Russia at war 1941-1945

Sadovaya... I'd have to stop and sit down every hundred yards... Took me sometimes over an hour to get home...

You don't know what it was like. You just stepped over corpses in the street and on the stairs. You simply stopped taking any notice. It was no use worrying. Terrible things used to happen. Some people went quite insane with hunger. And the practice of hiding the dead somewhere in the house and using their ration cards was very

common indeed. There were so many people dying all over the place, the authorities couldn't keep track of all the deaths... You should have seen me in February 1942.

Oh, Lord, I looked funny! My weight had dropped from seventy kilos to forty kilos in four months! Now I am back to sixty-two—feeling quite plump...

On the following day I had a conversation at the Architects' Institute, where they were already working on the future restoration of the various historic buildings, such as the palaces of Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) and Peterhof that had been wrecked by the Germans: We went on with this blueprint work right through the winter of 1941-2... It was a blessing for us architects. The best medicine that could have been given us during the famine. The moral effect is great when a hungry man knows he's got a useful job of work to do... But there's no doubt about it: a worker stands up better to

hardships than an intellectual. A lot of our people stopped shaving—the first sign of a man going to pieces... Most of these people pulled themselves together when they were given work. But on the whole men collapsed more easily than women, and at

first the death-rate was highest among the men. However, those who survived the

worst period of the famine finally survived. The women felt the after-effects more seriously than the men. Many died in the spring, when the worst was already over.

The famine had peculiar physical effects on people. Women were so run down that

they stopped menstruating... So many people died that we had to bury them without coffins. People had their feelings blunted, and never seemed to weep at the burials...

It was all done in complete silence, without any display of emotion. When things

began to improve, the first signs were that women began to put rouge and lipstick on their pale, skinny faces. Yes, we lived through hell right enough; but you should have been here the day the blockade was broken—people in the street wept for joy, and strangers fell round each others' necks. Now life is almost normal. There is thisshelling, of course, and people get killed, but life has become valuable again.

Also, I remember this conversation, one day, with Major Lozak, a staff officer who

conducted me round the Leningrad Front: