Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (29 page)

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Sleds and Cocoons

At 60° north, Leningrad is on the same latitude as the Shetland Islands, and only a couple of degrees short of Anchorage. In midwinter, the sun rises at nine, hanging blindingly low in the sky until it sets again at three. Today, winter temperatures usually average around -10°C, but in January 1942 they dipped into the -30s. Head-high snowdrifts blocked the streets, metre-long glassy spears hung off the tram wires and the women turning rocket-casings at the Bolshevik plant were able to score a length of metal piping, tap it with a hammer, and break it clean through. During the short, bright days, for those with the energy to notice, the city looked extraordinarily beautiful – the air, free of the usual coal smoke, dazzlingly clear; the snow, unsullied by vehicles, a chemical blue-white. During the eighteen hours of silent, blacked-out darkness (the cold had grounded the German bombers), one felt one was living at the bottom of a well, or in the depths of the ocean.        

Leningraders saw in the New Year as best they could. Vera Inber spent the first part of the evening at a poetry reading held in the red drawing room of the Writers’ Union building on Shpalernaya, the long, rather dull boulevard, lined with government buildings, that runs from the centre of town to the Smolniy. A few small logs burned in the fireplace, and a single candle on the podium table. ‘It was very cold. My turn came. I moved closer to the candle and started on the first stanza of my new poem (I haven’t decided on a title yet). It was the first time I had read it in public. When I got to the part where I curse Germany I could hardly breathe – I had to stop and start again three times.’ At midnight, back at the Erisman Hospital, she and her husband went downstairs to the medical superintendent’s consulting room:

We took with us our last bottle of Riesling. We poured the wine into glasses, but then the telephone rang. It was the doctor on duty in Casualty, reporting that he had forty dead bodies lying in the corridors and some even in the bathroom. He didn’t know what to do. So the Medical Superintendent went down to Casualty, and we went back up to our room and bed.
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Vasili Chekrizov, returned from erecting pillboxes at the front, spent New Year’s Eve at the Sudomekh shipyard. For a month it had had no electricity: ‘We’re doing damn all, and this hurts morale. People should at least be allowed to go home, but the management keeps them here all day . . . I’m told that in Workshop no. 3 they’re making eight to ten coffins daily – and that’s just in our one factory.’ Leningraders no longer, he noted, took any notice of shelling: he had seen passers-by fight for bits of a broken wooden fence in the midst of a bombardment; a colleague had seen a crowd tear to pieces a newly killed horse. ‘In an hour’, he wrote as midnight neared,

1942 will be with us. I’m sitting in our common room, lit only by the stove. In this respect at least, we’re well off – we’ve got almost unlimited firewood. I’m sitting re-warming the coffee in my cup. Radio reception is good for once – New Year’s Eve speeches . . . It’s a hard way to meet the New Year – hunger and cold; people dying every day. But the speeches are full of optimism. The dark, difficult times are behind us. Though there’s no improvement in food supply you can almost smell the enemy’s destruction and retreat.

Like thousands of others, he thought of his wife and son: ‘How are Dina and Gelik? Did they get the money? If they did then they’re all right. What luck that they aren’t here. How could I have faced Gelik, seeing him hungry and not being able to do anything to help?’
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Yelena Kochina got up at four o’clock in the morning to queue for one of the bottles of wine distributed to mark the holiday:

The hours ran silently after one another like grey rats, disappearing into the darkness. But I kept on standing and standing, repeating to myself the chant – ‘Everything comes to an end, everything comes to an end . . .’ The moon dimmed; the sky turned grey, then white, then blue . . . The night had passed. At three o’clock in the afternoon I got the bottle with its pretty little shiny cap.

She took the bottle straight to a street market, where she was lucky to trade it (with a sailor) for a large piece of bread. Back at home, she and her husband passed the evening together in grim, apathetic silence:

Dima doesn’t steal bread any more. For days at a time now he lies with his face to the wall . . . His face is covered with soot – even his fine pale eyelashes have become thick and black. I can’t imagine him clean, smart and neat like he used to be. But of course I’m not much better. Lice torment us both. We sleep together – we’ve only got one bed – but even through padded coats it’s unpleasant feeling  the other’s touch.
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Leningrad was now entering its period of mass death. In December, according to police records (certainly a substantial undercount), starvation and its related conditions – ‘dystrophy’ in a new coinage – had killed 52,881 out of the city’s civilian population of about two and a half million.
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January’s toll was 96,751 and February’s 96,015.

The sight of death, already commonplace by the end of the year, now became universal. ‘Early this morning’, wrote a manager at the Lenenergo power station, ‘[the director] Chistyakov’s father died. He’s still lying on a daybed in Chistyakov’s office. Next to him Chistyakov carries on working and eating, and takes rests on the same bed. Colleagues and visitors come and go – the dead man disturbs no-one.’
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As if caught in Vesuvius’s gas cloud, the corpses of the many who collapsed outside on the street also remained as they were, huddled in doorways or slumped against walls and fences. ‘On the pavements’, wrote Ostroumova-Lebedeva on 18 January,

lots of wooden boxes have been erected, and filled with sand. There’s no water, so these sandboxes are all we have to fight fires with. Today, walking along the street, I saw a very old woman sitting on one of these sandboxes. She was dead. A few buildings further on, on another box, a dead boy slouched. He had been walking along, became exhausted, sat down and died.

Vera Kostrovitskaya, a dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet school and niece of the Franco-Polish poet Apollinaire, recorded the gradual stripping of a corpse that leant against a lamp-post opposite the Philharmonia:

With his back to the post, a man sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack . . . Probably he was on his way to Finland Station, got tired and sat down to rest. For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He sat 1. Without his knapsack; 2. Without his rags; 3. In his underwear; 4. Naked; 5. A skeleton with ripped out entrails. They took him away in May.
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Shock and horror disguised themselves as gallows humour. The shrouded corpses pulled along the streets, sometimes two at a time, on sleds, prams, handcarts or sheets of plywood, were nicknamed ‘mummies’ or ‘cocoons’. A ‘strengthened supplementary food’ ration – the
usilennoye dopolnitelnoye pitaniye
or UDP – sometimes issued to the dying became
umresh dnem pozzhe
or ‘You’ll die a day later’.
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Saying goodbye, people told each other not to ‘end up in the trenches’ – referring not to the trench warfare of the front, but to the newly dug pits in the cemeteries. The soldiers who did the rounds of the streets picking up bodies dumped outside on the pavements called their job ‘gathering flowers’, because the heads of the dead were often wrapped in bright-coloured cloth, so as to make them easier to spot under the snow.
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Bodies were also deposited in the open slit trenches in the parks, which formed impromptu mass graves when their props were looted for firewood, causing them gradually to collapse. The whole, as ever, was gloatingly recorded by German intelligence. On Prospekt Stachek (a long thoroughfare running through the south-western industrial suburbs), a report of 12 January noted, six people had collapsed and died, and their corpses been left lying. ‘Such cases have become so common that nobody pays any attention to them, and general exhaustion is anyway such that only a few can give real help.’
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In part thanks to the design of the rationing system, mortality followed a clear demographic. In January 73 per cent of fatalities were male, and 74 per cent children under five or adults aged forty or over. By May the majority – 65 per cent – were female, and a slightly smaller majority – 59 per cent – children under five or adults aged forty or over. Children aged ten to nineteen made up only 3 per cent of the total in the first ten days of December, but 11 per cent in May.
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Within a single family, therefore, the order in which its members typically died was grandfather and infants first, grandmother and father (if not at the front) second, mother and older children last.

The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households – usually mothers – were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: whether to eat more food themselves, so as to stay on their feet, or whether to give more to the family’s sickest member – usually a grandparent or child – and risk the lives of all. That many or most prioritised their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind. The lucky ones were put into children’s homes; the unlucky had their cards stolen by neighbours, took to thieving on the streets or simply died alone.
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The physical symptoms of starvation, suffered in varying combinations by the large majority of Leningraders, were emaciation, dropsical swelling of the legs and face, skin discolouration (‘hunger tan’ in the slang of the time – faces are described as turning ‘black’, ‘blue-black’, ‘yellow’ or ‘green’), ulcers, loosening or loss of teeth and weakening of the heart. Women stopped menstruating and sexual desire vanished. The optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev described how it felt in his diary:

For a long time I have wanted to write down what a person emaciated from starvation experiences. You sleep very little – six or seven hours. Throughout the night you continuously pull up your covers and tuck them in, for you are always cold. The cold pours along your spine and whole body. Your protruding bones ache, forcing you to keep changing position. All the time you are tortured by hunger; you can feel the emptiness of your stomach, and convulsively swallow your own saliva. It’s difficult to perform any sort of physical movement, even the most insignificant. Before turning over in bed, you take a long time to gather your strength. You procrastinate, put it off. In your mind you repeat the necessary sequence of actions over and over again, before actually committing to them. The morning arrives and it’s very hard to overcome your inertia, to get up and get dressed. During the day your movements are slow and careful. Despite wearing warm clothes you feel chilled, and are dogged by an unpleasant sensation of noise in your ears. Your own breathing and speech resonate as if in an empty vessel. Your feet swell, and deep cracks form in the skin of your fingers . . . You exist on the sidelines to everything going on around you. In the canteen, for example, you meet a friend, a colleague, and don’t have the energy even to say hello. You look at him expressionlessly, and he returns the same look. Why waste strength on words?
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Lidiya Ginzburg describes starvation as a sort of premature ageing, combined with alienation from the body:

The mind hauled the body along . . . Let’s say I move my right leg forward. The other one moves back, pivots on its toes and bends at the knee (how poorly it manages that!) then pulls itself off the ground and moves forward through the air . . . You have to watch the way it goes back, otherwise you might fall over. It was the most ghastly dancing lesson.

Even more insulting in its abruptness was losing one’s balance. It wasn’t weakness, nor staggering from exhaustion, but something else altogether. You want to put your foot on the edge of a chair to tie your shoelaces; but at that very moment your temples begin to thud and you are overcome with giddiness. The body has just slithered out of control and wants to fall like an empty sack into some incomprehensible abyss.

A whole series of foul processes went on inside the alienated body – degeneration, drying-out, swelling up, not like good old-fashioned illness. Some of these processes were imperceptible to the person stricken with them. ‘He’s already swelling up, isn’t he?’ they say . . . but he hasn’t realised it yet . . . Then he suddenly becomes aware that his gums have swollen. He feels them with his tongue, terrified, then prods them with his finger. He can’t leave them alone, especially at night. He lies there with an intense feeling of something hardened and slippery, its numbness especially frightening: a layer of dead tissue inside his mouth.
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In starvation’s final stages, sufferers resembled barely animated skeletons, with hollow stomachs, sunken cheeks, protruding jaws and blank, frightening stares. ‘His legs moved like artificial limbs’, Inber wrote of a man she saw being helped along the street. ‘His eyes stared madly, as if he were possessed. The skin on his face was tightly stretched, the lips half open, revealing teeth which seemed enlarged . . . His nose, sharpened as if it had melted, was covered with small sores, and the tip had bent slightly sideways. Now I know what is meant by ‘gnawed by hunger’.
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