Peace in the Face of War

Nelly Pozner, a music teacher, was eight years old when war broke out. She
described ‘siege life’ to me from the point of view of a child:
Things became very hard after Papa left for the front. The water was cut off.
We had to go to the river with buckets and boil the water before we could
drink it. One day my mother came back in tears without the bucket. She told
me she had been bending over an ice hole in the Fontanka when she saw a
human head beneath the water. In her horror she let go of the bucket. After
that she had to use a kettle. It only held two litres and emptied so quickly
that Mamma would cry as she pulled on her felt boots again.
Our furniture began to disappear. And our clothes… We exchanged them for
glue. It gave off a revolting smell as we heated it. Then we let it congeal into
a sort of aspic, which we ate with vinegar, mustard and bay leaves – we had
these left over from before the war. It would damage your intestines if you
ate it hot. The hardest part was waiting for the glue to cool down.
One day I was at the baker’s with my mother. We collected our ration – 125
grammes for each of us – when suddenly a youth rushed up, knocked into
my mother and snatched the bread from her hands. He ran off. Mamma
cried out in her loud operatic voice. A patrol of soldiers was passing. They
ran after the boy, caught him and brought him back to the shop. The boy had
already sunk his teeth into the bread. The soldiers asked my mother, ‘Was it
him?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘It was not him.’ Thieves were shot on the spot.
People said they learned to tell from the eyes when someone was lost. Nelly
said she had never forgotten those of the thief.
His eyes were expressionless, like those you see today in the faces of drug
addicts, eyes that are no longer human. Perhaps it was already too late for
that boy.
Those who understood that the spirit began to die before the body strove to
remain alive by sharing what they had. Ivan Dmitriev, a celebrated stage and
film actor, told me that he had had a daughter who was killed in a bombing
raid.
We buried her at Serafimovskoye cemetery. On the way back I came across
a little boy abandoned in the street. He was about two years old, filthy,
dressed in an adult’s quilted jacket. I decided to adopt that boy, but I was
faced with the problem of how to feed him. My ration was not enough for
two, even for a child. So I introduced him to my comrades. Each one of them
donated five grams from their 50 gram sugar ration.
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