The woman said nothing, but next time the shop door opened she shoved Yelena forwards, staying outside herself. ‘I was so stunned that even when I had the macaroni there in my hands, which were trembling with excitement, I couldn’t believe that what had happened was real.’
The time bought by this act of charity was short. Though Dima managed, at the cost of enormous physical effort, to make a burzhuika out of corrugated iron scavenged from a bomb site, by mid-December he had sunk into apathy and paranoia. No longer going to work or helping with the baby, he got up only to go to the bread shop, eating the makeweight piece, the prized dovesok, on the way home. His movements, wrote Yelena, were now those of a ‘broken robot’, his expression ‘fossilised’ and ‘savage’, his eyes rimmed with soot and the skin of his face stretched by oedema to a lacquer shine. Her own face had swollen, too—she looked ‘like the back end of a pig’. Neither could think of anything but food:
I pour four ladles of ‘soup’ [made of joiner’s glue and crumbled bread] for Dima and two for myself. For this I get the right to lick the pot, though the soup is so thin that there’s not really anything to lick. Dima eats his with a teaspoon so as to make it last longer. But today he finished his portion faster than I did. I happened to get a particularly hard piece of crust, which I was pleasurably chewing. I could feel him staring with hatred at my steadily moving jaws.
‘You’re eating slowly on purpose!’ he viciously burst out. ‘You’re trying to torment me!’
‘What do you mean? Why would I do that?’ I blurted, amazed.
‘Don’t try to deny it, please, I see everything.’
He glared at me, his eyes pale with rage. I was terrified. Had he gone mad?{16}
Vera Inber saw a corpse being dragged on a sled for the first time on 1 December. ‘There was no coffin. It was wrapped in a white shroud, and the knees were clearly discernible, the sheet being tightly bound. A biblical, ancient Egyptian burial. The shape of a human form was clear enough, but one couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.’ By the end of the month this was a common sight. In October, the NKVD reported to Zhdanov towards the end of December, 6,199 people had died ‘in connection with food difficulties’ in Leningrad, a nearly 80 per cent rise on the usual pre-war mortality rate of about 3,500 deaths per month. In November the number had risen to 9,183, and, in the first twenty-five days of December, to 39,073. Each of the past five days, between 113 and 147 corpses had been picked up on the streets. Mortality rates were particularly high among men (71 per cent of the total), over-sixties (27 per cent of the total) and babies (14 per cent). Despite the arrest of 1,524 ‘speculators’, the report also noted, barter prices for food in the officially illegal but in practice tolerated street markets had risen to extraordinary heights. A rabbit-fur coat was worth one pood (sixteen kilograms) of potatoes, a pocket watch one and a half kilos of bread, a pair of felt boots with galoshes four kilos of duranda. In the last six days of December another 13,808 people died, bringing the month’s total toll to almost 53,000.{17}
Progress was also being monitored in Berlin. Army intelligence and the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence wing of the SS, both regularly reported on conditions inside the city, collating information from informers, deserters and POWs. ‘Illness’, the Sicherheitsdienst reported on 24 November, had ‘started to spread’:
Women in particular are predisposed to serious throat infections, by reason of the insufficiency or complete absence of heating in domestic apartments, and breakage of window glass. The mortality rate amongst children is quite high. There have been cases of abdominal and spotted typhus, although one cannot yet speak of an epidemic. Numerous cases of dysentery have also been noted.{18}
A fortnight later another intelligence report, from von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, boasted successful artillery hits on a hospital, a House of Culture, the Mariinsky Theatre, a food warehouse, tram sidings and the offices of Leningradskaya Pravda. Casualties, it noted, were no longer being picked up by buses, but by horse-drawn carts—themselves often out of commission thanks to a shortage of forage. What German intelligence devoted most space to, though, was the onset of famine. The civilian ration, it was correctly noted, had been cut five times since the beginning of September, and ‘bad organisation of food distribution’ meant that card holders often got less than their allotment or nothing at all. ‘There have been cases of increasingly weak workers falling unconscious in the workplace. The first starvation deaths have also been recorded. It can be concluded that in the coming weeks we will see further significant deterioration in the food situation of the civilian population of Petersburg.’{19}
The art historian Nikolai Punin made his last siege-winter diary entry on 13 December, sitting in his dark room overlooking the Sheremetyev Palace. Earlier, he had written of his longing that the churches be opened and filled with prayers and tears and candles, making ‘less palpable this cold iron matter in which we live’. Now, he likened Stalin to the jealous Old Testament God:
De profundis clamavi: Lord save us… We are perishing. But his Greatness is as implacable as Soviet power is unbending. It is not important to it, having 150 million [people], to lose three million of them. His Greatness, resting in the heavens, does not value earthly life as we do… We are living in the frozen and starving city, ourselves abandoned and starving. I can’t remember the snow ever falling in such abundance. The city is covered in snowdrifts like a shroud. It is clean, because the factories aren’t working, and it is rare that smoke rises from the chimneys over the apartment buildings. The days are clear, and travel might be easy, but the city is buried like the provinces, white and crackling…
And everything is simple; no one says anything in particular. They don’t talk about anything except ration cards or evacuation. They simply suffer and probably think, like I do, that maybe it’s not their turn yet.
I feel the loneliness most of all at night, and the senselessness of petitions and prayers, and sometimes I cry quietly… And there is no salvation. And one can’t even be imagined, unless you give in to daydreams. ‘We turned our backs on Him,’ I think, ‘and He on us.’ Miserere I mumble, and add—there it is, dies irae. Lord, save us.{20}
PART 3
Mass Death
Winter 1941–2
I think that real life is hunger, and the rest a mirage. In the time of famine people revealed themselves, stripped themselves, freed themselves of all trumpery. Some turned out to be marvellous, incomparable heroes, others—scoundrels, villains, murderers, cannibals. There were no half-measures. Everything was real. The heavens were unfurled and in them God was seen…
10. The Ice Road
Lieutenant Fritz Hockenjos was thirty-two years old and commander of a Radfahrzug, or bicycle reconnaissance unit, within the 215th Infantry Division of General Busch’s Sixteenth Army.{1} A forestry manager in civilian life, he came, like most of his men, from Lahr, a picture-perfect medieval town set amid rolling vineyards between the Rhine valley and the western edge of the Black Forest. He had a wife, Elsa, and two young sons, and his hobbies were hunting, birdwatching, photography and singing in the local church choir.