{"id":19457,"date":"2020-02-04T14:35:14","date_gmt":"2020-02-04T11:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/?p=19457"},"modified":"2020-02-06T11:09:24","modified_gmt":"2020-02-06T08:09:24","slug":"a-siege-of-the-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/articles\/columns\/a-siege-of-the-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"A Siege of the Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent weeks, politicians have spoken about the military tragedies of the 20th century and recalled the Holocaust and the Siege of Leningrad. But these two catastrophes have much more in common than just a date: In both Nazi camps and the city under siege, people were driven to an inhuman state by hunger, cold, and backbreaking labor, and hundreds of thousands of children suffered and died. But what is more important and terrifying is that that survivors later had to conceal the trauma caused by these nightmares. It has only been within the past 25 years that Soviet Jews who survived camps and ghettos have been able to talk about what happened to them. Under Soviet rule, the victims of the Nazi terror were given the vague classification of \u201cSoviet citizens\u201d and were not permitted to clarify their nationality, ethnicity, or religion. This makes the words<\/a> that President Putin pronounced on January 23 at a forum in Israel sound especially cynical: \u201cThe Holocaust has always been a deep wound for us, a tragedy we will always remember.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who is this \u201cus\u201d for whom the Holocaust was a \u201cdeep wound?\u201d Let\u2019s admit that it really is time to acknowledge that even the word itself was never pronounced in public. After all, the absolute majority of people who remember or personally knew victims of the Holocaust or were victims themselves did not live to hear Putin express sorrow regarding the death of six million Jews \u201ctortured in ghettos and death camps.\u201d And as far as the hundreds of thousands of Roma killed (mostly in Auschwitz) are concerned, not one word of sympathy is devoted to them, even though many members of the Roma people<\/a> who were shot, burned, and forgotten, can be counted among the number of \u201cSoviet citizens\u201d who perished.<\/p>\n

Roma in Pskov and Novgorod oblasts who could remember the Holocaust were still alive several years ago, and some of their memories were recorded<\/a>. I don\u2019t know anyone alive now who recalls the history of how \u201cthe Germans chased after us on motorcycles and my father raised a white flag over the caravan,\u201d which is what one elderly woman told me. But their children and grandchildren are alive and at least they must be told that the sufferings of their forebearers have not been forgotten, that the horrendous crimes and discrimination of the past should have no place in the present or future. A kind word must be said to anyone who was ever forced to remain silent after suffering terrifying trauma. Herein lies the enormous guilt of the \u201cvictorious powers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Survivors of the siege were also forced to remain silent, as Viktor Konetsky described in his autobiography: \u201cYou sit with your typewriter and descend into the nightmare of those times. And then it starts: \u2018Why did you stuff so many corpses in there? How could it be they\u2019re in the garbage pit in your courtyard? And adolescents are hacking them out of the ice? Why these horrors?…\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s true, we did speak about the blockade (and even invited survivors to speak publicly in late Soviet times), but always in a heroic manner. Children were shown a ration weighing 125 grams and told that it actually wasn\u2019t even bread but just oil cake and water, but no real reflection was offered. It was all just a sign of the \u201cbarbarity of the fascists\u201d and the \u201cfeats of the people.\u201d The question of why children were given less bread than working adults could not even be posed, because it was clear that \u201ca person who doesn\u2019t work, doesn\u2019t eat\u201d or, consequently, live. Even now schoolchildren are raised on the song about children thrown into battle: \u201cThey were only 12, but they were Leningraders.\u201d The country is proud that it sent children to their deaths, even though the number of soldiers guarding Leningrad exceeded the number of soldiers laying siege to the city.<\/p>\n

Families in the siege spoke in whispers about the fact that there were instances of cannibalism in Leningrad (I think every family knew about these cases), and no one had anything to say about the fact that leaders had delicacies on their tables even during the most terrifying days (even though many people knew about this). And try saying something about that now (for example, the banned film \u201cHoliday\u201d). The whispers of the families caught in the siege are still alive in the memories, not so much of survivors anymore, but of their descendants, and even their mouths are being plugged up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My own impression from speaking with people who survived the siege as children is that they have felt tremendous insult and the trauma of abandonment and neglect their entire lives. Children, particularly very young ones, could not understand who was responsible for their misfortune and frequently blamed the people closest to them\u2014their parents. This sense of affront remains in elderly people, who understand intellectually that their parents took superhuman efforts to save their lives, but still remember: \u201cMy mother worked in a pharmacy. She had chocolate for wounded people brought in from the front. I almost died from dystrophy three times, but she never gave me even one little piece.\u201d Or something else, not about hunger: \u201cMy mother was a teacher in a daycare. When shooting started, she grabbed all of her charges\u2019 hands, while I, the youngest of the children, ran behind them bawling. For a long time I thought that my mother didn\u2019t love me. It was only years later that I understood that this was responsibility for someone else\u2019s children.\u201d And the most horrifying of all\u2014a nighttime conversation between parents overheard by a child, when the father wanted to eat bread, but the mother wouldn\u2019t give it to him: \u201cThis bread is for the children!\u201d The father, who did not survive the siege, lived on in the son\u2019s memory in the words: \u201cIf we survive, we can have other children.\u201d<\/p>\n

The people, these children of the siege, did not need their feats glorified; they needed help healing their trauma, help understanding that all the misfortune was not the fault of their parents, even those who could not restrain themselves and took food from their children, as in the recollections of Yuly Filippov<\/a>: \u201cMy father somehow managed to get ration cards for me and my brothers, but he hid this from us. He became a barbarian. He didn\u2019t want to help my older brother Zhenya, even though he had three ration cards. Zhenya died from hunger\u2026 I cried the entire night. I wanted to do something to my father. I even though about killing him with an axe for Zhenya, but a weak person would not have been able to do that.\u201d Listening to this truth, knowing it, and discussing it would have helped to overcome the pain and even to forgive. Instead of the truth, we still have the rhetoric of the feat, as if the feat itself could take away the pain.<\/p>\n

Parents were also guilty before their children in the eyes of the state. I was particularly shocked by a story from the siege about \u201cleaving a child in danger\u201d: A mother put her five-year-old daughter in line for bread and left. Just then, a female stranger came up to the girl and offered to take her somewhere and give her some gingerbread. The unsuspecting girl stretched out her hand and the unknown woman led her along an empty street. The girl was saved by a miracle: People appeared on this usually empty street because a tram had broken down. Among them was the girl\u2019s neighbor, who understood that the girl was being led away and dashed to take her back. Even though the kidnapper tried not to give the child back, other passersby helped. The girl\u2019s mother reported this case to the police. A police officer summoned her several weeks later, saying the he had to show her something. He took her down into a basement, where there was a storage area filled with clothes. \u201cLook,\u201d he said. \u201cI want you to see this so that you don\u2019t leave your child anymore. This isn\u2019t the first time we\u2019ve found something like this. The cannibals stole the children, it\u2019s an entire network. Don\u2019t you know what the jellied meat and patties they sell in Olympia Garden are made from?\u201d<\/p>\n

Saving children was the job parents, and if this job was sometimes assigned to officials, then it was often poorly considered in advance. One of my acquaintances blamed herself her entire life for not thinking to look for children\u2019s documents when she went around houses on patrol, collecting children found alone there. She spoke about the siege for many years and gave speeches at meetings. Once, when she was talking about young boys saved by the patrols (\u201cWe found children crawling on the lifeless bodies of their mothers\u201d), a member of the audience stood up and rebuked her: \u201cI am one of those children. I don\u2019t know my real name or the names of my relatives. There are many of us. Maybe our fathers returning from the front or our evacuated relatives were looking for us!\u201d<\/p>\n

These young patrollers cannot be seriously blamed\u2014in a stupor from hunger, they themselves were just following orders. No one told them to take documents, so they didn\u2019t. But the person who gave the order is guilty. The person who didn\u2019t think about the child\u2019s right to a biography, to a life, to memories, is guilty. The authorities of the city under siege, the authorities of the country, both past and present, are guilty. Anyone who denies the truth about the siege, the Holocaust, the war, who brags about the \u201cfeats of the people\u201d as if it is a personal achievement, is guilty.<\/p>\n

Stefania Kulaeva \u2013 expert, Anti-Discrimination Center Memorial<\/em><\/p>\n

First published on the blog of Radio Svoboda<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Drawing by Dima Buchkin from the album \u201cSiege of Leningrad.\u201d 1941-1942<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent weeks, politicians have spoken about the military tragedies of the 20th century and recalled the Holocaust and the Siege of Leningrad. But these two catastrophes have much more in common than just a date: In both Nazi camps…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19454,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[565,362],"tags":[],"strategy_cases":[],"campaign":[],"archive":[],"filter-content":[],"regions":[],"class_list":["post-19457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-columns"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_urls_v2":{"full":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",650,458,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-125x125.jpg",125,125,true],"medium":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-300x211.jpg",300,211,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",640,451,false],"large":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",640,451,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",650,458,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",650,458,false],"pub-thumb":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-220x155.jpg",220,155,true],"post-thumb":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-170x170.jpg",170,170,true],"wcicon":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-48x48.jpg",48,48,true],"wcsquare":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"wcsmall":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-250x176.jpg",250,176,true],"wcstandard":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-550x388.jpg",550,388,true],"wcbig":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",650,458,false],"wcfixedheightsmall":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-255x180.jpg",255,180,true],"wcfixedheightmedium":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-426x300.jpg",426,300,true],"wcfixedheight":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",650,458,false],"wccarouselsmall":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-210x150.jpg",210,150,true],"wccarousel":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin-400x285.jpg",400,285,true],"wcslider":["https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/buchkin.jpg",650,458,false]},"post_excerpt_stackable_v2":"

In recent weeks, politicians have spoken about the military tragedies of the 20th century and recalled the Holocaust and the Siege of Leningrad. But these two catastrophes have much more in common than just a date: In both Nazi camps and the city under siege, people were driven to an inhuman state by hunger, cold, and backbreaking labor, and hundreds of thousands of children suffered and died. But what is more important and terrifying is that that survivors later had to conceal the trauma caused by these nightmares. It has only been within the past 25 years that Soviet Jews…<\/p>\n","category_list_v2":"Articles<\/a>, Columns<\/a>","author_info_v2":{"name":"admin3","url":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/author\/admin3\/"},"comments_num_v2":"0 comments","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19458,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19457\/revisions\/19458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19457"},{"taxonomy":"strategy_cases","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/strategy_cases?post=19457"},{"taxonomy":"campaign","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campaign?post=19457"},{"taxonomy":"archive","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archive?post=19457"},{"taxonomy":"filter-content","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/filter-content?post=19457"},{"taxonomy":"regions","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/regions?post=19457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}