Blokada

For as long as I can remember the word blokada has been said and talked about around me.

Blokada, or blockade, a word as inherent to my place of birth as White Nights and granite-bordered canals. The 900-day siege of Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) by the German forces between 1941 and 1944 has so deeply shaped the conscience of the city's life, culture, and collective memory that the thought of it is almost inescapable in personal and public life.

The word is almost as ubiquitous in my childhood memories as my grandmother's pies, trips to the Black Sea, and sound of boots crunching on snow. It was simply in everything. I remember knowing the word before I knew what it meant, like being familiar with milk before you know what it is.

I had a vague idea that it was something scary and bad, because whenever people said blokada their faces would get somber and a sort of respectful silence grew around the speaker. Yet there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, it wasn't a kind of hush that occurs at the mention of a taboo. It was like a big, black, fuzzy ball which would float through the streets of the city, and through people's homes, and through the museums, and sometimes floated by you and reminded everyone around of it's perpetual existence.

Blo-ka-da. Something black. Damp. Cold. When people remembered, they talked of rationing, and death, and the unbelievably cold winter. The siege continued through summer as well, but most stories never mention summer. The blackness and hunger consumed summer I think. No warmth was felt from the Sun's rays in those years, and no joy taken from bloom.

Many, many, many people died. As I got older I tuned in more to the details of Blokada, the painful exhaustion of the meager food supply after the city's supply lines were cut and warehouses bombed. There were cases of cannibalism in some homes, and other cases of whole families dying together, one by one. Someone once told me of the diary of Tania Savicheva, an eleven-year-old girl who survived but kept a diary, the following is its entire contents:

Zhenya died on Dec. 28th at 12:30 A.M. 1941

Grandma died on Jan. 25th 3:00 P.M. 1942

Leka died on March 5th at 5:00 A.M. 1942

Uncle Vasya died on Apr. 13th at 2:00 after midnight 1942

Uncle Lesha on May 10th at 4:00 P.M. 1942

Mother on May 13th at 7:30 A.M. 1942

Savichevs died.

Everyone died.

Only Tanya is left.

I'd like to also share two small personal stories. In a way, the reason I am able to write these words today is due to two unrelated animals: a shark and a cat.

My father's mother was four years old at the start of the siege. Her father had been arrested and killed by the NKVD in the 30s for being an "enemy of the people". Of course he was only a middle class, educated man from a bourgeois family with a wife descendant from German nobility. Since they were considered to be the family of an enemy of the people, my great-grandmother and grandmother were not allowed to evacuate with other people throughout most of the siege, and my grandmother once read to me the tearful letters her mother wrote to her older daughter who had been fortunate enough to be evacuated with her school. These letters were full of horrific descriptions of the bombing of the city, the pleading of her little daughter for food, and courageous statements of faith in the strength of the city.

However, at some point my great-grandmother found the spinal chord of a shark in some closet in her apartment, which had been brought back as a souvenir from distant travels by a relative or friend before the revolution. She made soup from the nutritious bone marrow which sustained her and my grandmother better than the 200 grams of barely edible bread they received each day. This, along with a couple of other lucky gastronomical breaks throughout the siege assured my own eventual existence after they were finally evacuated in 1942.

Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather's survival hinged on a cat. He was fifteen at the time and his friend and him were able to arrange to evacuate over the Road of Life. This was the name of the frozen-over lake Ladoga on the north-eastern side of the city, which was used to evacuate troops and civilians out of the city. They were taken up to walk ahead of an armed convoy of soldiers to test the ice. However, they had no food to take with them. The crossing would have likely proved fatal if the boys hadn't found a stray cat which my great-grandmother friend and packed for them. My grandfather lived to the age of sixty-nine thanks to that cat, but both of his older brothers died at the front. His father starved to death in the blockade.

But, even though that black, fuzzy, damp ball of memory still floats through the parks and kitchens of my city, the most important emotion left in its wake is courage. The undying memory of the courage of the citizens, and the belief that pretty much anything can be overcome.