Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
Dedicated to my grandfather
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.
