How does anyone survive war and disaster? Seventy years have passed since the German Wehrmacht closed its ring around Leningrad, but the question is as relevant today as it ever was. No city in the course of human history has suffered as many losses as Leningrad during the three year siege from 1941-44. Half the population died - a million and a half out of almost 3 million. But as many survived. How? Rations were too small to sustain human life. People lived on a crust of bread a day. They ate dogs, cats, pigeons, rats; they boiled belts and ate carpenter’s glue. Added to the starvation was the cold – temperatures in the winter of 1941/2 fell to minus 40 degrees. Electricity and water were cut off. And through it all there was constant shelling and bombardment.
Leningraders spoke of ‘dystrophy,’ where the starving body begins to devour not only its own organs but also conscience and morality. Moral dystrophy led to ever deeper circles of hell – the starving found corpses in the street and hacked off pieces of flesh. Some murdered for flesh. By January 1942 it had became dangerous to go out alone - cannibals and gangsters had taken control of some districts.
Yet astonishingly, a road led out of that hell. While the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga eventually saved Leningraders on a physical level, there was another road of life, a metaphorical one, which enabled people to save themselves and each other. This road is the focus of The Besieged. Its author, Caroline Walton, “Wanted to know how anyone could survive such circumstances without going mad.” She embarks on a journey through present-day St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) to find survivors, and in doing so, makes sense of events in her own life.
In Man’s search for Meaning, Victor Frankl recalled men who walked through the Nazi camps comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread: “Although they were few in number, they offered sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
And so it was in the siege. Survivors speak about the choices they made; choices, not always easy ones, that kept them from succumbing to despair and stepping over the cliff edge into hell. A troupe of actors shared their rations with an abandoned orphan and in doing so saved themselves: “For it was those who ate up all their rations at once, hidden in a corner, who were the first to die.”
Scholars lived in the basements of the Hermitage writing, giving lectures and telling one another everything they knew, so that if they died, their expertise would not die with them. Authors and poets vaulted over the siege horrors in their imagination. Children were rescued from abandoned flats and taught to dance before wounded soldiers. An orchestra with full choir broadcast Beethoven’s Ninth through loudspeakers to the besieging Germans in their trenches. A theatre remained open throughout the siege, with a mortuary next to the box office for deceased actors. The auditorium was always packed. As one survivor says: “A person who laughs is unvanquished.”
The Besieged shows humanity at its best. In the words of a reviewer, it is: “A love letter to St Petersburg, to Russian endurance and to life itself.” And it's available now, priced £17.99.