The frontline soldier Ivan Zykov describes officer training in Leningrad, though at a higher level: commanding officer of a battalion. The training took place in a former school on the outskirts of Leningrad, where they slept as well, with their revolvers under their pillows and their loaded rifles stacked in pyramids. They didn’t once go into the city, because there was nothing to do in town but remember its prewar glory. There was no heating in the school — the water pipes had frozen back in November. They say that some theaters were still open, that the actors shuffled onstage with sunken faces to act.
Organizing food was tricky. The cooks were civilians and some of the men on duty were responsible for the chopping of wood and fetching buckets of water. We fetched water from the Neva several times a day in a big container on a sledge. About 400 meters from the school was an old wooden house and we demolished it for the wood. We’d heave a few logs back on our shoulders, saw them, chop them and take them to the kitchen so the cook could make porridge or soup. When food was ready, we weren’t allowed into the dining room. We’d line up first for a mug of pine-needle infusion which we had to drink it to avoid getting scurvy, and only then were we allowed to eat.
The freezing weather lasted a very long time. “The snow fell, and fell, and fell. The square, the banks of the Neva, the peeling facade of the Winter Palace, the broken windows of the Hermitage — it all seems somehow distant and fantastical, a fairy tale of a dying city, where Chinese shadow puppets still move, hurrying about until they breathe their last.” By February the constant talk was of cannibalism; dark rumors filled the pages of diaries. “Professor D, a pathologist, says that the liver of a person who has died of starvation has a bad taste, but when mixed with brains, is delicious. How on earth does he know???” These stories are relayed with the repeated refrain: “True or false?” The extreme naturalism of the description returns both the storyteller and the reader to their senses. Around this time Shaporina, who remained an objective and sober narrator, almost to the point of removing herself from the narrative, writes: “I have become a cave dweller.” She received her ration of 450 grams of meat and “I didn’t have the patience to cut it with a knife and fork, I picked it up in my hands and ate it.”
May 17, 1942
My dear family,
I don’t know where to begin. I’m alive and in good health and doing well. I wrote many times from the training camp but didn’t receive a reply. I don’t know why that is.
I have a permanent address now and so I am writing again in the hope of a reply. Please write and tell me how you all are, whether you are well? How are Mother, Auntie Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya, the baby, Sarra Abramovna? I’m worried that I haven’t heard from you.
I was in Leningrad until March, so the food situation was fairly bad. At the end of February I went to Lake Ladoga, and the food got better immediately and I feel quite fit and well now.
Please write as much as possible about everyone and everything. I can’t wait to hear. All my love to Mother, Auntie Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya, their baby and Sarra Abramovna.
My address: PPS 939,994, s/p 3 Battalion, 7 Company, Junior Lt Gimmelfarb L. M.
*
In Spring 1942, stiffly, almost unwillingly, life began returning to its former shape. Food supplies increased, a market opened, things could once again be bought for money. The city was coarser, in the sun it seemed almost rural — here and there patches of land appeared from under the snow, ready for sowing potatoes, cabbage, and cucumbers. In April the city’s inhabitants came out onto the streets to clear them after the Terrible Winter. The Terrible Winter lived on of course, it seemed to breathe through every crack, but still the changes felt like heaven. This insubstantial, shaky euphoria (there was no faith in it, but still a desire to linger beneath a glassy sun) washes through the Siege diaries during these weeks and months. At the beginning of summer Klavdiya Naumovna writes to her son:
Things are happening again, life feels quite exhilarating, especially after the winter. People are washing themselves, they’ve started wearing their best dresses. The streetcars are running, shops are reopening. There are lines for perfume in the shops — they got perfume into Leningrad. It does cost 120 rubles a bottle, but people are buying it and I was even given some. I was so happy. I love perfume! I sprayed some on and I don’t feel hungry at all, I feel as if I were just returning from the theater, or a concert or a café. This is especially how I feel wearing “Red Moscow” scent.
Shaporina confirms this, writing that the air was wonderful — and how delicious the radish was. She didn’t have much hope left, but at least they were still alive.
Otter, Lydia Ginzburg’s hero and alter ego, expresses the same feeling of a suspicious absence of hunger, waking with a “wonderful, still undiminished lack of suffering.” Otter’s Day, from which she later draws the perfectly constructed Notes from the Blockade, was written with some distance in 1943 and 1944, but the description of life returning to its former state, without apparent reason, seems very real in its unlikeliness. “The window was open. He was neither hot nor cold. It was light all around. And it would stay light the whole of the white night through. He didn’t even feel like eating. [ . . . ] Otter threw back the sheet and exposed his body to the light, bright air, neither cold nor hot.”
There was a welcome lull in hostilities on the Leningrad Front. Nikulin wrote of the “layering of corpses” that had been left over the winter and had reappeared when the snow melted: the September dead in their light jackets and shoes, overlaid by the marines in their felted peacoats, the Siberians in their short fur jackets, and the city’s volunteer defense forces. The roads were wet and impassable, the dugouts filled with water. Spring dried everything, made the earth even again, decorated it with green, and disguised the graves. “The soldiers rested behind their defenses. There were hardly any new dead or wounded. Training began, they even started showing films [ . . . ] They built bathhouses everywhere, and got rid of the lice.” It was a sunny summer: they slowly got ready for an offensive. Lyodik’s mother asked him if he was due leave and he replied that “no leave is given in wartime. When the war is over then I hope to see you all, my dearest ones.” Singers came and gave concerts to the soldiers — the still-unknown Klavdiya Shulzhenko sang “The Blue Scarf,” which had been adapted for her and which would later become a wartime classic:
When I receive your letters
I hear your voice in my head
And between the words, the bluest scarf
Waves with what’s unsaid.
*
July 5, 1942
Dear Mother,
I got a postcard from you yesterday and I was delighted. A little while ago I got another one. I was happy to know that you and all the family are in health and doing well. Did you get my letter where I wrote down everything in detail? On the same day I wrote to Father but I’ve had nothing back from him yet. I sent you 700 rubles, I wrote to you about this. Did you receive them?
Here everything is just as before, the days pass uneventfully. The weather is good. A few days ago we had a show: jazz, readings, two dancers, a singer and a baritone. I especially liked how they sang “Chelita” and “The Blue Scarf,” and how they played Dunayevsky’s jazz. For a long while I couldn’t get the concert out of my head, because it was such a big luxury for me. Probably those despicable Germans heard the music as well, as it was put on not far from the front line.
I am doing well. I live in hope of seeing you, father and all our dear family very soon. I am so proud of Father that he has been promoted to a guardsman. I hope in my turn I can justify the faith placed in me by the nation as a Red Army Officer.
Mother, tell me everything, I want to know about everyone. I have one request. If possible could you send me envelopes as they are hard to come by here.
I wish you health and happiness. I send you all my love.
Love from your
Lyod
ik
Please give my love to everyone.
P.S. I met some soldiers from our part of Moscow. It was good to talk to them. One of them lived and worked on our street.
Love again.
Lyodik
*
Before the war “The Blue Scarf” had seemed little more than a simple ditty, and the words were quite different. It was almost by chance that it became the hymn to the soldier’s blues: another young lieutenant on the same Volkhovsky Front handed the singer, Shulzhenko, a piece of paper with his version of the lyrics, and they stuck:
For them, for her
The one he did adore
The gunner aims, the scarf is blue
That his beloved wore
Many of the popular songs of the period had similar fates. The fashionable “Chelita” was given new life by the Soviet music hall stars of the thirties. The Mexican original was more urgent and more sublime, but the Soviet version had some catchy lyrics and carefully managed class awareness: the Mexican señores may have promised her heaps of pearls, but the heroine only has eyes for the baker’s boy under the midday sun. A famous Red Army song, “Boldly We Go Into Battle for the Soviets,” has a White Army twin, “Boldly We Go Into Battle for Holy Rus,” only the latter is sung in a slow deep voice, as if rising up from underground. Both versions have a common root (or branch) in the beautiful song “The Scented Buds of the White Acacia.” Grandmother Dora, who remembered the Civil War well, used to sing a song about the Priamursky Partisans to me in my childhood, and only years later I found unexpectedly its perfect reverse, the same tune used for the war march of the opposing Siberian Infantry. Even the salon waltzes from the piles of old manuscripts have their strange echoes in Soviet propaganda songs.
The Second World War song “Katyusha,” composed in Russian in 1939 by Matvei Blanter, was sung across the world — one of its incarnations was the hymn of the Spanish Blue Division, who fought on the Leningrad Front, but on the side of the Wehrmacht. In this version the singer sings of a spring without flowers, far away from a loved one, and the ignoble foe swimming in vodka. It’s a sad song and it ends with the promise of a heroic end. In a single battle at Krasny Bor, over a thousand Spaniards were killed in only an hour.
There was death everywhere that summer. On the other side of no-man’s-land Lyodik wrote to his cousin: “I think I will join the Party, so I can defeat the damned enemy in a Bolshevik spirit! Here’s to victory! Here’s to meeting again soon!”
July 26, 1942
Dear Mother,
I found out from Auntie Beti’s letter that you received the money (700 rubles). I don’t understand why you didn’t write yourself. The last time I heard from you was the postcard with Lyonya’s note on it. I really hope to get a letter from you soon. You asked me to send you a money order. I sent it and now you should receive the money every month from your local Military Office. I earn 750 rubles, but that’s with field payments, my basic wage is 600 rubles. I can only send 75% of this amount by money order, so I’ve done this for 400 rubles. I’ll send the rest in smaller amounts by mail. The money order is valid for a year from July 1943. You can get out money from August 1943. On July 23 I sent you 900 rubles. Please let me know you have received this. I wrote the address 13 ulitsa Lenina, Yalutorovsk on the money order because I couldn’t send it poste restante. Please let me know if you live a long way away from Auntie Beti. If you need to you can put a different address on the order at your local military office.
How are you feeling, Mother? I hope you aren’t getting too tired at work. Don’t overdo it, please. I’ve already told you that I had a letter from Father, I replied straightaway, but I haven’t had an answer yet. Did you get my last letter? I am in good health and doing well. In two days I’ll be twenty. I hope that I’ll be back with you and all our family by my next birthday. I wish you health and happiness. I send you all my love.
Your loving son,
Lyodik
Surprisingly, soldiers and officers still received a wage in wartime. In 1939, an infantryman received between 140 and 300 rubles a month, and artillerymen and tank crew received slightly more. Soldiers on active service received additional “field payments.” For officers these payments were set at 25 percent of the basic wage. Junior Lieutenant Gimmelfarb was in command of a platoon and his minimum wage would have been 625 rubles. In the bundle with the papers that the beautiful Verochka Gimmelfarb left on her death were the yellow stubs of money transfer orders, on the back of each a few words including the unchanging “love, Lyodik.”
August 10, 1942
Dear Mother,
I received a letter from you yesterday but when I opened the envelope there were just four more envelopes inside, and no note. Maybe the letter fell out, I don’t know. I haven’t had a letter from you for a long time and I am very worried about your health because Father wrote that you were complaining of exhaustion. Please write and send details, tell me how you are. The last letter I received was from Aunt Beti a while ago now, I answered it straightaway and included a note to you as well. I wrote out a money order for you, to Aunt Beti’s address, as I couldn’t send it poste restante. The order was for 400 rubles, I couldn’t send any more. I’ll send the rest poste restante. Did you receive the 900 rubles I sent you a month ago? I got a letter from Father and a card from Uncle Fili. Father is well. Uncle Fili has been with the Pacific Fleet for nearly a year. His wife Tonya is working in a studio in Almaty. Uncle Fili promised to let me know everyone’s addresses. He wrote to you as well, he got your address from Father. I am in good health and doing well. How is everyone? Write to me about everything. Only please don’t worry about me, it’s quite unnecessary. Be happy and healthy. I send you lots of love. Love to all the family.
I look forward to your letter.
Your loving son,
Lyodik
This was his last letter. On August 25, Lyubov Shaporina, writing up conversations she’d had, noted in brackets: “(I’m writing and somewhere outside the city or on its outskirts there’s prolonged gunfire, an artillery duel, the guns are muttering deep and low, threateningly, like a big storm approaching.)”
On August 27, the ill-fated Sinyavinsky Operation began. The offensive was intended to breach the Siege at its narrowest point, where besieged Soviet troops were only 16 kilometers away from the main Soviet army. But it was across an area of marshland and forest, which the Germans had reinforced with gun emplacements, dugouts, and minefields. Hundreds of meters of barbed wire, fences with gun slits surrounded by ditches of marsh water, “and the guns kept roaring and the radio plays a cheerful tune. It’s rumored the offensive has begun,” Shaporina wrote.
The 994th Rifle Regiment had been given orders to take the village of Voronovo and dig in there. Beyond a stream lay two half-destroyed hotel complexes held by the Germans. The Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion described it all very carefully in his memoirs: the constant firing meant the infantry had to keep low to the ground, a few tanks breached the line and crossed a bridge only to find they were alone and exposed, five days of incessant and futile fighting, officers dying one after the other.
The Commanding Officer of the Third [Lyodik was in the Third Battalion] was hit in the leg, my Commissar was hit in the shoulder, the Senior Battalion Commissar had both legs ripped off. A few people were killed outright, I was hit below the knee of my right leg. Shrapnel took the flesh off down to the bone. I had two fingers ripped off my right hand, two more injured. Three pieces of shrapnel in my hip on the right-hand side. [ . . . ] The blood is flowing, but for all these wounds we only have two bags of blood.
The man who wrote this returned home crippled. Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s mother received the standard notification of death. It says that her son was killed on August 27, on the very first day of the Operation. In the fog of mass slaughter, the dates and anniversaries of death could only be approximate since no one knew the act
ual dates. Aleksandr Gutman, who commanded a battalion in a neighboring regiment, said that they wrote “fell in battle” on all the notifications of death, as it wasn’t always possible to rescue the bodies of comrades from the battlefield and the record of the dead was poorly kept. The last moment of clarity before the darkness descends is a few hours before the beginning of battle:
The objective was clear, everyone was ready for the offensive. We passed on our defensive area to the arriving unit. The regiment went to the point of assembly, ready for the offensive, or to put it another way, we took up our first position. We ate dinner in the woods, organized sentry, and lay down to sleep as best we could. For many this would be their last night alive, but no one thought about this, everyone was filled with a single thought: to be victorious and to survive. We slept, it was a little rough, but the night passed without incident. At six in the morning we ate breakfast, smoked a cigarette. Then checked weapons, ammunition, bullets, gas masks, and rolled up our greatcoats and fixed them onto our kit. Then we waited for the order. At 8 exactly the artillery and mortars began firing along the whole Sinyavinsky line of troops of the 54th army. At 9 the soldiers began their ground offensive.
*
National Commissariat
Defense Union USSR
994th Rifle Regiment
September 16, 1942
№ 1058
PPS № 939
Death Notification
Your son, Lieutenant and Officer in the rifle platoon of the 7th front line company, 994th Rifle Regiment, Leonid Mikhailovich Gimmelfarb, of Moscow Lenin District, was injured and died of his injuries on August 27, 1942, in the battle for the Socialist homeland, true to his oath and displaying courage and heroism.
In Memory of Memory Page 28
