Russia at war 1941-1945

Ladoga. Schüsselburg was recaptured and, in a very short time, a rail link was established with the "mainland" and a pontoon bridge built across the Neva; as a result, trains could travel from Moscow to Leningrad.

[Vera Inber (op. cit., p. 194) wrote in March 1943, "only freight trains cross the pontoon bridge across the Neva at Schüsselburg. The railwaymen call this place 'the corridor of death'. It is under constant German shell fire.]

But the memory of the terrible winter months of 1941-2 lingered on, and when I went to Leningrad in 1943, they were still the main subject of conversation.

Chapter VII LENINGRAD CLOSE-UP

When I went to Leningrad in September 1943, the German lines were still two miles from the Kirov Works, on the southern outskirts of the city.

[With the exception of Henry Shapiro of United Press who went there a few weeks

earlier, I was the only foreign correspondent allowed to visit Leningrad during the

blockade. To me, as a native of Leningrad, who had lived there until the age of seventeen, this was a particularly moving experience. After an absence of twenty-five years, I visited all the familiar places, including the house where I had spent my childhood and school years. Many houses in the street had been destroyed by bombing and in the house where I had lived a large number of people had died of hunger in 1941-2. I have described my visit fully in an earlier book {Leningrad, London, 1944), but as it is out of print I make no excuse for reprinting from it, in this chapter, a few accounts of visits and conversations which convey something of the spirit of Leningrad during the blockade.]

The total population had now been reduced to some 600,000, and the city, though as

beautiful as ever, despite considerable damage caused by shells, bombs and fires, had a strange half-deserted look. It was a front-line city, sure enough, and a high proportion of its people were in uniform. There was practically no more bombing, but the shelling was frequent, and often deadly. It had caused great damage to houses, especially in the

modern southern parts of Leningrad, and many people would recall horrible "incidents"

when a shell had hit a queue at a tram-stop or a crowded tram-car: some of these had happened only a few days before.

Yet, in a strange way, life seemed almost to have returned to normal. Most of the city looked deserted and yet, in the late afternoon, when there was no shelling, there were large crowds of people walking about the "safe" side of the Nevsky Prospect (the shells normally landed on the other side) and even little luxuries were sold here, unavailable at the time in Moscow, such as little bottles of Leningrad-made scent. And the "Writers'

Bookshop" near the Anichkov Bridge in the Nevsky was doing a roaring trade in

secondhand books. Millions of books had been burned as fuel in Leningrad during the

famine winter; and yet many people had died before having had time to burn their books, and—a cruel thought—some wonderful bargains could now be got. Theatres and cinemas

were open, though whenever the shelling started they were promptly evacuated. In the Marsovo Pole (the Champs de Mars) and in the Summer Garden—whose eighteenth-century marble statues of Greek gods and goddesses had been removed to safety—

vegetables were being grown, and a few people were pottering around the cabbages and potatoes. There were also cabbage beds round the sandbagged Bronze Horseman.

Almost from the moment I arrived in Leningrad—after travelling there by plane via

Tikhvin and then, at night, only a few yards above the waters of Lake Ladoga—I began to hear stories about the famine. For instance this conversation on the very first night with Anna Andreievna, the genteel old lady who looked after me at the Astoria:

The Astoria looks like a hotel now, but you should have seen it during the famine! It was turned into a hospital—just hell. They used to bring here all sorts of people, mostly intellectuals, who were dying of hunger. Gave them vitamin tablets, tried to pep them up a bit. But a lot of them were too far gone, and died almost the momentthey got here. I know what it is to be hungry. I was so weak I could hardly walk.

Had to use a walking stick to support me. My home is only a mile away, in the