Reliving The Siege
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This week marks the 65th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad, when, between September 1941 and January 1944, more than one million civilians, not to mention hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides, lost their lives.
I visited The Blockade Cemetery in St Petersburg, where 500,000 people are buried in mass graves, on a very snowy day in March, 1995. I was eighteen at the time and I think the numbers were just too big to comprehend. They still are today. However, to get some idea of just what it was like in the city during those 900 horrendous days, a Russian blogger has superimposed images of besieged Leningrad over present day St Petersburg.
According to my very rusty Russian, the introductory text:
Каждый день мы ходим по тем Ñамым улицам, ÑƒÐ¼Ð¸Ñ€Ð°Ñ Ð½Ð° которых его защитники думали о наÑ. О наÑ, которых им не было Ñуждено увидеть. Ðо мы можем и помним!
means something like: “Every day we walk along the same streets upon which our dying defenders thought about us. About us, those who it was decided we would not see. But we can remember them!” (I expect to be corrected very soon.)
65 Years After the Leningrad Blockade was Lifted (Russian blog)
(Via Dizzy)
3 Comments
February 1st, 2009 at 11:06 am
One of my colleagues in St. Petersburg was a ‘блокадница’, i.e. lived through the siege and I remember her descriptions of the hunger. It was the abiding memory. I read a not-that-good-actually novel on the siege called, I think, The Siege, by an Englishwoman but she too described the hunger well.
Met your visiting pal last night. Hope your (and Sofie’s) ears burnt like mad.
February 1st, 2009 at 11:12 am
Flip, tried to leave a comment here with Cyrillic and everything but your site, or the internet, has eaten it.
February 4th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
The translation is to be corrected only in one spot:
About us, those who it was decided, THEY would not see.
One of the books that was translated, I think in 1980′s was “The Seige” by D. Granin and A. Adamovich
It is a documentary. Two authors interviewed survivors of the siege.
The only thing I can compare it with is Haruki Murakami’s documentary about Tokyo subway gas attack.