Paulina Genosoba
The Siege of Leningrad
It was a beautiful sunny day in Leningrad, July 22 1941. It was the end of year examinations during my first year in university. At noon the devastating news suddenly filtered through that war had violently disrupted our lives.
My friends, one by one, left for the front – Tulia, Costia and the other boys. You dear boys never returned. You are lying in the ground beneath Leningrad. No one knows where your graves are.
July 1941 - we were students busy digging trenches under heavy bombardment from the Germans. We would cover our heads with our spades and wait for the bombing to stop.
By September we were anxious and petrified. There were days when we lost all hope. We were gripped by terror and waited to see when the Germans would take the city and what would happen then.
There were rumors in our building that, Pytor, the street cleaner had prepared lists with the names of the Jews. The image in front of us was an endless line, a line of starving and besieged Jews waiting for bread.
One day we took a direct hit during a bombardment and we witnessed terrifying bloody scenes in front of our very eyes. It is hard to find the right words to describe it.
Hunger threatened on the streets. All the time we saw people with bloated faces and I asked my mother: “The people are starving, so why are their faces swollen? They should be hungry.” My mother smiled sweetly at me and tried to explain to me that people swell up because of hunger. When there was no more water or electric power in the houses, we’d go out of the house in the freezing morning to collect ice. We would melt the ice at home and we’d boil water for drinking. Of course, washing was out of the question.
Winter 1941 – it was a freezing and cruel winter full of horror and hunger. Traffic came to a standstill, everything was silent. Bodies were taken away on sledges. There was constant traffic of many sledges out on the streets. People ran out of strength. The living rested by the sledges on which the dead were laid out and sometimes froze to death themselves. That was the end. Bodies lay in piles of snow, in stairwells and in houses.
The daily ration of about 125 grams of moist black bread, slightly bigger than a box of matches. We divided it into 3 pieces, to draw out the “pleasure” during the day.
The bombing no longer scared us. From time to time we became apathetic. My mother turned black from starvation and looked scary. I was a pile of bones.
In March 1942 it was announced that the students were to be transferred out of the city. They tried to save the dying. My mother instructed me: “Go, my child. I can’t bear to see you tomorrow.” At the time I was suffering from malnutrition – a terminal condition. “And you, mother?” I asked her. “I will stay here and wait for you. The sun will shine again and we will warm up and come back to life,” she replied.
My mother led me and my little suitcase on a children’s sledge. She was exhausted and weak yet determinedly led me to the collection point. She drew strength from the thought that she was going to save her daughter’s life. We parted, as it transpired, forever. I never saw her again.
A monument was erected in Victory Square in Leningrad in memory of the fallen. The monument is also in honor of my mother, Ettel Greenberg.
Once, in my youth, I dreamt of being an actress. Now in my home the dream has come true. I am an actress in our home theater called Holon Dream.
