Stories about the Blockade

(dedicated to my grandfather)

1

Since early childhood, I remembered St. Petersburg as an amazingly beautiful, almost fabulous city. These memories were full of joyful and hilarious events. Me, father, mother, brothers and sisters – we were all healthy, full of strength, but most importantly, we were together! Everything changed in the summer of 1941.

The blockade began for us suddenly and unexpectedly, even the adults did not seem ready to accept it and did not really explain to us what would happen and how our lives would change further. Of course, we had heard disturbing news about the German offensive, but the fact that we could be locked up in our hometown for almost two years was unthinkable!

At that time, we lived in a large communal apartment in the Petrogradsky district. Our family occupied three rooms. I went to school with my older sister and three brothers. Nikolai, the oldest of us, just finished it this year, and the younger ones haven’t started yet. My father worked as a master at the university (St. Petersburg State University), and my mother was a nurse at the hospital (I don’t remember which one), later she was transferred to a military hospital.

My father and older brother Nikolai were the first to go to the front. It was like this, Nikolai received a summons from the military enlistment office, after learning about it, his father decided to volunteer with him. It all happened literally in one day. In the evening, we saw them off with the whole apartment, and in the morning, when I woke up, they were gone.

My mother was having a hard time breaking up, at that time she was missing at work all day, and in the evenings she usually came and cried quietly for hours in her corner. My two other older brothers, 17-year-old Ivan and 16-year-old Leonid, were already secretly planning to escape to the front as volunteers, but they wanted to hide it from their mother and sisters in every possible way, so they made Alexey and me promise never to tell anyone about it. And we were silent.

Autumn was quite difficult for us. There were problems with food supplies, but the worst thing was that we started to get sick, especially my younger brother Sasha and sister Lena. They lay for days with a high fever, almost motionless. A couple of times, my mother invited doctors she knew from the hospital. They examined them, gave them some medications, which, as it seemed to me, did not help them much.

My younger sister died first. I didn’t see how it happened, I just found out about it one warm November day from Masha. Alexey, I, and another of my school friends were returning from school when she met us at the entrance.

– Lena died, Mom went to bury her, – was all she managed to say.

2

Winter is coming and life is leaving the city. The streets are dark and cold, and the overhanging silhouettes of buildings seemed to press down on you as you walked down the street. Then we all learned what a bourgeois stove was, which warmed us with warmth, and one day we saw a girl pulling a sled loaded with buckets of water. For the first time, my brother and I even found it somewhat funny, but after a week we went to the Neva and other rivers for water with the whole house or even, probably, the city.

I didn’t recognize my hometown. Everything I associated him with was changing before my eyes. The warmth of summer was replaced by cold, white nights – impenetrable twilight, peaceful silence – the howling of sirens, raids and shelling… At that time, I did not dare to discuss this with my brothers and sisters, and even more so at school, so that classmates would not consider me a coward, but now it seems that all Leningraders were gripped by this feeling of devastation and uncertainty.

By the way, I was doing well at school. Due to the change in my usual lifestyle and the need to keep the fire burning in our small room stove, I plunged headlong into my studies. At that time, I read an unusually lot, wrote, and did my homework with diligence, so that I turned into an almost round excellent student, which began to strongly distinguish me from the class, because many dropped in academic performance, did not do their homework, or skipped school for days at all. Just like me, my school friend Igor proved himself great. And at the end of December, the headmaster even presented us with certificates for excellent studies.

After school, Igor and I didn’t want to run straight home and brag about our successes. On the contrary, imagining ourselves as adults, we decided to take a walk around the area, especially since neither I nor his parents were at home. So, step by step, we found ourselves at the Leningrad zoo. The once festive and grand entrance was now closed and resembled a cemetery gate.

Evil tongues have long been spreading rumors that all the animals were killed and eaten long ago. But we didn’t want to believe it, and we were curious. So we went to wander along the deserted sidewalks around the zoo, hoping to find out something. Of course, we couldn’t see anything, so my friend started reminiscing.

– How long has it been since you’ve been to the zoo? – he asked me.

– Probably two years ago,- I replied, running through the past in my memory.

– But I managed to do it in May! Imagine, there’s an elephant there now! – Igor said admiringly.

– Oh, come on, – I said.

– It’s a pity you didn’t see him, – he continued, – He’s an amazing animal! Huge and elegant, as if from an old fairy tale!

I was overcome by a slight feeling of envy. Igor talked so great about the elephant that I also certainly wanted to see it, but now it was impossible, except after the lifting of the blockade? Having seen nothing, we parted.

There was another significant event that day when I returned home. I expected Masha to meet me in the hallway and, as usual, begin to reproach me for walking home from school for so long, but surprisingly no one met me. I instinctively walked down the hall to the light that was pouring through the half-open kitchen door, hoping to meet someone from the neighbors there and maybe find out where mine were.

In the kitchen, I found my sister crying at the table and my brother trying to calm her down. The door creaked, but my arrival went unnoticed. After standing on the threshold for a second, I entered and sat down at the opposite end of the table.

– What happened? – I asked.

Masha continued to cry, turning away from me, and Alexey said:

– Ivan and Leonid went to the front…

My legs gave out. They had been talking about it for a long time, probably for several months, but it seemed to Alexey and me that it was their invention. We even teased them a couple of times, asking “how many fascists were killed.” And here it is, without warning!

– Did Mom let them go?  I asked, hoping to hear that she had followed them and that everyone would return home soon.

– She doesn’t know yet, – my brother replied softly.