Children and War: A Historical Anthology

21. Innocent Victims and Heroic Defenders: Children and the Siege of Leningrad

Chapter Twenty-One Innocent Victims and Heroic Defenders Children and the Siege of Leningrad Lisa A. Kirschenbaum By the fall of 1941, as the German army closed its blockade of Leningrad and the German air force began its campaign to bomb the city into submission , only a small fraction of the city’s 400,000 children had been evacuated .1 Few children escaped the city during the first months of the siege, when the daily bread ration for dependents fell to 125 grams. No official figures count the number of children who died during the terrible winter of 1941–1942, when thousands of Leningraders died of starvation every day. The city lacked the capacity to bury, let alone identify, all of them.When the so-called“Road of Life”opened across frozen Lake Ladoga in late 1941,children were among the first evacuated.However,some remained in the blockaded city, which was often subject to heavy air and artillery attack until the siege was finally broken in January 1944. In official Soviet parlance, Leningrad was a“city front,”a place where the distinction between front and rear, soldier and civilian, disappeared. With most of its adult male population in the army or evacuated with the war industry , the city of Leningrad was a front “manned” largely by women and children. Wartime accounts tended to emphasize that children not only withstood the siege but also that they played a vital role in defending the city. In these accounts the most visible representative of the young generation was the Young Communist teenager (Komsomol), often a girl, digging anti-tank trenches, extinguishing incendiary bombs in buckets of sand before they set fire to rooftops, or delivering food, water, and even the mail to Leningraders struggling against starvation and isolation. 279 While wartime accounts emphasized child heroes, the emerging“cult”of World War II in the 1960s made an innocent child victim a prominent statesanctioned symbol of the city’s wartime experience.2 The rituals, heroes, and memorials of the “cult” worked to turn the war into the Soviet state’s chief legitimizing myth. In the case of Leningrad, the cult of the war made an eleven-year-old girl the most visible victim of the siege. Tania Savicheva’s laconic nine-sentence “diary” chronicling the deaths of six members of her family during the famine winter and spring of 1941–1942 became an emblem of the “Leningrad epic.” Soviet, post-Soviet, and Western accounts used the diary as a means of evoking the horrors of the blockade. Tania’s brief diary and stories about hard-working, spirited Young Communist girls and boys define the city’s children in wartime as at once innocent victims and heroic defenders. The publicity these images received, both during and after the war, illuminates the political uses of children’s wartime experiences. That these images continue to shape the memory of the war in post-Soviet Russia suggests the difficulty of separating the“raw”memory of people who lived through the siege as children from the Soviet“myth”of innocence and heroism. Wartime Images of Children in Leningrad In wartime accounts, two sorts of children inhabited besieged Leningrad: those receiving excellent care in state institutions and those doing adult work to “defend” the city. Newspapers praised Leningrad’s women for their protection and rehabilitation of the youngest survivors of the siege. The press pictured teenage boys and girls as fighting for their mothers and the motherland by caring for children, the sick, and the old. The wartime story of Leningrad’s children can thus be understood as of a piece with propaganda that made devotion to family and hometown key markers of Soviet patriotism.3 What remained largely invisible in these Soviet wartime accounts was the failure to evacuate children and the fatal effects of starvation. During the war, telling the story of the youngest victims of Nazi aggression proved dif- ficult for the Soviet state. Images of threatened and wounded children often functioned in Soviet wartime propaganda as a means of generating hatred of the invader and of inspiring sacrifice. A wartime photograph of Leningrad’s main street shows a bombed-out building decorated with a 280 l i s a a . k i r s c h e n b au m two-story version of a frequently reproduced poster that featured a woman with a child in her...