To Live Until Spring

The first winter of the Siege of Leningrad was the most terrible. The ring closed on September 8, and the city wasn’t ready for it. Heating in apartments was absent, there was nowhere to get firewood, and the thermometer needle had already begun to fall below minus twenty degrees by November. No electricity, no water, no transport—only constant bombardment and artillery shelling. And, of course, those very “one hundred and twenty-five blockade grams, half with fire and half with blood,” which were very conditionally called bread. In December there were two weeks when ration cards were issued with nothing at all.

The people of Leningrad performed feats of battle and labor; teenagers took their places at the machines instead of the older ones who had gone to the front. For children like Zhenya Titova and Yurko Egorov, the real feat was simply to live through until spring—surviving without adults amid the largest humanitarian catastrophe of the 20th century: the Siege of Leningrad.