By fall, the juggernaut of Operation Barbarossa pounded at Leningrad’s gates. On September 8, Shlisselburg, a strategically important town nearby on Lake Ladoga, fell to the Germans. Russia’s second-largest city was now completely cut off by land: no transport, no provisions, no fuel. It was the start of blokada, the Siege of Leningrad, which would last a mythic nine hundred days. Stalin was furious. He’d only learned the Shlisselburg news from a German communiqué; Marshal Kliment (Klim) Voroshilov, Leningrad’s bumbling commander, had been too scared to tell him. The Vozhd rushed General Zhukov north with a terse note for Voroshilov: he was fired. Zhukov was taking over. Klim bade stoic farewells to his aides, assuming he would be shot. (Somehow he wasn’t.)
On September 22 Naum stood in Zhukov’s office at the Smolny in Leningrad. The general seemed even more abrupt and severe than usual, pacing with his arm behind his back. A bold, brutal campaigner, Georgy Konstantinovich was notoriously callous with the lives of his men. He cleared minefields by sending troops attacking across them. The cheapness of Russian blood fueled the future marshal’s combat strategy.
Zhukov ordered Naum to lead an amphibious reconnaissance mission as part of a counterattack on Shlisselburg, to try to break the Nazi encirclement. Immediately.
Naum quickly calculated. Zero time for preparations. Boats for the counterattack in wretched shape. Number of men: grossly inadequate. His troops were to include 125 naval school cadets—mere kids. Granddad had recently delivered an address to them. He remembered one eager boy: dark-haired, small, with pensive eyes and crooked teeth, a pimply face.
Despite his survival instinct, almost despite himself, Naum blurted out his objections.
A bolt of rage familiar to everyone under Zhukov’s command flashed in the general’s eyes. His bullmastiff jaw tightened.
“We’ll execute you for this,” Zhukov snarled quietly. “You have your orders!”
Orders were orders, even if suicidal.
High winds on Lake Ladoga postponed the counterattack the first night. The second night three boats overturned, drowning two men, and the operation was aborted. The main force’s commander was arrested on the spot and sent to the gulag. The third night Naum and his scouting party were able to land, though the main force still couldn’t. Granddad and his men had to wade two kilometers through chest-high, ice-cold water. With their radio soaked, they were unable to relay reconnaissance but managed some sabotage before fighting their way back to Soviet lines the following night, losing four men.
The main assault force was ordered to try yet again the day after. It was obliterated in the shallows by the Germans.
But Russian blood was cheap; that was the ongoing lesson from Zhukov, who would be anointed the great architect of the Soviet victory to come, then brutally demoted by Stalin (saved from arrest by a heart attack), repromoted by Khrushchev, then demoted again.
Back from his mission, Naum lay semiconscious, wheezing and grunting. The acute pneumonia he’d contracted from his forty-eight drenched hours could finish him, he knew, here in this anonymous hospital bed. Or he could perish in another “meat-grinder” like Shlisselburg—the best death, since his kids would remember him as a hero. Zhukov’s firing squad was the most agonizing scenario. Families of “enemies of the people” were usually exiled, or worse; their children grew up in orphanages, branding their fathers as betrayers of Homeland. This last possibility deprived Naum of sleep. It pierced like a red-hot iron. For several years now he’d been writing to his kids almost daily, letters composed mostly in his head, but some actually written and left in locked drawers.
Only one of those letters was ever opened in front of Larisa, Yulia, and Sashka. Three sentences jabbed out there on that hospital bed: “Liza, teach the children to throw grenades. Make sure they remember their papa. He loved them so.”
These lines reached Liza at the end of 1941 in a seven-hundred-square-foot room on the second floor of a crumbling warehouse. She, the children, and Dedushka Yankel shared the room with six other families evacuated from Moscow. The September journey, during which Nazi Messerschmitt fighters circled low over their riverboat, had brought them here, to the relative safety of Ulyanovsk, an old Volga town with muddy streets and folkloric carved wooden shutters.
“Look, look, Jews!” pale-blond street kids greeted them upon arrival.
“We are not Jews,” Mother corrected them. “We are from Moscow.”
Now, several months into their stay, Liza had barely unpacked Aunt Clara’s blue sunduk. Why bother? Peace, she still believed, would surely come any day. She attended to their makeshift existence while Dedushka Yankel dug trenches—and sometimes potatoes—outside the city, both his fingers and the potatoes harder and blacker as the earth froze. The five of them slept and did most of their living on two striped mattresses pushed together on the room’s cement floor. Beyond the flimsy curtain partition a sound tormented them around the clock: the piercing shriek of a toddler slightly older than Sashka. The boy was barely nursed, barely touched by Katya, his mother, who disappeared all day to return after midnight with nylon negligee and Coty perfume. “Prostitutka and black marketeer” everyone in the room said, taking turns holding and rocking the inconsolable child, who wouldn’t eat.
Katya wasn’t home when the boy stopped crying. The next day Larisa watched in solemn exultation as a small sheet-wrapped bundle was carried out the door. She knew exactly what had happened: death had been her constant obsession ever since she’d read about a little frozen match girl in a Hans Christian Andersen tale.
Death. It was in the wail of Dasha their neighbor when she unfolded the triangular letter from the front, the official notification known as a pokhoronka, or funeral letter. Death came every day from the radio where the Voice announced it, in numbers so catastrophic, they baffled a child who could barely count over one hundred.
“Vnimaniye, govorit Moskva!” (Attention, Moscow speaking!) the Voice always began. The dramatic, sonorous baritone that awed and hypnotized not just my mother but the whole country belonged to Yuri Levitan, a bespectacled Jewish tailor’s son. Russia’s top radio man delivered most of his broadcasts—some 60,000 throughout the war—not from Moscow but from cities hundreds of miles away, to which radio staff had been evacuated. Such was Levitan’s power, Hitler marked him as a personal enemy. A whopping 250,000 reichsmarks was offered for his head.
Reading aloud soldiers’ letters home, the Voice conjured tender, intimate chords. Reporting the fall of each new city as the Germans advanced, it turned slow and grave, chanting out and accenting each syllable. Go-vo-rit Mos-kva.