Russia at war 1941-1945

In those days there was something in a man's face which told you that he would die within, the next twenty-four hours... I have lived in Leningrad all my life, and I also have my parents here. They are old people, and during those famine months I had

to give them half my soldier's ration, or they would certainly have died. As a staff officer I was naturally, and quite rightly, getting considerably less than the people at the front: 250 grams a day instead of 350. I shall always remember how I'd walk

every day from my house near the Tauris Garden to my work in the centre of the

city, a matter of two or three kilometres. I'd walk for a while, and then sit down for a rest. Many a time I saw a man suddenly collapse on the snow. There was nothing

one could do. One just walked on... And, on the way back, I would see a vague

human form covered with snow on the spot where, in the morning, I had seen a man

fall down. One didn't worry; what was the good? People didn't wash for weeks;

there were no bath houses and no fuel. But at least people were urged to shave. And during that winter I don't think I ever saw a person smile. It was frightful. And yet, there was a kind of inner discipline that made people carry on. A new code of

manners was evolved by the hungry people. They carefully avoided talking about

food. I remember spending a very hungry evening with an old boy from the Radio

Committee. He nearly drove me crazy—he would talk all evening about Kant and Hegel. Yet we never lost heart. The Battle of Moscow gave us complete confidence

that it would be all right in the end. But what a change all the same when February came and the Ice Road began to function properly! Those tremendous parcels that

started arriving from all over the country—honey and butter, and ham and

sausages! Still, our troubles are not at an end. This shelling can really be very upsetting. I was in the Nevsky once when a shell landed close by. And ten yards

away from me was a man whose head was cut clean off by a shell splinter. It was

horrible. I saw him make his last two steps already with his head off—and a bloody mess all round before he collapsed. I vomited right there and then, and was quite ill for the rest of the day—though I had already seen many terrible things before. I

shall never forget the night when a children's hospital was hit by an oil bomb; many children were killed, and the whole house was blazing, and some perished in the