Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (32 page)

Sixteen more such morgues opened in April, several of them in disused churches, including the Trinity Cathedral and the chapel of the Alexander Nevsky monastery.

On 15 January the city soviet ordered the digging of more, bigger trenches at the Bolsheokhtinskoye cemetery (just across the river from the Smolniy), the Serafimovskoye cemetery in Novaya Derevnya, the old Lutheran cemetery on Decembrists’ Island, and at the Piskarevskoye and Bogoslovskoye cemeteries in the far north-eastern suburbs. Though each of the fifteen district soviets was supposed to find four hundred workers to man new burial teams, only one actually did so, and the job was turned over to NKVD troops and civil defence units. The ‘Komsomolets’ excavators with which they started work proved unable to break the ground, which had frozen to a depth of one and a half metres, so instead explosives were used, together with heavier AK diggers.

A second order of 2 February instructed district soviets to come up with a daily total of sixty lorries with trailers, for the collection of corpses from morgues and hospitals. Five-tonne trucks were to transport one hundred corpses per trip, three-tonne trucks sixty corpses, and one and a half-tonne trucks forty. Drivers were incentivised with extra rations – 100 grams of bread and fifty of vodka for every second and subsequent delivery. As a result, the Burial Trust reported, for several days in February ‘six to seven thousand bodies were delivered daily to the Piskarevskoye Cemetery alone . . . Five-tonne trucks piled high with corpses could be seen driving through town, their poorly covered loads reaching as high again as the sides of the vehicle, with five or six workers sitting on top.’ Since the corpses were frozen stiff, to pack in the maximum number collection teams could use the same technique as for logs, some standing vertically so as to form a fence holding in the remainder.
36
At the cemeteries the excavators could not keep up with deliveries, creating enormous backlogs. The number of unburied corpses at the Piskarevskoye, the Trust estimated, reached 20,000–25,000 at its February worst, stacked in rows two hundred metres long and two metres high.

Though the conversion of brick kilns to crematoria in March, combined with decreasing mortality, gradually brought the situation under control, mass burial continued up to the end of May. At the Piskarevskoye (the largest of the sites) a total of 129 trenches were dug, filled and re-covered from 16 December to 1 May. The biggest six – four to five metres deep, six metres wide and up to 180 metres long – contained, the Trust estimated, about 20,000 bodies each. At the Bogoslovskoye a disused sandpit was filled with 60,000 corpses over five or six February days, an anti-tank ditch with 10,000, and bomb craters with another 1,000. Eighteen anti-tank ditches on the northern edge of the Serafimovskoye cemetery accommodated another 15,000. Altogether, the Trust reported, 662 mass graves were dug and filled in the city, not counting the use of pits, craters and trenches. How many dead they contained in total is still disputed, but the best estimate for the number of civilians who died during Leningrad’s first siege winter is around half a million.
37

12

‘We Were Like Stones'

On 17 February 1942 Mariya Mashkova, head of acquisitions at the Public Library, a handsome, grey-blue, neo-classical building that curves round the corner of Aleksandrinskaya Square and the Nevsky, sat down to write:

 

Day after day passes, and it already feels late to be starting a diary. Unrepeatable, terrifying things happen and are forgotten. The rest, the trivia, remain in the memory. A packet of letters arrived today and reminded me that away from Leningrad there's a different life going on, and people who can't imagine even a hundredth of what we're going through.

Outside I can hear shelling. It didn't use to bother me, but now I think numbly, ‘Somewhere a building is collapsing, people are being crushed.' But what's this compared to everything that's happened already? We are all ill. Olga Fedorovna [Mashkova's mother-in-law] is very bad – no surprise, since from room to room there are dead people, a corpse for every family. It has been almost a month since Anna Yakovlevna Zveinek died from starvation. She's still lying there in her freezing, dirty room – black, dried-up, teeth bared. Nobody is in any hurry to clean her up and bury her; everyone is too weak to care. Two rooms away lies another corpse – her daughter Asya Zveinek, who also died of starvation, outliving her mother by twelve days. Asya died two steps from my bed, and Vsevolod [Mashkova's husband] and I dragged her away because it was too warm in our room for a dead body . . .

Almost in front of my eyes N. P. Nikolsky died, a friend of Vsevolod's and a [former] deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was brought in on a sled, with the idea of placing him in a recuperation clinic
so as to get him back on his feet . . . He fell into a coma and quickly died, in Vsevelod's office. He stayed there, on the sofa, for twelve days, since nobody could cope with burying him. Altogether, the Library has lost at least a hundred people . . .

People's attitude to death, and death itself and burial, have greatly simplified. At first it was very difficult. Make a coffin – it's hard to get one, 500–700 roubles – dig a grave, that has to be paid for in bread . . . Then rentable coffins appeared, and after that people were taken to the morgues on sleds, just wrapped in sheets and blankets. Thus I buried V. F. Karyakin, Zinaida Yepifanova's husband . . . and even my deadened nerves were barely able to handle everything I saw . . .

Asya moved in with us after her mother died . . . When she died, too, to my despair I couldn't use her ration cards, because a friend of hers had disappeared with them two days before. Card theft is frightening and commonplace . . . In shops and on the streets one often hears a piercing, tearing scream – and you know that someone's cards have been stolen, or that a piece of bread has been ripped from someone's hands. It is unbearably depressing, and what saves you is bestial indifference to human suffering.
1

 

What was it like to live through this? Many diaries peter out in January or February, their authors either too weak to write or at a loss for words. Others condense into curt records of relatives' deaths and of food obtained and consumed. Yet others, like the poet Olga Berggolts's, become more prolix – long, repetitive outpourings of despair, disbelief, guilt, anger and terror. Ask one of the dwindling number of siege survivors today how they remember those months, and the reply will likely be the words ‘
kholod
,
golod
,
snaryady
,
pozhary
' – ‘cold, hunger, shells, fires' – a set phrase whose long, rhyming syllables are both a shorthand and a litany.

Most obviously, the siege winter meant a narrowing of existence  to the iron triangle of home, bread queue and water source – and to immediate family and neighbours. Sequestered in their dark and freezing flats, reliant on sleds, home-made lamps and scavenged fuel, Leningraders compared themselves to cavemen, to Robinson Crusoe and to polar explorers. Pre-war life, which at the time had felt so disorganised, now seemed to Lidiya Ginzburg's ‘Siege Man' like ‘a fairy tale':

 

Water in the taps, light at the press of a switch, food in the shops . . . From that former time, an engraving hung above the bookshelf and a Crimean clay jug sat on the shelf – a gift. The woman who had given it was now in unoccupied Russia, and the memory of her had become a pale and unnecessary thing . . . In that winter's enveloping chaos it felt as though the jug and even the bookshelves were something in the nature of the Pogankiniy Chambers or the ruins of the Colosseum, in that they would never have any practical significance again.
2
       

 

With narrowing of the physical world came narrowing of the emotions. Survivors describe themselves as having been ‘like wolves' or even more commonly ‘like stones' – automata drained of feeling or interest except that of prolonging their own survival. The sight of a stranger collapsing on the street, which in November and December had presented itself as a moral dilemma – should one stop and help, and risk failing to bring home food for one's own family, or pass on by? – in January and February hardly registered. On 13 January, setting out to the Scholars' Building for ‘soy soup', Aleksandr Boldyrev heard that a neighbour, ‘grown completely old and dilapidated in the last couple of months', had collapsed outside on the pavement and been dragged indoors by passing soldiers. ‘He's still there, in the stairwell, apparently dying. But I didn't go in, and went to get lunch. The journey there and back uses up all my strength, my little daily reserve. Golovan was also on his way to lunch, but his reserve was insufficient.'
3
Janitors, another diarist noted, asked people who sat down to rest on their buildings' doorsteps to move on, knowing that if they died there it would be their responsibility to drag the corpse to the morgue. If the person was well-dressed, however, the janitor would ‘be more courteous, even offer a chair, because he knows that afterwards, he can take their clothes'.
4
The same shrivelling of the emotions occurred within families, the deaths of beloved husbands or parents provoking only relief at obtaining an extra ration card or anxiety about how to dispose of a corpse.

For almost everyone, it was impossible to think about anything except food. Obtaining it, preparing it, saving it, calculating how long it could be made to last – all became universal obsessions, as did memories of meals past. ‘As he walked along the street', Ginzburg wrote of her ‘Siege Man',

 

he would slowly go over everything he had eaten that morning or the day before; he would ponder what he was going to eat that day, or busy himself with calculations involving ration cards and coupons. He found in this an absorption and tension which he had previously known only when thinking through and writing about something very important . . . What was it so sickeningly like? Something from the previous life? Ah yes – being unhappily in love.
5

 

Others became seized by ‘bread mania', imagining themselves dipping slice after slice in sunflower oil, or nibbling an endless supply of buttered rolls. (Varlam Shalamov, starving in the Kolyma goldmines at the same time, wrote that ‘we all had the same dreams of loaves of ryebread, flying past like meteors or angels'.) New etiquettes grew up around food. Some families ate everything they had obtained for the day in one go; others spread it out into three ‘meals'. Food could be pooled and divided equally or according to need, or each family member could eat ‘according to his ration'. Food preparation was spun out into elaborate rituals. The Zhilinskys, having reused their tea leaves several times, mixed them with salt and ate them with a spoon. Boldyrev's four-year-old daughter threw tantrums unless the table was laid to an exact plan, and ‘meals' accompanied with a set form of words: ‘The tea is so cold that flies and mosquitoes skate and sled on it, and you can drink without a cup, without a spoon, straight from the saucer.' (‘This', wrote her father, ‘is said about five times with every cup, in a weird, almost sickly tongue-twister . . . A childish reaction to the surrounding chaos.')
6
Traditions of hospitality, inevitably, evaporated. ‘I know she's hungry', wrote Klara Rakhman of a schoolfriend's just widowed, lice-ridden mother who came to beg for
duranda
: ‘But she should understand that at such times it's embarrassing to ask.' (Rakhman's own father, her ‘darling papochka', died in March.)
7
       

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.) On sale in the street markets was ‘Badayev earth', dug from underneath the remains of the burned Badayev warehouses and supposedly impregnated with charred sugar. Together with another little boy, Igor Kruglyakov slipped past guards to dig some up:

 

I found what I thought was a piece of sugar, and put it in my mouth. I sucked it all the while we were walking home. It didn't dissolve but it tasted sweet. When we got home I spat it out into my hand, and it was just an ordinary stone . . . Mama scolded us of course, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, pretended there was some sugar there. She mixed it with water and it was as though we drank sweet tea.
8

 

Denying oneself food so as to give it to others – as hundreds of thousands of Leningraders managed to do – became an act of supreme self-control and shining charity.

 

In January Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with friends. Revisiting her own flat on 1 February, Kochina found the door open and the furniture in pieces. ‘“Why are you chopping up our furniture?” I asked the woman next door. “We're cold,” she answered laconically. What could I say to that? She has two children. They really are cold.' Returning four days later she found a corpse on her bed, ‘so flat that the bedspread was slightly raised only by its head and feet. After chopping the leg off a chair I left, without inquiring whose body it was.' Two days later it had been joined by two more. ‘Evidently the neighbours have set up a morgue in my room. Let them – dead bodies don't bother me.'
9