“Bread for the grandfather’s grave…” – Moskovskaya Pravda

On February 7, 1943, the first train from the mainland arrived in besieged Leningrad. The photo shows the Steel Way memorial in the Leningrad Region.

September 8, 1941 is considered the beginning of the blockade. But the railway communication was interrupted already on August 27. The city was supplied only along Lake Ladoga – the Road of Life.

From the directive of the Chief of Staff of the German Naval Forces of September 22, 1941:

“The Fuhrer decided to wipe the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia, the continued existence of this largest settlement is of no interest … It is supposed to surround the city with a tight ring and raze it to the ground by shelling from artillery of all calibers and continuous bombing from the air. If … requests for surrender are made, they will be rejected, since the problems associated with the stay of the population in the city and its food supply cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war being waged for the right to exist, we are not interested in saving at least part of the population.

Several attempts to break the blockade were unsuccessful and tragic. The Luban operation ended with the encirclement of the Second Shock Army. 14,000 soldiers and officers died or went missing.

The main direction of the battles until January 1944 was the “Sinyavinsko-Shlisselburg ledge”, the Sinyavinsky swamps. Here from September 1941 to January 1944 there were terrible battles. Ours paved the gati and went on the attack along them, the Germans fired from the dominating heights. The exact number of deaths is not known. Only in one operation in the fall of 1942, 156,927 soldiers and officers participated. After the defeat, 3209 fighters left the swamps to their original positions (Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense. F. 344. Op. 5554. D. 379). 153,718 Soviet soldiers died, went missing or were taken prisoner. Out of 156,927.

The blockade lasted 872 days.

The solid ring was broken on January 18, 1943. On that day, the troops of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts joined, forming a corridor 8 to 11 kilometers wide. After that, the battles for the complete liberation of the city continued for another year, until January 27, 1944 – the “Day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade” officially established in our country.

A 33-kilometer-long railway was laid along that corridor in 17 days. On February 7, 1943, the first train with weapons and food came along it. He walked for two days, under fire, stopping for repairs.

If the path across Lake Ladoga was called the Road of Life, then this one is the Road of Victory. She operated from February 7, 1943 to March 10, 1944. For a year and one month, 4,441,608 tons of cargo were delivered to Leningrad through it. On the Ladoga road from September 12, 1941 to March 1943 – 1,615,000 tons.

The life and struggle of the civilian population in besieged Leningrad is a tragic page in world history.

Leningrad is a martyr city and at the same time a hero city.

There were no food supplies, famine in the city of three million began immediately after the encirclement. On October 1, 1941, workers and engineering and technical workers received 400 grams of bread a day, employees, dependents and children – 200 grams each. On November 20, workers – 250 grams, the rest – 125 grams. The bread was half of impurities, from food pulp.

Hundreds of thousands of Leningraders came out to build fortifications. Weakened from hunger, women and teenagers prepared peat and firewood for the city in the Vsevolozhsky and Pargolovsky districts, sent up to 200 wagons per day to Leningrad. They also went out on duty during the bombing, dismantled the rubble, extinguished the lighters. Among them was the boy Yura Voronov, the future famous poet.

In blockade days
We never found out:
Between youth and childhood
Where is the line?
We are in forty-three
Issued medals,
And only in the forty-fifth –
Passports.

However, even on that invisible line there were terrible serifs. One of them is for the same Yura Voronov – November 25, 1941. A bomb hit their house. A brother and sister died. Many years later, Voronov told his friends: “Brother Alik was then three and a half years old, and sister Milochka was two months old. My dear did not understand anything, she only cried. And Alik wanted to eat. He always looked out the window and waited for me with bread. On that day, he never waited … The daily norm, these miserable grams remained with me. He ate them, wetting them with tears.

After 25 years, Yuri Voronov will write:

Here again
After so many years!
This woman
On Victory Day
Not a wreath, not flowers, but bread
Brought
At my grandfather’s grave.

During the 872 days of the blockade, up to one and a half million inhabitants died of starvation and disease.

One of the symbols of the city’s martyrdom was the diaries of Tanya Savicheva. When Leningrad was surrounded by fascist armies, she was less than 12 years old. She kept a diary in her older sister Nina’s notebook. Wrote in letters.

On the letter “Zh” – “Zhenya died on December 28 at 12:30 am 1941”
On the letter “B” – “Grandma died on January 25, 3 o’clock in the afternoon, 1942”
“Lyoka died on March 17 at 5 o’clock in the morning”
“Uncle Vasya died on April 13 at 2 am”
“Uncle Lyosha May 10 at 4 p.m. 1942”
“Mom May 13 at 7:30 am 1942”
“The Savichevs are dead”
On the letter “U” – “Everyone died”
On the letter “O” – “There is only Tanya left”

Tanya died of dystrophy in 1944, already in evacuation. All the Savichevs who were in Leningrad died. But her older brother Misha and older sister Nina survived. Twenty-year-old Misha found the war in a Pskov village, he came to visit his aunt. During the years of occupation, Mikhail fought in the ranks of the partisans, was seriously wounded. Twenty-two-year-old Nina worked in a construction battalion on Ladoga, from there she was evacuated to the rear. Returning to Leningrad, she found her notebook, the diary of her sister Tanya, and gave it to the museum.

Sergei Baimukhametov.