Whisper who dares

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip of soup and very little water — if they were lucky enough to get their daily rations — you couldn’t tell when they were naked whether they were male or female. I wouldn’t have believed that starving parents might eat their dead children, or vice versa; yet 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism. When people were standing in line, hour after hour, hoping to receive their tiny rations, if someone dropped dead, those alert enough rushed to steal their ration card. I never expected that one effect of ‘the battles with the body’ was apathy, a sign that death was near — ‘the indifference of the doomed’, as one of the diarists, quoted here, puts it — indifference not so much to their own condition but to the fate of their once nearest and dearest. ‘The best way to survive was to draw an even tighter ring around oneself.’

Then there was the corruption. Those in charge of food supplies, and of dishing out the meagre rations, often stole food for themselves — you could tell by looking at them — or exchanged it for sexual favours. So, when you saw a plump, pretty girl with lovely hair and colour, you always knew why she looked so good. One diarist wrote:

The salespeople are robbing us blind. In exchange for bread, they have everything they want. Almost all of them, without any shame at all, wear gold and expensive furs. Some of them even work behind the counter in luxurious sable and sealskin coats.