Memories from the 900 day Siege of Leningrad
Written by brothers Jury Glushchenko and Leonid Glushchenko
/ Leonid's words are in italics /
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Translated from Russian by young generation:
Olga Tourbassova-Glushchenko, daugther of Leonid, and Sasha Tourbassova, his grand-daughter.
We have written these memories for all those who could not see and did not experience all the terror what we had to go through, what war is like, then and now and what it means for children and adults alike when it indiscriminately smashes into your world, destroying everything in its path . We also would like to thank everyone who has taken an interest in learning more about the real people who struggled against fascism on front lines of this war and have a pride in their hearts about this Victory Day.
By all the rules of life, since my first winter I should have been buried at Piscarevskoe Cemetery in a Brothers' Grave with a short sign "1941" on a red granite stone. However, thanks to MY MOTHER'S and MY BROTHER'S unbelievable efforts and human achievements, my fate was changed. Now I am over 60 years old, for this I bow to my mother and to my elder brother Yury.
These memories were written by my elder brother who, in those awful years, became my second mother, saved and nursed me. I don't know whether I have a right to make any contributions to this manuscript as he had written it from his childhood memories. Because of my youth age, I remember various isolated fragments only, which later, because of my mother's stories, were compiling into a whole event.
We used to live in St Petersburg, although in those days it was known by another name, Leningrad. Our house was located at number 17 Rakov Street, next to Passage, now it is named Italyanskaya Street. The main entrance faces Nevsky prospect while another entrance faces Italyanskaya.
My mother and I were walking in the garden opposite the Russian Museum. I remember riding my bike around a flower bed whilst watching the park trams passing by. The Pushkin Monument can be seen there now.
My father worked as a mechanical engineer and my mother also had a highly respected position in the Chemical-Technological Institute. Life was good, when in January 1941 my brother Lenya was born.
On Sunday, 15-th June, we celebrated my 7-th Birthday. One week later, on the 22nd of June 1941, a beautiful summer day, our wonderful country was invaded by fascists. The Great Patriotic War had begun.
The next day we said good bye to our father as he like many thousands of other fathers and sons left to defend our country at the front. We did not have any relatives in Leningrad, so with fathers departure our mother was alone with a new baby and me.
In the beginning my friends and other boys of my age group were feeling a little anxious, so we played games, picking pieces of shrapnel out of the sides of the vehicles which had returned from the front line. In our back yards we constructed hideouts where we observed the first German airplanes with their black crosses on the wings. Every evening from our garden, barrage balloons were rising into the sky. Crosses made out of paper appeared on the windows. In Sadovaya Street one nice man created whole paper scenes on his windows.
My last sweet memory was after queuing for a long time in a commercial Coffee Nord we were drinking hot chocolate with cakes.
My father wrote in his letters from the front line, "Don't panic and don't leave Leningrad. The city will remain untouched just like Moscow. The war will not last longer than 3 or 4 months." He was fighting in Murmansk front. That is why we did not go away...
Our neighbour, Lelya, sent her daughter away on one of the last trains. However, the train was bombed and the children had to return to the city to their parents. A girl of the same age as me caught a lung inflammation on the way, and within a day she died in her mother's arms.
On 30-th August trains could not go to the South or East and on 8-th September the city was cut of from the world for 900 long days and nights.
Shelling and bombing had begun. In our street the house in Fontanka opposite Rot Front (now it is named Rodina) was bombed and destroyed.
There were many five storey houses with the whole fascade missing. You could see right into peoples homes with the furniture still in place. All this was no longer unusual to my eyes, it had become normal.
In order to obtain meal coupons for workers, our mother returned to work at her laboratory. By then they were filling bombs and mines with explosive.
Mother told us that during the artillery barrages, women tried to guess which area was being fired upon, as a majority of them had children at home. Once, when nobody was in the laboratory, a shell landed near by, ricocheted of the walls but very luckily did not explode.
During first few days of bombing we went downstairs from the third floor into the bomb shelter. It was in the basement where we used to do the laundry. However, after a time we had no strength to take ourselves downstairs to the relative safety of the basement, and when the bombs came, mother laid down on top of us and said "if they kill us, at least we will all die together."
Once, while we still had electricity, mother got me up. I was trying to get dressed but being very tired I fell back to sleep only partly dressed. Suddenly something banged nearby. The building trembled and a lamp began swinging back and forth. I began running around the room shouting, "Oh, my felt boot! Where is my felt boot?" Actually, one of my felt boots was on my foot and the other was in my hand.
Then we knew that a bomb had fallen on the next building, number 15, went through its all five storeys, exploded and destroyed the building.
During one of the first bombing raids Badaevskye food storehouses were completely bombed and burned out. Black smoke stayed for several days above that place. At that time people of Leningrad could not imagine what a terrible future this smoke portened.
Starvation had arrived. There was no heating, light, water or sewage. Broken glass in the windows was replaced by my mother with pillows, blankets and plywood. Both day and night became cold and dark.
My brother and I were protected by lying fully dressed on the bed, covered with all sorts of warm things which we could find at home.
The fear of being killed by a bomb or a shell was nothing to the feeling of starvation, so even when the bombs were falling all around, people would not leave the queue at the bakery so as to not lose there chance of a little bread for the children.
My mother was unable to breast feed my brother Lenya, so I had to feed him like a baby bird. I cut ersatz bread into tiny cubes and put them in his little mouth.
Many years later mum called me "little hero". However I am still feeling ashamed: I have not told her that in her absence this "little hero" took a family ration pack and sniffed it and broke off crumbs and just stared at this tiny piece of bread.
When he grown up, Lenya would say:
Yes, my brother is a real hero! Can you imagine a seven years old boy that went mad with starvation, but found a power in himself not to eat this little piece of bread! He cut it into tiny cubes and was feeding his little brother with it during the day. Not even adults could have such strength to do that!" There were cases when mothers ate their children's rations. Because of starvation and extreme conditions, people sometimes lost their moral character.
I do not remember much because of my youth but I learnt a lot from my mothers's memories. Each of us from time to time becomes hungry if we did not have time for lunch or stayed longer at work, and dinner time was moved 2 or 3 hours later. Then we feel really hungry! However, the feeling of starvation is completely different. Starvation is a wild brutish thing which consumes all human consciousness, desires and aspirations. Just to eat and it is not important what to eat, but just to have something in your stomach. This thought devours a person from inside! Even more, the person understands he will die because of starvation, all the normal human feelings become blunted. He does not react to other peoples' deaths. The sense of self shame and disgust evaporates. A person could have eaten another person and some did. Later in life my mother did not like to watch films about the war, and especially about the siege. She said " even if a producer desired to show the truth about those events, he still could not show even one tenth of that reality!" What about me? I stopped feeling hunger and worry of starvation only in 1950, five years after the war, although we were eating well after the war thanks to our parents' efforts. For five years after the war we continued to hide pieces of bread.
It was impossible to survive on the ration packs and mother traded valuables for miserable amounts of food. I remember that my father's morning suit was swapped for one kilo of unshelled oats. For the winter coat, a crook handed my mum some expired coupons and promised to bring potato but has not.
Sellers in the markets often tricked people. A piece of fat which was brought from the frost would often turn out to be one of estuarine. A bag of sugar would end up being one full of chalk with a thin layer of sugar on the top.
Finally, my mother succeeded in obtaining a "bourjouika"-stove and then the pipes for it. However, these were water pipes, of small diameter, and did not draw all of the smoke out of the room and the room became very smoky.
Wood was expensive just like food, so we used toys and books instead ; thus we burned my father's technical library.
Unfamiliar words such as "corps, lice, duranda (sunflower shells soup)" came into common use.
The days and nights of the most dreadful first winter of the siege seemed to last forever... However, our mother organized a New Year celebration for us. She brought a box of New Year decorations to our bed and we looked through cartoon animals and fish. Our beloved celebration of New Year, in freezing flats of starving people - what could be sadder?
Then my little brother Lenya started to die and I was sent to the hospital to look after him.
The hospital was located far from mother's work, but after work our mother who was so weak, exchanged her daily ration for some cookies for us and carried them to the hospital. There was no public transport which was already not working in December! However, these cookies often were not passed to us and one nurse said to our mum, "I can see the extent to which you love your kids. If you want them to live, take them away from here." Then our mother dragged us home again. She pulled me on a sledge and hold my brother's hand. It happened in December 1941.
However, there were also very honest and wonderful people. Many years later, I started to collect documents about the Leningrad Siege in the Institute's archive and I found lists of evacuated children. The lists were made very precisely. In spite of starvation and cold, an unknown person on the staff wrote these lists with his freezen hands and saved them. Thank you, unknown kind person!
In March, 1942 a group of employees of the Leningrad Chemical-Technological University were evacuated with their children. Our neighbour, Lelya, accompanied us to the Finland terminal, pulling the sledge with us, children and our basic possessions. We still do not know if she had enough strength to return back home.
We arrived at Ladoga Lake bank at night time. We rode on the icy Life Way by bus and in the morning we came up to Big Land where we were fed the first time. I still remember our patterned ceramic jug full of steaming porridge.
We began getting into "teplushki-coaches. We occupied a corner on the top berth, next to the window. Although there was a stove in the middle of our overcrowded coach, it was always freezing in our corner.
There was a command to choose a coach captain who would be responsible for ordering and distributing food. Everybody refused but my mum volunteered. She said that she was scared we would not get any food. In certain stations she took assistants who received and carried food to the coach and divided it into rations. Then someone would turn the face to the wall and was asked, "For whom is it?" He answered, "For Ivanovs, for Petrovs, etc."
At every station inspectors knocked on the door, "Are there any dead?" If there had been, they would have to be removed from the train and loaded onto sledges. There were three or four sisters on the berth below us. They had a carpet on them. After one of them died, they wrapped her corpse in a carpet to hide it from the inspectors and carried on with it until the end of the journey.
At small stops people opened the heavy coach doors together. As there were no toilets around, they had to relieve themselves on the snow, just next to the coach. Our mother was 31 years old; she was feeling shy and crawled under the carriage to the other side. Once she got trapped. The train began moving suddenly, she was wearing a fur coat and two pairs of father's trousers but she did not have time to button them up. With horror she watched the train accelerate, then she noticed a step and a handle on one of the carriages. She grabbed the handle and was traveling this way until the next stop. The fur coat was not buttoned up, her trousers fell down, and the cold iron was burning her bare fingers. The train seemed to be going forever. How did she bear that torture? Later she told us that the only thing which kept her going was the thought of her children. After the train stopped, she could not relax her fingers for a long time.
On our way we were bombed several times but no longer felt any fear.
We can remember stopping in Stalingrad. Tables covered with white tablecloths were put on the platforms, and the people of Leningrad were fed with a hot dinner...
It was just the beginning of the war for us. Our evacuation to Kislovodsk became another hell as the facsists occupied the town...
22-й выпуск Первой школы г. Магадана, 1958 г.
Адрес страницы: http://neisri.narod.ru/academnet/1school/22-1958/900days.htm
(c) Copyleft Трумпе M.A., 2022
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