Kingisepp where the Germans broke through to Leningrad from Estonia. Another teacher ‘died of hunger’, so did the teacher of geography. Comrade Nemirov, the teacher of literature, ‘he was among the victims of the blockade,’ and Akimov, the history teacher, ‘died of malnutrition and exhaustion, despite a long rest in a sanatorium to which he was taken in January.’ Of the teacher of literature, the headmaster wrote: ‘He worked conscientiously until he realised that he could no longer walk. He asked me for a few days’ leave in the hope that his strength would come back to him. He stayed at home, preparing his lessons for the second term. He went on reading books. So he spent the day of January 8th. On January 9th he quietly passed away.’

What a human story there is behind these simple words!

No fortress is impregnable; the only question is what price is one willing and able to pay. People in Leningrad have told me: ‘Of course, the Germans can, theoretically, take Leningrad. But it may cost them half a million men to break through our outer defences, and perhaps a million more before they get the whole town. And even then it’s not certain. Even if they got as far as the Neva, they’d still have to cross the Neva and get to the Petrograd side and to the islands. Even Hitler would be mad enough to try it, especially as he is bound to know that, sooner or later, he’ll have to pull out of here anyway – considering the way things are going further south – in the Smolensk and Nevel areas. He’s sufficiently crazy as he is, to tie up all these troops of his between here and Riga, when he is so desperately in need of troops elsewhere. On the other hand, we also could break the German ring round Leningrad – it isn’t really a ring any longer, but let’s call it that for convenience – if we were prepared to pay a very heavy price. But there are more economical ways of relieving Leningrad. Leningrad will not be relieved by a breakthrough right here, but by a breakthrough on the Volkov, Kalinin or central front, or by a combined breakthrough on all three. We know that, sooner or later, they’ll have to pull out, and we are ready to put up with the shelling – this completely senseless shelling – because we know that this shelling kills incomparably fewer people than would an attempt by our Leningrad troops to storm the so-called German ‘iron ring.’ Besides, there is no longer today the same need for breaking through the blockade as there was before. The blockade is now far from complete; the German ‘iron ring’ has large gaps in it. First of all, there’s Lake Ladoga; and the ice road across it saved us from starvation during the terrible winter of 1941–2; then in the summer of 1942 we transported our supplies across the lake in barges and steamers under fighter cover. The only time when we were really almost completely cut off from the mainland was during those four terrible months – October, November, December, January and the first part of February. Even then, the situation looked slightly more promising after we had recaptured Tikhvin on December 12th. But while Tikhvin was in German hands – it had been in their hands for a month – we were completely cut off except for transport planes. … However, Lake Ladoga was not a very satisfactory supply route as you may imagine, especially in summer. Our breakthrough at Schlusselburg last February has made a very big difference. Through that Schlusselburg gap there now runs a railway which links up with the rest of the country. The link of thirty-five kilometres was built in twenty-two days – at Stalin’s express orders. We now get everything we really need.’

The tremendous chain of Russian fortifications round Leningrad was something that had been built up in process of time – during the last two years. Even now they were continuing to be perfected. In the past, at the beginning of the siege, the fortifications were much thinner. Now nothing was being left to chance. Even parts of Leningrad that seemed least likely to be attacked had been powerfully fortified now; the Krestovsky Island in the north, the Delta which might conceivably be attacked in winter, across the ice of the Gulf of Finland, had now been turned into a powerful bastion. All the approaches to Leningrad from land or from the frozen sea had been made as impregnable as was humanly possible. But that wasn’t all. The defence of Leningrad had developed in the last two years on the principle that the Germans might well attempt to storm the city, and that, if they were prepared to pay a sufficiently heavy price, they might capture, say, the first line of defence, and perhaps even the second, and might even, if they were determined to progress at any price, break into the city itself. Therefore defence in depth had been organised on a scale probably unequalled anywhere. On the southern part of Leningrad every house had, in effect, been turned into a fortress, with the principal machine-gun nests and anti-tank strongholds set up in the basements and ground floors of large buildings dominating crossroads and main thoroughfares. This network of little fortresses – cemented, sandbagged, and propped up with masses of steel girders and wooden walls nine, ten, twelve logs thick – extended with varying degrees of density across the whole of Leningrad. In the southern part of the city these powerful firing-points were to be found in almost every house, in other parts at every strategically vital street corner. Many of these firing-points in the basements and on the ground floors were so large and ‘basic’ that they were visible to any passerby.

But I gathered that, in the event of trouble, hundreds of other firing points, invisible to the outsider and concealed at various levels of the houses, would come into action. Besides, in the southern part of the city, there were many barricades still, with anti-tank guns and machine-guns behind them, and several streets were lined with masses of anti-tank hedgehogs which, in case of necessity, could simply be put in a solid mass across the street. This stupendous work was done by the army, and even more by the civilians, and done in incredibly difficult conditions, with a shortage of certain building materials, and with the people not in the best condition for hard physical labour. And outside Leningrad proper there was the front, with its numerous lines of spaced-out trenches, with minefields and masses of barbed wire in between. This front zone stretched in an irregular crescent from the German Uritsk–Strelna–Peterhof foothold on the Gulf of Finland to a point on the Neva west of Schlusselburg, to that Schlusselburg-Ladoga corridor through which Leningrad’s essential overland lifeline now ran. And further west, a similar but shorter Russian crescent of minefields and trenches and barbed wire was defending that Russian bridgehead on the south side of the Gulf of Finland opposite Kronstadt – the Peterhof-Oranienbaum – Krasnaya Oorks bridgehead. That day – it was after the visit to the Tambov Street school – I saw something at first hand of those Leningrad fortifications and of the soldiers manning them. We drove down to the Narva district, past the Narva gate and the damaged houses around it, with the heavily sandbagged firing-points on their ground floors, but instead of driving south-west towards the Putilov works, we took the road going due south towards Pushkin (the former Tsarskoye Selo). Some distance away on the right was the large black shape of the Putilov works. On either side of the road were large new workers’ dwellings, many of them badly shattered by shells. All the large spaces between the houses were being used as cabbage plots. We drove up to a large dug-out, scarcely noticeable at more than a few yards away so well was it camouflaged on all sides, except for the entrance at the back. Above the low, wooden door hung a poster of a ragged and distressed-looking child against the background of a burning village: ‘
Papa, ubei nemtsa
 – Daddy, kill a German!’ We were met by a sentry who took us into the ‘blockhouse.’ Inside was a large gun, and the blockhouse, with steel girders and wooden walls twelve logs thick on the side facing the enemy, and almost as thick on its other sides, was a powerful piece of engineering. A lieutenant and two privates showed us the gun, and one of them observed that the blockhouse had actually received a direct hit not long ago, just above the embrasure – but the shell had hit the twelve logs and no harm had been done. Little short of a direct hit into the very muzzle of the gun itself could knock this firing-point out.

We were then taken down some wooden steps into what turned out to be a light and remarkably spacious dug-out, with a little window on the side facing Leningrad. There were bunks on either side of the dug-out, a table with books and magazines, and an emergency foodstore and first-aid outfit. Several other men were in the dug-out – some were lying on their bunks – and they rose to greet us. They were all strong and bright and cheerful-looking lads, but very tough and hardened by the war. ‘Nearly all of us,’ said the lieutenant, ‘have been here since February 1942, the time when this blockhouse was built – largely by ourselves.’ All of them had the Leningrad medal, and three or four had other decorations; besides, all wore the guards badge on the left side of their chest – they belonged to a crack artillery regiment. ‘Looks pretty cosy down here,’ I remarked. ‘Yes,’ said a bright young fellow, speaking with a strong Ukrainian accent, ‘it’s become like a second home to us.’ He laughed. ‘It’s grand to feel heroes, but it would be nice to have a quiet life for a change. We’ve lived here for eighteen months now – more, nearly nineteen months!’ There was another soldier there with a long curly moustache and laughing blue eyes, and also speaking with a Ukrainian accent. ‘It’s all right down here, but we’ve had our hot moments – plenty of them. When the Germans start shelling Leningrad we come into action at once, and try to shut them up. Of course they do their damnedest to shut us up too. We’ve probably got a record for accurate firing. Not long ago we were much bothered by a German battery four-and-a-half kilometres away which kept pounding at us all the time. We called it ‘target 230.’ So we decided to have a real crack at it. And would you believe it – after three shells within sixty-five seconds – we silenced the battery completely. It’s never shown any signs of life since! We’ve sometimes been shelled by eighteen German batteries all at once. You’ll have noticed how everything around is pretty well ploughed up.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘you’ve still got those vegetable plots. Whose are they?’ ‘Oh,’ said one of the soldiers, ‘each guncrew has its own vegetable garden. The Germans sometimes make a terrible mess of it, but there’s something always left, and we have a lot of our own home-grown vegetables to eat in addition to the usual army rations!’ Nearly all the men were Ukrainians, and the remaining two were Siberians. I commented on this. ‘We’re not from Leningrad,’ one of them said, ‘and yet we are. Two years here have made this place mean more to us than any other. There’s little hope, anyway, of seeing the old folks again. They’ve been under German occupation for over two years, in a place near Kiev, so what hope is there of ever seeing them again? We can take it out of the damned parasites here. It’s all part of the same show anyway.’

‘How far away are we here from the front line?’ I asked. ‘This is really part of the front line,’ said the lieutenant. ‘You could get a little further along the Puskhin road, but there isn’t really much more to see; a lot of trenches and a couple of miles of minefields and barbed-wire entanglements. That is, strictly speaking, the front; here you are on the outer defences of Leningrad. This is one of the bristles of the Leningrad hedgehog,’ he said, obviously enjoying the simile. ‘And a hedgehog has a lot of bristles, hasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Indeed it has,’ he said, and the soldiers nodded approvingly. ‘Thick with bristles,’ he added. ‘Do you always stay here, or do you ever go to Leningrad?’ I asked. The fellow with the blond moustache replied: ‘We don’t go much to Leningrad really. We only go when there’s motor transport available, and only a few of us at a time. But it’s much too dangerous to go to town in a tramcar,’ he added quite seriously. I must have looked a bit startled, for he explained: ‘Well, you see, the way we feel is this. Tramcars, as you know, are dangerous. Many have received direct hits and everybody inside was killed. If any of us get killed right here – well, it’s normal, it’s part of the job. But to be killed while having a joyride in a tramcar – it would be too silly!’ ‘You may think it funny,’ said another soldier, ‘but it’s quite true. We don’t often go to Leningrad for that reason. We, have a very good club right here – in the basement of one of the big blocks of flats. You can see it from this window.’ ‘Is anybody still living in the house?’ I asked. ‘Yes, quite a number of people. Not right up on the top floors, they’ve been badly smashed up and are not – well, not very quiet; but there are people living there, right up to the third floor. There’s an old man on the third floor who refuses to leave his bed at night, whatever happens. Only once is he known to have gone downstairs, one night when it was really quite exceptionally bad. He says that he is very hard of hearing, and that the shelling doesn’t bother him much.’ The soldiers laughed. ‘Yes, you’d find some queer characters round here,’ one of them said, ‘especially among the old Putilov workers.’

‘And it’s not a healthy spot,’ another soldier said, young and fair-haired. ‘It’s much easier for the parasites over there really. They’ve got their batteries hidden in forests and we are here right in the open. One day they fired no fewer than 600 shells at us. They landed all round, but not one of us got as much as a scratch. Often we have to fire right in the midst of their shelling us. We’ve got much better than we were in the winter of 1941. We hadn’t much experience then.’ ‘When were you made into a guards regiment?’ I asked. ‘In March 1942.’ ‘And how far are the German guns?’ ‘They vary a lot,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Their far-range batteries are as much as thirty or thirty-five kilometres away, and the air force has to take care of them. The 152-mm shells they fire at us from a distance of seventeen kilometres. But they use bigger stuff too – 203 and 210 and even 240-mm shells.’