Peace in the Face of War

When the Shostakovich score was flown into the city, Ksenia and other
surviving members of the radio symphony orchestra practised under
the direction of Karl Ilych Eliasberg. Ksenia said the musicians had to be
helped up the stairs and could rehearse for only fifteen minutes at a time.
Nevertheless, the symphony was performed publicly in Leningrad’s Astoria
hotel on August 9th 1942, the day Hitler had chosen to celebrate the fall of
the city. It was broadcast both to the city and the besieging forces.
August 9 th made a great difference. The shelling and bombing and hunger
continued but I knew I had accomplished an important deed – that I was of
use to the city.
A less well-known spiritual gift was broadcast live the previous November
1941 to the besieging forces: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with a choir of
120 starving men and women summoning all their strength to sing Ode to
Joy to the German troops surrounding the city.
The ability of siege survivors to harness deep spiritual reserves was perhaps
most vividly expressed by a 70 year-old doctor, Professor Svet Tikhvinskii.
Svet was twelve at the outbreak of war.
After my family left for the front, I gathered lumps of coal from the railway
line. I made wick and oil lamps to light my room. I went to the Neva for
water. I slept on a metal bedstead with a board laid across it. I had one
thin blanket for covering. I was used to austere conditions. I was brought
up in a military family. I cut up my leather boots, boiled and ate them. I
ate all the carpenter’s glue in the house and then boiled sawdust. There
was a vegetable warehouse in the neighbourhood. In the course of decades
vegetables had rotted and formed a layer over the floor. I dug up that earth
and ate it. Then as winter approached I went to the army and asked them
to take me in. I told them my father was a general and I didn’t want to die. I
said I was prepared to do anything, any work at all, if they would just let me
live with them.They agreed, even though my father was not a general but a
colonel in the medical service. I stayed with them for a few months. In the
end they sent me away to study. I left my comrades with tears in my eyes.
Their parting words were, ‘Lad, live for us, study for us.’ Of 900 men, only
one returned from the war.
Svet began to train as a gymnast in the Empress Elizabeth’s former palace
that had been converted into a school and orphanage.
Each day I cycled all the way across the city from the Vyborg Side, sometimes
through shelling and artillery fire. I was very serious about my training. I
became a gymnast, performing with my troupe in hospitals, schools and
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