Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (50 page)

Saved by a school, in the role of teacher rather than pupil, was Olga Grechina. Since the beginning of the war she had dug trenches, worked in factories, cleared snow, had several close shaves during air raids and lost her mother to starvation. Her sixteen-year-old brother Vovka had turned into a stranger, appearing at their flat only rarely and with odd new possessions – clothes, a bicycle and jars of half-rotten salted tomatoes – which he fantastically claimed had been lent by relatives or turned out of the Smolniy’s cellars. ‘Already’, she wrote, ‘he wasn’t the same happy little elephant who all my schoolfriends adored, a bit of a coward and none too keen on his lessons.’ In May 1942 all became clear, when she heard that he had been arrested for stealing – not only from bread shops, she discovered, but from neighbours and relatives, including two spinster aunts whose cards he had taken, promising to return with their rations; they had subsequently died of starvation. Despite doing the rounds of the police stations and joining the long, silent queues outside the Kresty, Olga had no further news of her brother until the summer of the following year, when she received official notification that he had died of ‘dystrophy’ in a camp in Yaroslavl province.

After Vovka’s arrest, Olga suffered a nervous breakdown. Forced to sell remaining family valuables to an avaricious schoolfriend (her parents’ silver wedding anniversary tea set went for a few roubles, an oak table for two kilos of millet), she felt surrounded on all sides by loss and betrayal, started to suffer hallucinations and fell into deep depression. Attending teacher training in response to a radio appeal for nursery school staff, she sat at the back and slept:

I woke rarely and couldn’t write or remember anything. Luckily there were no exams – I would have failed them. There were a couple of nice girls there but I spoke to them robotically – I think they thought that I was mentally handicapped. And this was actually true, since I remember nothing from June. I don’t remember what I ate, who I saw, or any other details of my life then. I didn’t feel that I was dying, but that I was already dead.
28

Her salvation was Boarding School no. 43, a tightly run, well-connected institution housed in a handsome nineteenth-century building one block down from the Hermitage on the Neva (and still there today). The headmistress, presented with a skinny, spectacled twenty-year-old with a plait pinned round the top of her head and darned socks, immediately despatched her to dig potatoes at the school’s affiliated collective farm, where she was fed cabbage soup, dozed through the days with her ‘nose in the earth’, and opened up to fellow staff, mostly newly widowed university lecturers, through the long pale evenings. In September they returned to the city and Olga was put to mending schoolbooks (‘It was very hard not to eat the paste, made from pure white flour’) before being given charge of a class of thirty-five ‘no longer starving, and quite lively’ four-year-olds. ‘You are not herding children’, she was told, ‘you are bringing them up.’

The job was an extraordinary one. The teachers lived full-time at the school, together with 120 four- to seven-year-olds. At night – when not taking the children down to the air-raid shelter – they slept on pushed-together tables, and during the day not only taught, but stoked stoves, hauled water up two flights of stairs from the unlit basement of a neighbouring building, washed and dried sheets (six of Olga’s group were bed-wetters), flushed out lavatories, folded and unfolded camp beds (four times a day, taking into account afternoon naps) and shaved the children’s heads to rid them of lice. In the evenings they repaired the children’s clothes, reusing buttons and elastic. There was no soap, no toothpaste and so little crockery that everyone drank from saucers. Staff were also drafted to outside ‘voluntary’ work, demolishing buildings for firewood and emptying bedpans in a nearby military hospital. Though it was forbidden to talk in front of children about the war – they were to be ‘transported to a world of fantasy, fairy tales and art’ – reality inevitably intruded. On walks they competed for spent shot from the anti-aircraft guns on the
Kirov
, moored nearby on the Neva embankment, and at break-time distressed Olga with their games:

Today the children found some sort of hole in the yard, and began to dig, chanting, ‘Come on, come on, dig quicker. Our little ones are in there. The Germans have killed them all!’

Lida: ‘My Vovochka’s in there!’

Rufa: ‘And my Lilenka and Granny!’ . . .

Tearing the girls away from this game was very difficult. It fascinated them and they came back to it again and again. It was always Rufa, five years old and the oldest in my class, who started it. She hadn’t been to kindergarten before and had been living with a Granny who fell asleep and didn’t want to wake up any more. Before that there had been a Lilenka – probably a younger sister – who also fell asleep forever.
29

Never having had much to do with small children before, Olga initially found controlling her ‘collective’ almost impossible, but quickly learned the tricks of the trade. At mealtimes she quietened them with the help of a floppy-eared dog glove-puppet that had been her own childhood toy. During air-raids she repeated again and again a tale from the Brothers Grimm, of a magic pot that produces a non-stop flow of sweet golden
kasha
, so much of it that it pours out of the house and floods the whole town. ‘A mass of energy, time and starch’ went into preparations for New Year’s Day 1943. Besides having to recite crass poems in praise of Voroshilov, distributed by the city education department, the children dressed up as snowflakes, rabbits and bears, and a teacher as Snegurochka – Russia’s Little Snow Girl, grand-daughter of Grandfather Frost – juggling snowballs made of cotton wool. Aunt Motya, the incorruptible eighty-year-old School cook, made
pirozhki
out of carefully hoarded flour. Olga stayed with School no. 43 all the way through to the autumn of 1944, before resuming her university degree. It had not only saved her from despair but given her ‘a place in the world’. ‘I felt that I needed people’, she wrote later, ‘and that they might need me.’

*
In private he was more cynical: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell’, he famously told his private secretary later the same night, ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

21

The Last Year

Hitler’s objectives for 1942 included Leningrad. It was to be stormed, a Führer Directive of 5 April instructed, as soon as victory in the Crimea had freed up the necessary armour and artillery, in an operation to be code-named
Nordlicht
,
or ‘Northern Light’.
1
Ignoring his generals’ pleas for another attempt on Moscow, Hitler reiterated his intention after Sevastopol’s capture, ordering Manstein to lead five divisions and a giant railway gun, the ‘Heavy Gustav’, north.
2
‘St Petersburg’, he mused over lunch a few days later, ‘must disappear utterly from the surface of the earth. Moscow, too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia.’
3
Far from retiring to Siberia, in mid-August the Red Army launched its fourth attempt to break the Germans’ hold on the southern shores of Lake Ladoga, concentrating on the already blood-soaked Sinyavino ridge south of Shlisselburg. Manstein’s new divisions were able to prevent a breakthrough, but not to embark on
Nordlicht
. Meanwhile, Hitler also launched Operation
Blau
(‘Blue’), his mighty southward push towards rhe Caucasus and Central Asia. Rostov-on-Don fell in the last week of July, and by mid-August panzers were pushing into the foothills of the Caucasus, within tantalising reach of the Baku oilfields.

Beneath the surface, though, the war was beginning to tip in Russia’s favour. By autumn the Wehrmacht was grossly overstretched: its supply lines thin, its recruits ever younger and rawer, and its generals increasingly yes-men – ‘nodding donkeys’, as Speer called them
4
– of the Führer. (Halder resigned in September, bewailing Hitler’s ‘fits of insane rage’ and ‘chronic tendency to underrate the enemy’.) The Red Army, in contrast, was beginning to pull itself together. Unlike Hitler, Stalin had begun to realise that military decisions were better left to the professionals. Increasingly, he listened to his generals, and in October stripped the political commissars who dogged regular officers’ footsteps of most of their powers. Lend-Lease supplies were beginning to arrive overland via Vladivostok and Tehran, instead of on the precarious Arctic convoys, and weapons production was increasing, especially of the robust, reliable T-34 tank and PPSh-41 sub-machine gun.

The sheer size of the Soviet population was also beginning to tell, as was the Red Army’s willingness to use women, who were drafted in large numbers from the spring of 1942 onwards. Used in ancillary roles from the start of the war, women – mostly, like their male counterparts, in their late teens or early twenties – were now trained as fighter and bomber pilots, anti-aircraft gunners, observers, snipers, mine-clearers and ordinary infantrymen. ‘This morning’, wrote a disconcerted Fritz Hockenjos, ‘one of my sentries spotted a riflewoman. For fun he shot at her. She dived for cover, ran, turned around, shot back and ran on – as good as any well-drilled soldier. Let’s hope I never have to deal with women like that.’ Later, during a Russian attack near Pskov, his men reported seeing female soldiers running forward with mats, which they threw over barbed-wire entanglements for the infantrymen following behind. ‘We shot them and the infantry down. The men told me about it later, using bawdy jokes to hide their discomfort. When I asked how they knew they weren’t men they said “When they jumped, everything jiggled.”’
5
By the end of the war, some 800,000 such women had served in the Red Army altogether.        

That the war in the East was turning became apparent to the world at Stalingrad, the small city on the Volga – less than 200 kilometres from the present-day Russian border with Kazakhstan – which is still synonymous with Soviet stubbornness and Nazi overreach. Besieged from August 1942, it seemed permanently about to fall until mid-November, when Zhukov launched an ambitious counter-encirclement of Paulus’s Sixth Army. A mid-December attempt to relieve the Sixth Army, led by Manstein, failed, and seven more weeks of terrible slaughter later Paulus surrendered, together with more than 90,000 troops. What hurt most, Hitler raged in his ‘Wolf’s Lair’, was that Paulus had not committed suicide: ‘What is Life? Life is the Nation . . . He could have freed himself from all sorrow, ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow.’
6
The same less-than-cheering sentiment was pre-printed on the
Feldpost
cards on which Hockejos wrote notes home to his wife: ‘It’s completely unimportant whether or not we live; what’s necessary is that our
Volk
lives, that Germany lives.’

For Leningrad – now down to a fifth of its pre-war population – the second winter of the siege was nothing like the first. Again, households retreated into single rooms heated by smoky
burzhuiki
; again, they sealed up their windows and laid in stocks of food and firewood. But the winter was a mild one, more flats now had electricity and water, and ration levels were the same as Moscow’s: there was no repeat of 1941–2’s mass death.

While the battle of Stalingrad was still at its height, Stalin ordered another push to liberate Leningrad. Code-named Operation
Iskra
, or ‘Spark’, it was essentially a better planned, better equipped repeat of the previous August’s Sinyavino offensive. The Leningrad armies would force the Neva at three points along the river south of Shlisselburg; the Volkhov armies would thrust westwards, meeting up with them south of Ladoga. A preliminary attempt to drive tanks across the Neva failed, the ice proving not yet thick enough to bear their weight, and the operation was put off to 12 January, by which time the temperature had fallen to -15°C. Overseen by Zhukov, it began at first light, with a two-hour barrage from more than 4,500 guns. This time the tanks got across, on ingeniously designed pontoons that had been moved into place under cover of darkness and frozen into position with water sucked from under the ice. By the end of the day a bridgehead five kilometres long and one kilometre deep had been established on the Neva’s southern bank. By the 14th the two Soviet fronts were only three miles apart, and at 9.30 in the morning of the 18th they finally met, at peatworks that have gone down in history as ‘Workers’ Settlements nos 1 and 5’, but which were in reality outposts of the Gulag. Later the same day the Red Army liberated Shlisselburg. It was almost empty, all but a few hundred of its inhabitants having died of starvation, been sent away as slave labourers or fled together with the Germans.