Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (30 page)

Through January and February the city Party Committee
issued a stream of orders – on the manufacture of
burzhuiki
, chlorine tablets and vaccines, on the ‘holding to account’ of pharmacy managers, on the sorting of undelivered mail, on the provision of pillows and linen to orphanages, the formation of teams of plumbers to repair the sewage system, the delivery of 13,000 pairs of cotton socks to a hospital. All fell into a void.

Among the many government agencies to cease functioning was the fire service. Set alight by bombardment, home-made stoves or by the twists of paper and splinters of wood used as torches once the kerosene for ‘bats’ and ‘smokers’ ran out, buildings burned for days. The health service was completely overwhelmed. ‘In Hospital 25th Anniversary of October’, ran a report to Popkov, head of the city soviet, of 12 February,

bedlinen has not been washed since 15 January . . . The wards are completely unheated, so some patients have been moved into the corridors, which have temporary stoves. Due to the very low temperatures patients cover themselves not only with hospital blankets but with dirty mattresses and their own coats . . . The lavatories are not working and the floors are not being washed.

Of the hospital’s 181 doctors only 27 were reporting for duty, of its 298 nurses only 163, and over a thousand corpses had piled up in its mortuary and storage rooms. In the Raukhfus Children’s Hospital, which on some days had no heating at all, patients slept two or three to a bed. They had not been washed or had their bedlinen changed for six weeks, with the result that all had lice. Two hundred and ninety-nine corpses awaited removal.
15
A pile of dead also grew outside the Erisman’s rear entrance on the Karpovka canal – overflow from its mortuary plus neighbourhood fatalities deposited there by relatives. ‘Each day now’, wrote Inber,

eight to ten bodies are brought in on sleds. And they just lie there on the snow. Fewer and fewer coffins are available, so too the materials to make them. The bodies are wrapped in sheets, blankets, tablecloths – sometimes even in curtains. Once I saw a small bundle wrapped in paper and tied with string. It was very small – the body of a child.

How macabre they look on the snow! Occasionally an arm or leg protrudes from the crude wrappings . . . It reminds me of a battlefield and of a doss-house, both at the same time.
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Dmitri Lazarev, who visited the Erisman to take leave of a friend, described overflowing slop buckets – ‘honey-buckets’ – and the only nursing as being done by visitors.
17
On 15 January its mortuary went up in flames, the origin of the fire the still-smouldering quilted jackets, lined with raw cotton wadding, of workers killed in a factory blaze. Overall, according to the city health department, 40 per cent of those admitted to its seventy-three hospitals in the first quarter of 1942 died in them. Wide discrepancies between different institutions – the Karl Marx Hospital reported 84 per cent mortality among patients admitted in January, the October District Second Children’s Hospital only 12 per cent – suggest the figure may be less than complete.
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Marina Yerukhmanova witnessed the rapid deterioration of conditions in the hotel-turned-hospital Yevropa. On 16 November a bomb had landed just outside the main entrance, knocking out its electricity supply, and with it heating, lighting, stoves and lifts. Remaining peacetime trappings – starched tablecloths, white-jacketed waiters – quickly fell away, but the hospital managed to keep on operating fairly normally until New Year, when its running water failed and its lavatories froze. Thereafter it quickly descended into squalor and disorder. Patients relieved themselves on the marble main staircase, turning it into a ‘yellow ice mountain’. They set up a black market in the second-floor restaurant, and mugged the orderlies – many, like Marina and her sister, gently reared ‘Turgenev girls’ – carrying food along the dark corridors.
Shtrafniki
– dark-skinned, glittering-eyed soldiers from the 16th Punishment Battalion, mostly former convicts – took over the grandest bedrooms, pinning rugs over their shoulders and twisting velvet curtains into turbans ‘like the crew of a pirate ship’. A grand piano was gradually stripped of its mahogany casing, which went into stoves for fuel, and the ‘Eastern’ dining room with its stained-glass longboats was turned into a mortuary.

On 4 January, having been working fifteen-hour days carrying buckets of hot water up four flights of ice-covered stairs, Marina collapsed with stomach pains. A kind nurse put the girls and their mother into what had been one of the hotel’s cheaper bedrooms, on the top floor. Its grey-painted walls were covered with fernlike swirls of hoarfrost, the indoor temperature being eleven degrees below freezing. What allowed them to make the room habitable was Marina’s mother’s discovery of a half-litre bottle of alcohol in the hotel’s former pharmacy. With one half of it she bought
sukhari
, and with the other paid a man to make a
burzhuika
out of a bucket. Stoked with broken-up furniture and the hotel’s old personnel files – Marina and her sister leafed through application letters from long-gone wine waiters and pastry chefs before feeding them to the flames – the stove turned the room into the Yerukhmanovas’ ‘ark’. Two nurses moved in, one with her elderly mother; no gloomy talk was allowed and everyone got fully undressed daily, so that they could check each other’s clothes for lice. The ‘ark’ could not, however, carry all. A first cousin, twelve-year-old Lesha, came to visit early in the New Year:

The little boy had reached the last stage of starvation. He was all oedema – the liquid had swelled his body so much that it seemed as if his skin wouldn’t hold . . . We somehow pulled him together, gave him something to eat. Like a stuck record, he kept repeating and repeating that he would die within a week, his mother maybe sooner, and so on and so on. And we sat and listened, but our feelings were so blunted . . . We lived only in order to live. Thought and emotion somehow came to a standstill.

All over the city, public institutions – schools, factories, banks, post offices, police stations, university departments – similarly ground to a halt, though employees with strength enough continued to turn up for warmth, companionship and the chance of obtaining a plate of watery soup in the canteen. ‘In the mornings’, Lazarev wrote of his Optical Institute, ‘we sat round the stove in silence, heads bowed. We sat for hours, not moving, not talking. When there was no more firewood the stove went out. Though there was a big pile of wood in the courtyard nobody had the strength to chop it and carry it up the stairs. Instead, we sat out the wait until lunch in the cold. After lunch we went home.’ The first to die (as in Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building and Olga Grechina’s apartment block) were the Institute’s ancillary staff. ‘The old cleaning lady has just died of hunger’, he wrote on 25 December. ‘Only the day before yesterday she was dusting my desk. I’m told that she went home, lay down on her bed, stretched out her arms, sighed and died. Today, entering the lab, I saw the corpse of our recently deceased security guard in the next room.’

Unlike the cleaning lady, Lazarev had access to the Scholars’ Building, a clubhouse for academics splendidly housed a few doors down from the Hermitage on the Neva. Through September
pirozhki
, coffee and potatoes had been available there off-ration, though by New Year this had been cut to soup and sweet tea. ‘In the freezing hall’, wrote Lazarev

a long queue winds up the marble staircase. People stand and wait in silence. Almost everyone carries a document case over their shoulder, with hidden inside it a container for carrying food back home to the family. The wait feels endless. It’s especially cold standing next to the massive marble banisters – a perceptible wave of cold streams off them. At last our turn comes, and we enter the canteen. Frozen, in fur coats and hats, we sit down at the free tables. After some time a desultory conversation begins. A zoologist – tall and formerly overweight – complains that people of different sizes are all given the same food. ‘Mark my words, bigger men . . .’ But nobody listens to him, since Katyusha is approaching our table with her scissors and the matchbox for coupons. She is our favourite waitress – it seems to us that she serves up faster, and that her portions are a little bigger. People come to the canteen with their own plates and spoons. The respectable grey-haired professor licks his plate clean before hiding it in his gas-mask bag.
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Lazarev himself fell gravely ill in the spring, and was reprieved only by a providential secondment to a minelayer, which as well as providing him with proper meals allowed him to pass his ration cards to his wife and daughter.

The Leningrad Party Committee officially closed 270 factories over the winter, but most of the rest hardly functioned and even what remained of the defence plants managed only a little erratic repair work.
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Olga Grechina, orphaned by her mother’s death in January, stood guard duty at night in her semi-shut missile factory. Alone in the empty workshops she kept fear at bay by reading H. G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds
by the light of a ‘bat’ – the person on duty got the best book, as a distraction from the rats that scuttered ‘loathsomely and incessantly’ across the concrete floors. Off-duty she sat in the warmth of the janitor’s room, stripping pine branches of their needles for processing into a vitamin C drink – another food supplement devised by the Forestry Academy. The job paid her a single meal at 2 a.m. each day, of soup and
kasha
.

Out of the 270 workers of Workshop 15 of Vasili Chekrizov’s Sudomekh shipyard, 47 had died by the end of January. ‘How many will die in February nobody knows. Only seventy appear for roll-call, or at the canteen. All the others are lying down . . . Skilled, qualified workmen, the backbone of the shop, have died . . . Only a few people are working on repairs, and you can’t really call it work – in truth they’re just marking time.’
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The usual draconian punishments for absenteeism ceased to have any effect. At the Marti shipyard, a report to Zhdanov of early February complained,

hundreds of people fail to appear for work, and nobody pays any attention. Every day the number absent without leave rises . . . After the district Party Committee told the management that their behaviour sheltered truants, in the course of two days they brought proceedings against seventy-two absentees. But this was not the end of [the management’s] mistakes. Of the 72 cases half had to be sent back again, for lack of evidence.
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Academic life kept going for a remarkably long time. The Persianist Aleksandr Boldyrev was still taking tutorials in the Hermitage in late December (and scolding his students for turning in poor work). Nikolai Punin was doing the same until late November. At the Erisman Hospital the pathologist Vladimir Garshin lectured through the air raids, and held exams as usual at the end of the winter term, even as his students died in their hostels. (The single men, he noticed, collapsed first; girls and married couples lasted longer.) The only way to keep going, he thought, was to keep working:

So we invent things for the laboratory assistants to do, just to keep them occupied. If you stop working, lie down, it’s bad – there’s no guarantee you’ll get up again. One of the assistants died in the lab itself. She was found in the morning curled up in a ball underneath a warm shawl, wearing new brown felt boots. She hadn’t gone home, it was too far. Another assistant’s husband was killed in the street during an artillery barrage. She took two days’ absence and then returned to work, her dropsy-swollen face even puffier from tears. She is silent. Does work go on? Yes it does, somehow. The important thing is not to give up. The examinations are happening, and I’m taking the orals – their presentations aren’t bad! The lectures sank in after all! And the examiner, my assistant, grills them thoroughly but gently. Where do they get their strength from?
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Inber watched another Erisman doctor defend his thesis in the hospital’s air-raid shelter; the toasts afterwards were drunk in diluted spirits.
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The higher-profile institutions especially persisted in a defiant, almost surreal facsimile of normal life right through the winter’s worst days. On 9 February Inber attended a two-day Conference of Baltic Writers, organised by the Writers’ Union. To prepare she darned extra gloves and stockings, swapped four canteen meals for two eggs and a small piece of dried-up cheese, and dipped into her private food stock for a bar of chocolate. The walk from the Erisman to the conference venue, in normal times a pleasant stroll from the Petrograd Side to Vasilyevsky Island, took two hours, during which she passed snowed-in trams, a building that had been burning, unattended, all night, and a street flooded by a broken fire hydrant, the unexpected water giving off twists of vapour that caught the pink dawn light. At the end of a day of readings, reports and speeches she retired to a bunk set up behind a curtain in the tobacco-fugged conference hall. In the early hours she was woken by the sound of smashing wood. ‘It was Z, who was using an axe to demolish the chair on which he had been sitting during the presentations. I watched him throw the pieces into the stove – helpless Leningrad chairs! I grew warm again and went back to sleep.’