Russia at war 1941-1945

already licking his chops at the thought of the gala dinner he was going to get at the Astoria. Now we are sitting in the shelter round improvised stoves, with our coats and fur caps and gloves on. We have been knitting warm things for our soldiers, and have been taking round their letters to friends and relatives. We have also been

collecting non-ferrous metal for salvage...

Valentina Solovyova, an older girl of sixteen, wrote:

June 22! How much that date means to us now! But then it just seemed an ordinary

summer day... Before long, the House Committee was swarming with women, girls

and children, who had come to join the civil defence teams, the anti-fire and anti-gas squads... By September the city was encircled. Food supplies from outside had

stopped. The last evacuee trains had departed. The people of Leningrad tightened

their belts. The streets began to bristle with barricades and anti-tank hedgehogs.

Dugouts and firing points—a whole network of them—were springing up around

the city.

As in 1919, so now, the great question arose: "Shall Leningrad remain a Soviet city or not? " Leningrad was in danger. But its workers had risen like one man for its defence. Tanks were thundering down the streets. Everywhere men of the civil

guard were joining up... A cold and terrible winter was approaching. Together with their bombs, enemy planes were dropping leaflets. They said they would raze

Leningrad to the ground. They said we would all die of hunger. They thought they

would frighten us, but they filled us with renewed strength... Leningrad did not let the enemy through its gates! The city was starving, but it lived and worked, and

kept on sending to the front more of its sons and daughters. Though knocking at the knees with hunger, our workers went to work in their factories, with the air-raid sirens filling the air with their screams...

This from another essay on how the school-children dug trenches while the Germans

were approaching Leningrad:

In August we worked for twenty-five days digging trenches. We were machine-

gunned and some of us were killed, but we carried on, though we weren't used to

this work. And the Germans were stopped by the trenches we had dug...

Another girl of sixteen, Luba Tereshchenkova, described how work continued at the

school even during the worst time of the blockade:

In January and February terrible frost also joined in the blockade and lent Hitler a hand. It was never less than thirty degrees of frost! Our classes continued on the