Russia at war 1941-1945

"Round the Stove" principle. But there were no reserved seats, and if you wanted a seat near the stove or under the stove pipe, you had to come early. The place facing the stove door was reserved for the teacher. You sat down and were suddenly seized by a wonderful feeling of well-being: the warmth penetrated through your skin,

right into your bones; it made you all weak and languid; you just wanted to think of nothing, only to slumber and drink in the warmth. It was agony to stand up and go to the blackboard... At the blackboard it was so cold and dark, and your hand,

imprisoned in its heavy glove, went all numb and rigid and refused to obey. The

chalk kept falling out of your hand, and the lines were all crooked... By the time we reached the third lesson there was no more fuel left. The stove went cold and a

horrid icy draught started blowing down the pipe. It became terribly cold. It was then that Vasya Pugin, with a puckish look on his face, could be seen slinking out and bringing in a few logs from Anna Ivanovna's emergency reserve; and a few

minutes later, we could again hear the magic crackling of wood inside the stove...

During the break nobody would jump up because nobody had any desire to go into

the icy corridors.

And this from another essay:

The winter came, fierce and merciless. The water pipes froze, and there was no

electric light, and the tram-cars stopped running. To get to school in time, I had to get up very early every morning, for I live out in the suburbs. It was particularly difficult to get to school after a blizzard, when all roads and paths are covered with snowdrifts. But I firmly decided to complete my school year... One day, after

standing in a bread queue for six hours (I had to miss school that day, for I had received no bread for two days) I caught a cold and fell ill. Never had I felt so miserable as during those days. Not for physical reasons, but because I needed the moral support of my school-mates, their encouraging jokes.. .

[Curious that in all these ultra-patriotic essays there was not a single mention of Stalin.]

None of the children who continued to go to school died, but several of the teachers did.

The last section of the Famine Scrapbook, introduced by a title page with a decorative funeral urn painted in purple watercolour, was written by Tikhomirov, the headmaster. It was a series of obituary notes of the teachers who were either killed in the war or had died of hunger. The assistant headmaster was "killed in action". Another was "killed at Kingisepp", in that terrible battle of Kingisepp where the Germans broke through towards Leningrad from Estonia. The maths teacher "died of hunger"; so did the teacher of geography. Comrade Nemirov, the teacher of literature, "was among the victims of the blockade", and Akimov, the history teacher, died of malnutrition and exhaustion despite a long rest in a sanatorium to which he was taken in January. Of another teacher

Tikhomirov wrote: "He worked conscientiously until he realised he could no longer walk.