Peace in the Face of War

Performers received slightly higher rations but nevertheless many starved
to death. ‘It was an act of great courage on the part of my fellow actors,’
Dmitriev emphasised.
When you are starving five grams seems an enormous amount to give away.
But in fact it was the people who gave to others who survived. The person
who withdrew into himself, who ate his ration all at once under his blankets
– and I saw this happen – usually died.
This was a theme I heard time and again – those who shared what little
they had were more likely to survive. 1 Those with no food to share gave
of themselves in whatever way they could. They taught; they nursed;
they performed. For example, against all odds, a theatre remained open
throughout the siege, with a mortuary by the box office for those actors who
died on stage or in the wings. Ludmila Grigorievna, who has edited several
siege documentaries, told me:
Shows used to begin at four in the afternoon as bombing raids were less
frequent then. Audiences went to the theatre hungry and sat in their felt
boots and fur coats. They relished a bit of light and luxury, the décor, the
costumes. It was medicine. When people were too weak to clap they bowed
to the actors instead.
Evgenii Lind, director of St Petersburg Museum, And the Muses Were Not
Silenced, put the importance of the theatre succinctly:
Imagine a person half dead from hunger walking off the frozen street into a
place where chandeliers blaze, where there is music and laughter. A person
who laughs is unvanquished.
Actors, musicians and dancers discovered the mutually life-sustaining
power of their work. Trumpet-player, Arkadii Kotlyarskii, explained how he
survived at the front, playing before the troops defending Leningrad.
Entertainment is an exchange between you and your audience... It is the
very breath of life to an actor, poet or musician. When you entertain people
who are far from home, they welcome you as though you were a member
of their own family. The gratitude of those troops overwhelmed me. When
you go out hungry in front of a thousand soldiers they revive you. Their
gratitude kept me alive.
1
There are parallels here with the concentration camps. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl
recalls: ‘We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the
huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number,
but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of
human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own
way.’
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