The building manager wrote down the address on a scrap paper — Glukhaya Zelenina [‘Lonely Green’] Street. He gave us a sled, and warned us that unless they are in coffins corpses can now only be transported through the streets after 8 p.m. Even for the time of year it was unusually cold — 35 degrees below zero. Nina, Nika and I tied Vladimir Aleksandrovich to a board with towels, and with great difficulty lowered him down the dark stairs. Nina stayed at home to put the children to bed; Nika and I dragged the sled to Glukhaya Zelenina. . We pulled together at first, then took turns, so that the other person could turn his back to the wind and warm up his face and hands a little. The trip — in reality a fairly short distance — seemed never-ending. Finally we reached the gates of the morgue, previously a woodstore. The woman on the door, also half-dead from cold, was getting ready to go home, and in a martyred voice told us to hurry. We dragged the sled along a narrow cleared path through the yard to a big shed. Opening its door wide, in the moonlight we saw a mountain of corpses, half-dressed or sewn into sheets, and dumped in a heap like firewood. Impatiently, the woman indicated that the new delivery should be thrown on top of the mountain. . There was nobody else there and she stood on the sidelines, clearly not intending to help. We untied the body from the boards and tried to lift it, but without success — our wasted muscles didn’t have the strength. There was nothing for it except to try and drag it up the pile. The easiest way, it turned out, was to take it by the legs. Stumbling we began to climb, treading on slippery, frozen-solid stomachs, backs and heads. Despite the cold there was a suffocating stench. When, exhausted, we came to a halt, the head and shoulders of poor Vladimir Aleksandrovich still lay outside. The woman pushed at his head with the shed door, seeing if it would close. We needed to climb higher but couldn’t. At last, in desperation, we gave a jerk and the body moved sideways, its head swinging to one side. At the same time the door closed, and something rattled. It was the woman fussing with the door latch, seeing if it would hold shut. For several minutes we stood in complete darkness, afraid to move. . The door opened. Carefully, holding each other by the hand, we descended into the open, and all three of us sighed with relief. The woman (could she have been the morgue manager?) carelessly stuffed the paperwork into her pocket and the funeral was over.35
Sixteen more such morgues opened in April, several of them in disused churches, including the Trinity Cathedral and the chapel of the Alexander Nevsky monastery.
On 15 January the city soviet ordered the digging of more, bigger trenches at the Bolsheokhtinskoye cemetery (just across the river from the Smolniy), the Serafimovskoye cemetery in Novaya Derevnya, the old Lutheran cemetery on Decembrists’ Island, and at the Piskarevskoye and Bogoslovskoye cemeteries in the far north-eastern suburbs. Though each of the fifteen district soviets was supposed to find four hundred workers to man new burial teams, only one actually did so, and the job was turned over to NKVD troops and civil defence units. The ‘Komsomolets’ excavators with which they started work proved unable to break the ground, which had frozen to a depth of one and a half metres, so instead explosives were used, together with heavier AK diggers.
A second order of 2 February instructed district soviets to come up with a daily total of sixty lorries with trailers, for the collection of corpses from morgues and hospitals. Five-tonne trucks were to transport one hundred corpses per trip, three-tonne trucks sixty corpses, and one and a half-tonne trucks forty. Drivers were incentivised with extra rations — 100 grams of bread and fifty of vodka for every second and subsequent delivery. As a result, the Burial Trust reported, for several days in February ‘six to seven thousand bodies were delivered daily to the Piskarevskoye Cemetery alone. . Five-tonne trucks piled high with corpses could be seen driving through town, their poorly covered loads reaching as high again as the sides of the vehicle, with five or six workers sitting on top.’ Since the corpses were frozen stiff, to pack in the maximum number collection teams could use the same technique as for logs, some standing vertically so as to form a fence holding in the remainder.36 At the cemeteries the excavators could not keep up with deliveries, creating enormous backlogs. The number of unburied corpses at the Piskarevskoye, the Trust estimated, reached 20,000–25,000 at its February worst, stacked in rows two hundred metres long and two metres high.
Though the conversion of brick kilns to crematoria in March, combined with decreasing mortality, gradually brought the situation under control, mass burial continued up to the end of May. At the Piskarevskoye (the largest of the sites) a total of 129 trenches were dug, filled and re-covered from 16 December to 1 May. The biggest six — four to five metres deep, six metres wide and up to 180 metres long — contained, the Trust estimated, about 20,000 bodies each. At the Bogoslovskoye a disused sandpit was filled with 60,000 corpses over five or six February days, an anti-tank ditch with 10,000, and bomb craters with another 1,000. Eighteen anti-tank ditches on the northern edge of the Serafimovskoye cemetery accommodated another 15,000. Altogether, the Trust reported, 662 mass graves were dug and filled in the city, not counting the use of pits, craters and trenches. How many dead they contained in total is still disputed, but the best estimate for the number of civilians who died during Leningrad’s first siege winter is around half a million.37
12. ‘We Were Like Stones’
On 17 February 1942 Mariya Mashkova, head of acquisitions at the Public Library, a handsome, grey-blue, neo-classical building that curves round the corner of Aleksandrinskaya Square and the Nevsky, sat down to write:
Day after day passes, and it already feels late to be starting a diary. Unrepeatable, terrifying things happen and are forgotten. The rest, the trivia, remain in the memory. A packet of letters arrived today and reminded me that away from Leningrad there’s a different life going on, and people who can’t imagine even a hundredth of what we’re going through.
Outside I can hear shelling. It didn’t use to bother me, but now I think numbly, ‘Somewhere a building is collapsing, people are being crushed.’ But what’s this compared to everything that’s happened already? We are all ill. Olga Fedorovna [Mashkova’s mother-in-law] is very bad — no surprise, since from room to room there are dead people, a corpse for every family. It has been almost a month since Anna Yakovlevna Zveinek died from starvation. She’s still lying there in her freezing, dirty room — black, dried-up, teeth bared. Nobody is in any hurry to clean her up and bury her; everyone is too weak to care. Two rooms away lies another corpse — her daughter Asya Zveinek, who also died of starvation, outliving her mother by twelve days. Asya died two steps from my bed, and Vsevolod [Mashkova’s husband] and I dragged her away because it was too warm in our room for a dead body. .
Almost in front of my eyes N. P. Nikolsky died, a friend of Vsevolod’s and a [former] deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was brought in on a sled, with the idea of placing him in a recuperation clinic so as to get him back on his feet. . He fell into a coma and quickly died, in Vsevelod’s office. He stayed there, on the sofa, for twelve days, since nobody could cope with burying him. Altogether, the Library has lost at least a hundred people. .
People’s attitude to death, and death itself and burial, have greatly simplified. At first it was very difficult. Make a coffin — it’s hard to get one, 500–700 roubles — dig a grave, that has to be paid for in bread. . Then rentable coffins appeared, and after that people were taken to the morgues on sleds, just wrapped in sheets and blankets. Thus I buried V. F. Karyakin, Zinaida Yepifanova’s husband. . and even my deadened nerves were barely able to handle everything I saw. .