(January 18 marks the 30th

anniversary of the breakthrough

by the Soviet army of the block-
ade of Leningrad which had
been unsuccessfully besieged by
Hitlerites for 900 days.)

By IVETTA KNYAZEVA

LENINGRAD — They say

that many young people in the
West shrug their shoulders in

_ bewilderment Saying: “Hitler? I

don’t know such a man...” I

) thought of these words when I
| decided to write this article as a

' second lar

person whose adolescence pass-
ed in besieged Leningrad.
Having within less than two
years drenched all of Europe in
blood and trampled 14 states
underfoot, the troops of Hitler’s
fascist Germany attacked the
Soviet Union in June 1941. Hav-

| ing broken through to Leningrad

On September 8, the Nazis clos-
ed the blockade, cutting off all
communications connecting this
sae Jargest and important
Oviet city from the rest of the
country,

5 The Fuehrer decided to raze
.€tersburg to the ground ... it
A Proposed to tightly blockade
: € city and by shelling from dif-
een calibre guns and continu-
hes Pombings from the air to
eee it with the ground,” (Pe-
a urg is an old name of Le-
te grad), read Hitler’s instruc-
= n called “the future of the

Own of Petersburg.”

Planned Banquet

Seas “Fuehrer” knew what
& of city he had decided “to
ee ae. the ground.” Besides the
Hes €gic and economic consider-
a a it pursued one more aim,
pone ly the main one: “This will
nS for the Russians the loss
Rea Of the symbols of the
a Ppon that is most import-
the st the Russian people...
all of Leningrad would lead
a Complete catastrophe.”

ata eiet's orders, Field-Mar-
men Leeb, commander of
he ae Group North, threw
eee ie) Owing crack troops
a3 St Leningrad: 725,000 men
10 gence, 1,500 tanks, over
on Planes, more than 13,000

oe had he any doubts that
aa Y would fall and had al-
en Y Sent out invitations to a
eee to celebrate the capture
cityg inarad in the Astoria, the
ne eatost representable hotel.
Sees y not? If it took them
Sihion 0 years to march through
ae all of Europe, they would
ben €ed much time to capture
Ngrad, they thought.

Never E i
<s mtered City

r almost three y itler’
Sy : years Hitler’s
ae tried to get into Lenin’s
stan als days they tried to
shell = ; it with famine, fire and
bombs Topping 100,000 aviation
tnt and 150,000 shells on it,
San eee third building and
buildin © the ground every fifth
neve: 8 In Leningrad. But they
remahes the city, which
pean ned the only major Euro-
Pee oH. which no invaders has
Hitloe foot in.
everyan had taken into account
Ne Ing, except one thing he
sha: sts not able to under-
in the a © people and the ideals
be deg ame of which they would
: mace Leningrad.

not yet though mobilization had

the ‘first

Cers d 4
sent to poncing that they be

€ front li g
volu r ines. People’s
the noe units were fanned at
join ee factories. The first to

M were the Communists.
a Massed Air Raids
minent men of culture

| re
Sho among them, too: Dmitry

Poser <ovich, the famous com-
ye. anil Shafran, the cello-

astronomer Kirill Ogo-

rodnikov, a university professor,
poet Nikolai Tikhonov. Worker
Nikolai Bessonov, 65, came to
the enlistment centre together
with his six sons and two
daughters. :

When early in August the Hit-
lerites carried out the first mass-
ed air raid on Leningrad, chil-
dren went up the roofs of houses
together with their parents to
extinguish the incendiary bombs;
nobody ever taught us specially
to do these things, we simply
could not live otherwise.

When the Nazis closed the
ring on Leningrad’s throat, there
remained 2.5 million civilians in
it, including, as documents read,
“at least 1,200,000 economically
inactive people, old men and
women and sick people and
about 400,000 children.” There
was not enough time to evacu-
ate them.

16 Hours A Day

Then the famine started —
there were no food reserves and
there was no way of bringing
any food supplies into the city.
According to the same docu-
ment as of Nov. 9, 1941, there
remained in Leningrad a seven-
day’s supply of flour, an eight-
day’s supply of cereals and a 14-
days’ supply of fats . . . There
was no fuel. Winter was com-
ing. In-that year it was severer
than ever — the mercury in the
thermometer dropped to 30 de-
grees below zero (C). In addition
to the fierce cold, the bombings
and shellings at times lasted 15
or 16 hours a day, while the
daily ration was but a slice of
bread substitute, those very 125

grams of blockade bread mixed
with fire and blood, which to-
gether with some hot water were
our only food.
Mutilated City

Even now 30 years later when
I close my eyes I still see clearly
Nevsky Prospekt as I saw it on
the night of December 31, 1941,
when I took the kettle and went
to the river to fetch some water

(the waterlines had been frozen, .

the heating did not work and
there was no electricity in the
entire city), a fantastic icy vi-
sion, snow-drifts and torn wires.
The palaces, badly mutilated by
shell-splinters looked blind with
their boarded windows.

The bare passer-by, muffed up
to the very eye-brows so that
you could not distinguish wheth-
er it was a man or a woman —

seemed to be but shadows. One

of these shadows was dragging
a child’s sleigh on which lay
something wrapped up in a bed-
sheet. I knew perfectly well that
the ‘‘something” was a corpse.
It might have been the woman’s
husband, or the man’s wife, or
their child that had died of star-
vation. This was the way the
dead were buried in those days,
if there was sufficient strength
to bury them at all...
More Strength

The famine kept mowing down
the Leningraders. There was no
time to remove the corpses from
the streets. It took the toll of
641,000 city inhabitants alone -..
excavators were digging com-
mon graves in the frozen ground.

Hitler had reckoned on famine
becoming his ally: “Leningrad

‘conditions. the

will eat itself up,” he said. The
Fuehrer would not have miscal-
culated had he dealt with Philis-
tines, whom hunger would have
turned into animals with the one
and only beastly instinct of sur-
viving. But the literal, physical
starvation, from which all the
defenders of Leningrad suffered,
did not result in moral star-
vation. And in these inhuman
Leningraders
continued not only to live, but
to lead a noble life, being kind
and compassionate to each
other, to work and fight.

Workers-Soldiers Solidarity

The factories worked hard turn-
ing out arms and repairing tanks.
“Neither bombs nor shells will
shake our determination to re-
sist,’ wrote the workers of the
famous Kirov plant to the sol-
diers of the Leningrad front.
“We shall die, but shall block
the road to the enemy. We have
never been slaves and _ shall
never be slaves. We shall die,
but shall not give up Lenin-
grad!” And when an important
order for the frontline was re-
ceived at the factory, a job
which only a high-class special-
ist could perform, milling-ma-
chine operator Yevgeny Savich
had to be held up by his com-
rades from both sides, for he
could not stand by himself. But
Savich did fulfil the order for the
frontline.

The scientists continued their
work. A special government or-
der was necessary to make the
prominent scientists Academi-
cians Ivan Meshchaninov and
Leon Orbeli evacuate from the

_ besieged city. Only after the

seventh order to leave the city
(having lived through the worst
period of the blockade) did
Alexander Baikov, the world-
famous metallurgist leave the
city.
Books Respected

The Saltykov-Shchedrin Pub-
lic Library did not close down
for a single day. It is one of
the world’s five largest book
depositories. The city was freez-
ing, but the 16 million volumes
were untouched. The people
needed the library, they continu-
ed to work there, dressed in
fur-coats and felt-boots.

Fifty-two pullman cars took
the unique treasures of the
Hermitage Museum from Lenin-
grad into the country’s rear dur-
ing the first month of the war.
But it was impossible to remove
the whole Hermitage Museum
with its over 3 million displays.
And its curators and the scient-
ists, for whom it had long be-
come part of life and destiny,
refused to go into the rear.
Those who did not have the
strength to continue making the
daily routine from their homes
to the museum, moved into the
museum’s underground © floors
and continued to work there.

The Leningrad Symphony

Contrary to an ancient aphor-
ism, the muses were not silenc-
ed in the besieged Leningrad,
where guns roared day and
night. Dmitry Shostakovich
wrote his Seventh Leningrad
Symphony there. It was_per-
formed by the Orchestra of the
Leningrad Radio enlarged by
army and naval musicians speci-
ally sent to the city from the
frontline. The members of the
orchestra were hardly alive from
starvation and other calamities.
Here are some lines from the
diary kept during a rehearsal:
“The first violin is dying, the
drum has died on his way to
work, the French horn is on the
verge of dying.” Nevertheless
Shostakovich’s symphony sound-
ed from the besieged Leningrad.
The radio transmitted it for the
whole country. That evening not
a single bomb or shell exploded
in the city. Only 20 years later
the Leningraders learned that
Marshal Leonid Govorov, com-
mander of the Leningrad front,
gave orders to suppress enemy
weapon emplacements at any
Cost’: 43

Blockade Broken

Leningrad’s first victory, the
break-through of the blockade,
came on Jan. 18, 1943. A power-
ful strike of the Soviet troops
through a narrow corridor south
of Lake Ladoga, restored the
city’s land communication with
the rest of the country which
then could help the exhausted
Leningraders with food supplies,
fuel and everything else neces-
sary to go on living and fighting.
For the first time during that
terrible 900 days could the city
breathe again freely. The most
agonizing stage of the blockade
had thus ended and a year later
the blockade was lifted alto-
gether.

Leningrad has long healed the
wound of war and has become
even more beautiful than it ever
was. It is deeply admired by
thousands of people who come
here from all parts of the world
every day. Our foreign guests
often ask us what the city’s
losses were during the war. Eco-
nomists estimate them at 38,000
million roubles. But they did
not take into account the pain
which everyone who has lived
through the blockade still has in
his heart, for there is not a
single Leningrad family that has
not lost some of its members
during the years of the city’s
siege.

We have not forgotten any-
thing. And what about Hitler?
We do remember him.