Russia at war 1941-1945

One, a young thing, even smiled. Normal —yes, except for a kind of inner concentration

—as if they all had some bad memories they could not quite shake off...

*

Another striking memory is my visit to a secondary school in Tambov Street, in a modern and heavily shelled part of the city, three or four miles from the front. It was run by an elderly man, Tikhomirov, a "Teacher of Merit of the USSR", who had started as an elementary teacher back in 1907. This school was one of the few that had not closed

down even at the height of the famine. On four occasions it had been heavily damaged by German shells; but the boys had cleared away the glass, bricked up the walls that had been smashed, and had put plywood in the windows. During the last shelling in May, a woman-teacher had been killed in the yard of the school.

The boys were typical Leningrad children; eighty-five per cent of the boys' fathers were still at the Leningrad Front, or had already been killed there, while many others had died in the Leningrad famine, and nearly all their mothers—if still alive—were working in Leningrad factories, or on transport, or on wood-cutting, or in civil defence. The boys all had a passionate hatred for the Germans, but were fully convinced by now that these

svolochi (bastards) would be destroyed outside Leningrad before long. They had mixed feelings about Britain and America; they knew London had been bombed; that the RAF

was "bombing the hell out of the Fritzes"; that the Americans were supplying the Red Army with a lot of lorries, and that they (the boys) were getting American chocolate to eat; but "there was still no Second Front".

The headmaster, Comrade Tikhomirov, told me how they had "stuck it, and stuck it fairly well. We had no wood, but the Leningrad Soviet gave us a small wooden house not far

away for demolition, so we could use the timber for heating. The bombing and shelling was very severe in those days. We had about 120 pupils then—boys and girls—and we

had to hold our classes in the shelter. Not for a day did the work stop. It was very cold.

The little stoves heated the air properly only a yard around them, and in the rest of the shelter the temperature was below zero. There was no lighting, apart from a kerosene lamp. But we carried on, and the children were so serious and earnest that we got better results than in any other year. Surprising, but true. We had meals for them; the army helped us to feed them. Several of the teachers died, but I am proud to say that all the children in our care survived. Only it was pathetic to watch them during those famine months. Towards the end of 1941, they hardly looked like children any more. They were strangely silent... They would not walk about; they would just sit. But none of them died; and only some of those pupils who had stopped coming to school, and stayed at home,

died, often together with the rest of the family... "

Tikhomirov then showed me an extraordinary document, which he called "our Famine Scrapbook", containing copies of many children's essays written during the famine, and much other material. It was bound in purple velvet, and the margins composed of rather conventional children's watercolours depicting soldiers, tanks, planes and the like; these surrounded little typewritten sheets—copies of typical essays written during the famine.

One young girl wrote:

Until June 22 everybody had work and a good life assured to him. That day we went on an excursion to the Kirov Islands. A fresh wind was blowing from the Gulf,

bringing with it bits of the song some kids were singing not far away, "Great and glorious is my native land". And then the enemy began to come nearer and nearer our city. We went out to dig big trenches. It was difficult, because a lot of the kids were not used to such hard physical labour. The German General von Leeb was