Ales adamovich, daniil granin - book of siege - read the book for free. Literary critic: Granin resisted for a long time the writing of the "Siege book" D Granin blockade

On July 4, 2017, the front-line writer died. We remember his piercing speech, which in 2014 made the Bundestag blush and cry

The writer told the merciless truth about the siege of Leningrad. The writer told the merciless truth about the siege of Leningrad. Photo: Timur KHANOV

The German federal parliament has probably never heard such a passionate and terrible - according to the facts given - speech. The Petersburg writer, who was 95 years old in 2014, cited facts and figures about the blockade that cannot be heard without tears. It is unlikely that this information can be found in German history textbooks. And in the building of the Reichstag, from the lips of such a person as Granin, they sounded a revelation. Daniil Aleksandrovich did not set out to embarrass and reproach members of the government, the President of Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, by the way, listened with her eyes downcast. Granin accepted an invitation to speak in Germany on January 27, the day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi blockade. It so happened that a year later, on the same day, the prisoners of Auschwitz were also released, so since 1996 the Germans have been celebrating this date. They listened to almost an hour-long speech of the Petersburger in deathly silence, at the end they applauded standing.

“I had some strange and latent desire to tell this to all my dead brother-soldiers who did not know that we had won,” Granin explained. - They died with a feeling of complete defeat, confident that we had surrendered Leningrad, that the city would not survive. I wanted to inform them that we won, after all, and you did not die in vain.

Angela Merkel listened to the speech with her eyes downcast

"They put crackers on the graves"

- Today in St. Petersburg people go to the Piskarevskoye cemetery. This is one of the emblematic cemeteries of the city. They are going in order to remember and pay tribute to all those who died during the years of the blockade. They put crackers, sweets, biscuits on the grave hills ...

This story was tragic and cruel for me too. I started the war from the first days. Enrolled in the people's militia as a volunteer. What for? Today I don't even know why. But it must have been a purely boyish thirst for romance. How will the war be without me? But the coming days of the war sobered me, like many of my comrades. Brutally sobered. We were bombed when our echelon had just arrived at the front line. And since then we have experienced one defeat after another. They ran, retreated, ran again. And finally, somewhere in the middle of September, my regiment surrendered the city of Pushkin. We retreated already within the city limits. The front collapsed.

Hundreds of thousands of Leningraders died of hunger.

All connections of the huge metropolis were cut off from the mainland. And the blockade began, which lasted 900 days.

The blockade was sudden and unexpected, as, indeed, was the whole war. There were no supplies of either fuel or food. And soon, around October, the rationing system began. The bread was handed out on ration cards.

And then, one after another, catastrophic phenomena began, the supply of electricity stopped, the water supply, sewerage, and heating ended.

"Hitler ordered not to enter the city"

- What is a card system? She looked like this. Since October 1, they have already given 400 grams of bread for workers, 200 grams for employees. And already in November, they began to catastrophically reduce the issue rate. Bread was given to workers 250 grams, and employees and children 125 grams. This is a slice of low-quality bread, half-and-half with cellulose, duranda and other impurities. There was no food delivery to the city.

Winter was approaching. And, as luck would have it, a fierce winter, 30-35 degrees. The huge city lost all life support. He was mercilessly bombed every day.

Our unit was located near the city, it was possible to walk on foot. And we, sitting in the trenches, heard the explosions of aerial bombs, and even the shuddering of the earth reached us. Bombed daily. Fires started. Houses were on fire, as there was nothing to fill them with, the water supply did not work.

Houses burned for days. And from there, from the front, turning back, we saw columns of black smoke and wondered where and what was burning.

By December, the streets and squares of the city were covered with snow. Only in some places there were driveways for military vehicles. The monuments were laid with sandbags, the shop windows were boarded up. The city has changed.

Granin made the Germans blush and cry.

There was no lighting at night. Patrols and rare passers-by walked with fireflies. People began to lose strength from their heads. But they continued to work. They went to factories, especially military ones, to repair tanks, make shells, mines.

Hitler ordered not to enter the city in order to avoid losses in street battles where tanks could not participate. The army repulsed all our attempts to break through the blockade ring. The German troops, in fact, very comfortably, without much difficulty expected that the coming famine and frost would force the city to capitulate.

… In general, I am not speaking now as a writer, not as a witness, I am speaking more as a soldier, a participant in those events. I have a trench experience as a junior officer of the Leningrad Front.

"I wish I could live to see the grass"

Already in October, mortality began to rise. With this catastrophically low nutritional rate, people quickly became thin, became dystrophic and died. In 25 days of December, 40 thousand people died. In February, 3.5 thousand people died of hunger every day. In December, people wrote in their diaries: "Lord, I should live to see the grass." In total, approximately 1 million people died in the city. Zhukov writes in his memoirs that 1 million 200 thousand died. Death participated silently and quietly in the war.

Child's ration - three hundred grams of bread a day

... I want to tell you some details of life, which are almost absent in books and in descriptions of what happened during the blockade in apartments. You know, the devil of the blockade is largely hidden in these details. Where to get water? Those who lived near the canals, the Neva, the embankments, went there, made ice holes and pulled out water with buckets. Can you imagine going up to the fourth, fifth floor with these buckets? Those who lived further away collected and drowned snow. How to heat it? On potbelly stoves, these are small iron stoves. And how to heat, where to get firewood? They broke furniture, parquet floors, dismantled wooden buildings in the city.

"I fed my daughter with a deceased brother"

Already 35 years after the war, the Belarusian writer Adamovich and I began to question the surviving blockaders about how they survived. There were startling, merciless revelations. The mother's child dies. He's three years old. Mother puts the corpse between the windows, it's winter. And every day he cuts off a piece to feed his daughter and save at least her. The daughter did not know the details. She was 12 years old. And the mother did not allow herself to die and go mad. This daughter has grown up. And I talked to her. She found out years later. Can you imagine? There are many such examples of what the life of the siege has become.

... Once they brought the diary of the blockade. Yura was 14 years old, he lived with his mother and sister. The diary amazed us. It was the story of a boy's conscience. In bakeries, exactly, up to a gram, a portion of the put bread was weighed. Yura's duty in the family was to wait in line for bread and bring it home. In his diary, he admits what torment he should have not pinched off a piece of bread on the way. Especially tormented by his appendage, irresistibly wanted to eat this little piece. Neither mother nor sister, it would seem, knew about this. Sometimes he could not stand it and ate. He describes how ashamed it was, confesses to his greed, and then to his shamelessness - a thief who stole his daily bread from his mother, his sister. Nobody knew about it, but he was tormented. In the apartment, the neighbors were a husband and a wife, the husband was some kind of major chief for the construction of defense structures, he was entitled to an additional ration. In the common kitchen, my wife cooked dinner, cooked porridge. How many times Yura was drawn, when she went out, to grab, scoop up hot porridge with his hand at least. He punishes himself for his shameful weakness. In his diary, the constant battle of hunger and conscience, attempts to preserve his decency is striking. We don't know if he managed to survive. The diary shows how his powers diminished. But even already a complete dystrophic, he did not allow himself to beg for food from his neighbors.

Granin's speech in the Bundestag made a splash.

"I hated the fascists"

... One woman told how she went as children to the Finlyandsky railway station, to evacuate. A son was walking behind him, he was 14. And she was carrying her little daughter on a sled. The son fell behind on the way. He was very emaciated, dystrophic. What became of him, she did not know. And when I told us, I remembered my guilt.

... I've been at the forefront since 41 and part of 42. Honestly, I hated the Germans not only as opponents, soldiers of the Wehrmacht, but also as those who, contrary to all the laws of military honor, soldier's dignity, officer traditions and the like, destroyed people and townspeople in the most painful, inhuman way. They fought no longer with weapons, but with the help of hunger, long-range artillery, bombing. Destroyed whom? Civilians, defenseless, unable to participate in the duel. It was Nazism in its most disgusting form, because they allowed themselves to do this, considering the Russians subhuman, considering us almost savages and primates with whom you can do whatever you want.

... Black markets have appeared. There one could buy a piece of bread, a bag of cereals, a fish, a can of canned food. All this was exchanged not for money - for a fur coat, felt boots. They brought everything from home that was valuable - pictures, silver spoons.

In the streets and in the entrances there were corpses wrapped in sheets. Sometimes I was sent from the front to the headquarters. I was in the city and saw how the human nature of the blockade had changed. The main character turned out to be someone nameless - a passer-by who tried to lift the weakened person who fell to the ground and lead him. There were such items with boiling water. They gave only a mug of boiling water, and this often saved people. It was compassion awakened in people.

Speech by Daniel Granin in the Bundestag. The hour of memory of the victims of Nazism in the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany this year was marked by the 70th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade of Leningrad.

On October 1, 2016, a regular session of the project "Dialogues" by Nikolai Solodnikov and Katerina Gordeeva (within the framework of the "Open Library") was held in St. Petersburg at the General Staff Lecture Hall. This time writers Daniil Granin and Marius Ivashkevichus took part in the Dialogues. I will cite a small fragment from a speech by Daniil Granin, dedicated to the blockade of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War.

Daniil Granin. Photo: vk.com/open_lib

Daniil Granin: “The problem of memory is generally the most complicated problem that psychologists, psychiatrists, physiologists can best tell you about. the blockade, when finally it was decided, after long arguments and bickering too, we thought that we would undertake with him ... to write the "Blockade book." And then it turned out that we were late. memory, their own memory got clogged, crumbled, fell to pieces, and it was very difficult to understand what happened to the person. People began to tell us the blockade they saw in the movies, on television. So? She entered into competition with their experience The blockade had already begun to subside, to be forgotten, but this one was bright, story-driven, interesting, and it began to dominate genuine personal memory. ”For us, it was unexpected and very difficult.

You know, we received stories that ... Well, Adamovich did not know, he is Belarusian. But I more or less knew the blockade, because all this time I had been at the Leningrad front and had been in the city. And a problem arose: how to get a person out of his own blockade? It's incredibly difficult. Many refused altogether. When they started to get there “How did you live? And who died with you? And how did he die? ”, All sorts of ruthless details of life ...“ Oh, I don’t want to tell you! ” Tears or simply: “No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to. Let's do it another time "or" I won't talk about this anymore. " But this is also interesting: the majority of people, the overwhelming majority of those who refused to tell us about their blockade, then called and asked to return. And they decided to tell.

You know, it turned out to be very difficult to get to the bottom of what happened to the person. Why? Well, because it was his personal grief, he cannot talk about how her husband died, how the children died, what the bombing turned their apartment into, what was happening at work. The stories were very difficult and difficult. But they constituted, you know, the authenticity of the blockade life that interested us. It was a completely different life. You know, some paradoxical things. Here, a woman tells us: “There is nothing. Here, they bring a piece of bread. What to do with this bread? Covering ... ”She covered the table with a tablecloth, arranged all the cutlery, plates, knives, you know, forks and spoons, as if dinner were about to begin. There was no dinner - there was a dinner setting. Do not forget that the blockade is personal, room, apartment, family - it took place where there were all the pots, meat grinders, where there were all the plates, knives, spoons, forks. Where were the taps from which the water was supposed to flow. Where were the switches that didn't work.

Gradually, the tragic pages of the siege life were opening before us. We didn’t even want to write about some of them, and I don’t want to talk about them - it is so inhuman and difficult. But what became clear gradually? It was not so much (we understand) a struggle for one's life, for surviving and not dying, this struggle was around something else - not to become human. Do you understand? Don't turn into a beast. Hunger is something unimaginable. Here, during the blockade, they seized and condemned the cannibals. And for me it was unfair. People lost their usual notions of what is allowed and what is not, all barriers, all moral barriers collapsed.

E. Gordeeva: Daniil Alexandrovich, can I be here? .. Excuse me for interrupting. But don't you think that now, on the anniversary of the beginning of the blockade, there were solemn events in the city dedicated to the beginning of the blockade ... Let me help you. I'll do it now. Don't you think this is a belittling of the human tragedy of each individual person who survived the blockade or did not survive, did not live? These concerts, these celebrations and the general, well, in general, a perky and festive tone of conversation about the war and the blockade. Doesn't this seem to you to belittle memory and to cross it out? Wasn't that what you wrote about in Novaya Gazeta just now?<...>

D. Granin: I do not know. You see, I don't know how to talk about the blockade. I don't know how to avoid sad or tragic moments in this life, in that blockade life. Do you understand? There were no rules, there were no rules. When we started writing, we did not have literature that could serve as a model for us. Usually, when you start writing a story and a novel or something like that ... The only thing that Adamovich and I thought about was that the book should have some kind of cross-cutting idea. What idea could there have been during the blockade other than to survive? Survive, not dehumanize. But we wanted to understand why people did this? Why didn't they take to the streets with white flags and demand surrender? Are you interested in this?

E. Gordeeva: Yes.

D. Granin: You are interested. And our publishers were not interested in this. And this was a very important question for us. Why, by the beginning of the blockade, the Wehrmacht had already 15 cities in Europe (capitals, capital cities), which capitulated, but this city did not want to capitulate. Why? What was the essence of this Leningrad, you know, syndrome? What's the secret? We wanted to somehow dissect the blockade, to open its insides. The only thing, some things that we understood, that, firstly, it was a special city. A special city. It was an intelligent city; it was, indeed, the cultural capital of Russia. But maybe more than that. You see, during the entire Great Patriotic War, there were two most important events for me - Stalingrad and Leningrad. Stalingrad was pure military valor, and Leningrad was purely spiritual valor.

I would like to thank the President, the chairman and all the leadership of the Bundestag, the deputies for the kind invitation to speak here today, on such a momentous day, at least for me. Today in St. Petersburg people go to the Piskarevskoye cemetery, this is one of such symbolic cemeteries of the city. They go in order to remember and pay tribute to all those who died in years. They put rusks, sweets, cookies on the grave hills to express love and memory for those people for whom it was a tragic and cruel story.

She was tragic and cruel for me too. I started the war from the first days. Enrolled in the people's militia as a volunteer. What for? Today I don't even know why, but it was probably a purely boyish thirst for romance: how can there be a war without me, you must definitely participate. But the coming days of the war sobered me. Like many of my comrades, they were brutally sobered. We were bombed when our train just arrived at the front line. And since then we have experienced one defeat after another. They ran, retreated, ran again. And finally, somewhere in the middle of September, my regiment surrendered the city of Pushkin and we retreated outside the city limits. The front collapsed. And the blockade began.

All communications of the city, a huge metropolis, were cut off from the mainland, and a blockade began, which lasted 900 days. The blockade was so sudden and unexpected, just like this whole war was unexpected for the country. There were no supplies of either fuel or food, and soon, in October, the rationing system began. The bread was given out on ration cards. And then, one after another, catastrophic phenomena for the city began - the electricity supply stopped, the water supply and sewerage stopped working, there was no heating. And the disasters of the blockade began.

What is a card system? It looked like this: from October 1, they already gave 400 grams of bread to workers, 200 grams to employees, and already in November they began to catastrophically reduce the delivery rate. They began to give 250 grams to workers, and employees and children were given 125 grams. This is a slice of low-quality bread, half-and-half with cellulose, duranda (cake, the remains of oil seeds after squeezing out the oil) and other impurities.

There was no supply of food. Winter was approaching, and as luck would have it: thirty - thirty-five degrees. The huge city lost all life support. Every day he was mercilessly bombed and fired upon from the air. Our unit was located not far from the city, it was possible to walk on foot, and we, sitting in the trenches, heard the explosions of aerial bombs and even felt the earth shudder. Bombed daily. Fires started, houses were burning. Since there was nothing to fill in - there was no water, the water supply system did not work - they burned for days. And we from the front, turning back, saw these columns of black smoke and wondered where what was burning.

By December, the streets and squares of the city were covered with snow, only in some places there were driveways for military vehicles, monuments were laid with sandbags, shop windows were boarded up - the city was transformed. There was no lighting at night. Patrols and rare passers-by walked with "fireflies" (glowing icons. - Ed.). People began to lose strength from hunger. But they continued to work, go to factories where tanks were repaired, shells and mines were made. And then the following began to happen, something that I learned in detail only after the war.

Hitler ordered not to enter the city in order to avoid losses in street battles where tanks could not participate. Von Leeb's Eighteenth Army repulsed all our attempts to break through the blockade ring. The German troops, in fact, very comfortably, without much difficulty, waited for the coming famine and frost to force the city to capitulate. In fact, the war did not become a war; the war on the part of the enemy became an expectation, a rather comfortable expectation, of surrender.

I am now talking about these details, which are related to my personal experience as a soldier. And in general, I am not acting as a writer, not as a witness, I am acting rather as a soldier, a participant in those events about which they know little. I have a purely trench experience as a junior officer, but an experience that has its own details, its own impressions, are quite important, because they constituted that life, that flesh of events for every resident of the city, and for a soldier of the Leningrad Front.

Already in October, the mortality rate of the population began to grow. Because with this catastrophically low food rate, people quickly became dystrophic and died. In twenty-five days in December, 40 thousand people died. In February, three and a half thousand people died of hunger every day. In the diaries of that time, people wrote: "Lord, I would live to see the grass" - when the green grass appears. More than one million people died of hunger. Marshal Zhukov writes in his memoirs that 1 million 200 thousand people died. Death began to participate silently and quietly in the war, forcing this city to surrender.

And it is believed that hunger was of the greatest importance. This is not entirely true. Frost affected the state of people, their psyche, their health, well-being - there was no heating, - lack of water ... And I want to tell you some details that are almost absent in books and in descriptions of what happened during the blockade in apartments, how people lived. The devil of the blockade is in many ways precisely in such details. Where to get water? People, those who lived near the canals, from the Neva, from the embankments, made ice holes and from there they took out water and carried these buckets home. We went up to the fourth, fifth, sixth floor, carried these buckets, can you imagine? Those who lived further from the water had to collect snow and drown it. They drowned on "stoves" - these are small iron stoves. And what to drown with? Where to get firewood? They broke furniture, hacked parquet floors, dismantled wooden buildings ...

Already 35 years after the war, the Belarusian writer Adamovich and I began to interview the survivors of the blockade. They asked how they survived, what happened to them during the blockade. There were startling, merciless revelations. The mother's child dies. He was three years old. Mother puts the corpse between the windows, it's winter ... And every day she cuts off a piece to feed her daughter. Save at least the daughter. The daughter did not know the details, she was twelve years old. And the mother knew everything, did not allow herself to die and did not allow herself to go crazy. This daughter grew up, and I talked to her. Then she did not know what she was fed. And years later I found out. Can you imagine? There are many such examples - what the life of the siege has become.

They lived in the apartments in the dark. They hung the windows with anything at all to keep warm, and lit the rooms with smokehouses - this is a jar where transformer or machine oil was poured. And this tiny tongue of flame burned day after day, for weeks, months. This was the only lighting in the houses. The so-called black markets appeared. There you could buy a piece of bread, a bag of cereals, some kind of fish, a can of canned food. All this was exchanged for things - for a fur coat, for felt boots, paintings, silver spoons ... And on the streets and in the entrances there were corpses wrapped in sheets.

When the ice began to grow stronger, they paved the Road of Life - along Lake Ladoga. Cars moved along it, firstly, to take out children, women, wounded and to bring food into the city. The road was mercilessly fired upon. The shells broke the ice, the cars went under the water, but there was no other way out.

Several times I was sent from the front to the headquarters, and I visited the city. Then I saw how the human nature of the siege had changed. The main character in the city turned out to be “someone”, an “nameless passer-by” who tried to lift the weakened dystrophics who fell to the ground, take him away - there were such points, they gave him boiling water, there was nothing else - they gave him a mug of boiling water. And this often saved people. It was compassion awakened in people. This "someone" is one of the most important, and perhaps the most important hero of the blockade life.

Once, in May 1942, when it was already warmer, everything melted and there was a danger of infections from a large number of corpses, we, a group of soldiers and officers, were sent to the city to help take the corpses to the cemetery. The corpses lay in heaps near the cemeteries - relatives and friends tried to take them, but, of course, there was not enough strength to dig a grave in the frozen ground. And we loaded these corpses into cars. We threw them like sticks - they were so dry and light. I have never experienced this eerie sensation in my life again.

There were special problems in the evacuation. One woman described how she went with the children to Finland Station. Behind was a son, he was fourteen years old, and she was carrying her little daughter on a sled. She drove her to the station, and her son fell behind on the way, he was very emaciated. What became of him, she did not know. But I remembered this, you know, - a merciless loss. And then, when she told us about it, she remembered it as her guilt.

Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union Alexei Kosygin was authorized by the State Defense Committee and was sent to Leningrad. He told me what problem he faced every day. Send children, women, the wounded along the Road of Life to the mainland, or materials, machine tools, non-ferrous metals, some devices - for military factories in the Urals. This problem of choosing between people and devices necessary for the military industry, he told me what a painful and hopeless problem it was.

In the city there were characteristic announcements, everywhere there were sheets of paper glued: "I am making a funeral", "To swarm graves", "I am taking the dead to the cemetery." All this for a piece of bread, for a can of canned food ...

In the spring, rows of corpses of Red Army soldiers floated down the Neva. But they continued to take water from the Neva, pushing these corpses away - but what to do? I also had to drink such water.

Since July 1942, at the front, we have been trying to break through the blockade ring. But unsuccessfully, attack after attack fought back. The army lost 130 thousand people, for several months trying to break through the fortifications on the other bank of the Neva.

One day they brought me a diary of a blockade, a boy. Blockade diaries - this was the most reliable material about that time, especially together with the memories of people who survived the blockade. In general, I was struck by how many people kept diaries, recording what happened in the city, everything they saw, what they read in the newspapers, what was important to them ... Yura was 14 years old, he lived with his mother and sister. It was the story of a boy's conscience that shocked me. In bakeries, exactly, up to a gram, a portion of the put bread was weighed. To do this, we had to cut off more additional weights so that exactly 250-300 grams came out. Yura's duty in the family was to wait in line for bread and bring it home. He was tormented by hunger so much that he had to work hard to refrain from pinching off a piece of bread on the way, especially tormented his appendage, irresistibly wanted to eat this little piece, neither mother nor sister, it would seem, knew about it.

Sometimes he broke down and ate, he wrote about this in his secret diary. He describes how ashamed it was, confesses to his greed, and then to shamelessness - a thief, stole from his own, from his mother, from his sister. Nobody knew about it, but he was tormented. In the apartment, the neighbors were a husband and a wife, the husband was some kind of major chief for the construction of defense structures, he was entitled to an additional ration. In the common kitchen, the wife cooked dinner, cooked porridge, how many times Yura was drawn, when she went out, to grab something, scoop up some hot porridge with her hand. He punishes himself for his shameful weakness. In his diary, the constant duel of hunger and conscience, the struggle between them, fierce fights, and daily, attempts to preserve their decency are striking. We do not know whether he managed to survive, from the diary you can see how his strength was diminishing, but, even already a complete dystrophic, he did not allow himself to beg for food from his neighbors.

35 years after the war, we interviewed 200 people of the blockade for the book. Each time I tried to find out: "Why did you stay alive if you spent the whole blockade here?" It often turned out that those who were saving others were saving - they stood in lines, got firewood, looked after, donated a crust of bread, a piece of sugar ... Not always, but often. Compassion and - these are typical feelings of a blockade life. Of course, the rescuers also died, but I was amazed how the soul helped them not to dehumanize. How people who stayed in the city and did not take part in hostilities were able to remain people.

When we wrote the "Book of Blockade", we wondered - how could it be, because the Germans knew about what was happening in the city, from the defectors, from the intelligence. They knew about this nightmare, about the horrors of not only hunger, but from everything that happened. But they kept on waiting. We waited 900 days. After all, to fight with soldiers is yes, war is a soldier's business. But here famine fought instead of soldiers.

I, being at the forefront, could not forgive the Germans for this for a long time. I hated the Germans not only as opponents, soldiers of the Wehrmacht, but also as those who, contrary to all the laws of military honor, soldier's dignity, officer traditions, destroyed people. I understood that war is always dirt, blood - any ... Our army suffered huge losses - up to a third of its personnel. For a long time I did not dare to write about my war. But still I wrote a book about it not so long ago. He told about how I fought. Why did I do this? Probably, it was a latent desire to tell all my dead brother-soldiers who died, not knowing how this war would end, not knowing whether Leningrad would be liberated. I wanted to inform them that we have won. That they did not die in vain.

You know, there is such a sacred space. When a person returns to compassion and spirituality. Ultimately, it is not power that triumphs, but justice and truth. And this is a miracle of victory, love for life, for a person ...

Thank you for the attention.

Bundestag deputies gave a standing ovation

In Berlin, Daniil Granin spoke at a ceremony in memory of the victims of National Socialism. The merciless truth from his lips made a strong impression on the German parliamentarians.

More than half a century passed after the end of World War II, before the then Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Roman Herzog, decided in 1996 to celebrate January 27 as a national day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism.

This day was chosen because it was on January 27, 1945 that the Soviet army liberated the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. But on the same day - only a year earlier - the blockade of Leningrad was also broken.

Ceremony in the Bundestag

That is why this time a Russian writer, a direct participant in those events, Daniil Granin, was invited to speak in the Bundestag at a solemn ceremony in memory of the victims of National Socialism.

The 95-year-old Granin, leaning on a stick, was ushered into the parliamentary hall by the chairman of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert. On the other hand, he was accompanied by Federal President Joachim Gauck and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is still walking on crutches due to a ski injury.

Opening the meeting, Lammert drew attention to the coincidence of the dates of the liberation of Auschwitz and the breakthrough of the Leningrad blockade. But, he noted, the relationship between Auschwitz and the blockade of Leningrad - the genocide of Jews and the war of extermination against the Soviet Union - is not accidental.

"Both are rooted in the misanthropic National Socialist ideology," Lammert said and recalled that the poisonous gas Cyclone B, used in Auschwitz, was first tested on Soviet prisoners of war.

Merciless Granin

After a short musical intermezzo - the violin quartet performed a fragment of one of Shostakovich's works - Granin took the podium. The prudent hosts of the meeting put a chair for him at the podium, but the writer firmly refused the offer to sit down and spoke standing for almost an hour.

His speech was merciless. He did not speak, as some in the Bundestag expected, about the historical reconciliation of Germans and Russians, about the lessons of the past and overcoming the totalitarian legacy in Germany or Russia. He was asked to tell about the blockade, and he told, telling the hushed deputies about the monstrous everyday life of the blockade, who remained for 900 days not only without fuel and food, but also without water, sewage, electricity and heating.

Granin gave shocking details. He told, for example, about one mother who did not bury her three-year-old child who had died of hunger, but put a small corpse in the frost between the windows and cut a piece of it every day to save the life of at least a 12-year-old daughter.

And Granin himself was at the front during the blockade of Leningrad - just a few steps from the city. He said that the ground in his trench trembled when Leningrad was bombed or fired upon from long-range guns. Fires were also visible from the trench. The houses burned for days, since there was no water in the city, and there was nothing to extinguish them with.

According to the writer, "Hitler ordered not to enter the city in order to avoid losses in street battles in which tanks could not participate." As a result, Granin said, "the German troops, in fact, quite comfortably, without much difficulty expected that the coming famine and frost would force the city to capitulate."
"The soldiers must fight with the soldiers, war is a purely soldier's business," Granin said, "but here the famine was sent, which fought instead of the soldiers." Therefore, he told the deputies, "I could not forgive the Germans for this expectation of surrender for a long time, the expectation of the death of the city."

Deputies impressed

For the new coordinator of German-Russian intersocial cooperation, Social Democrat Gernot Erler, representing one of the parties of the ruling coalition in Germany, the writer's speech became an opportunity to listen to an old acquaintance. Erler read Granin's "Book of Blockade" and more than once held events on this topic in his constituency in Freiburg.

“But still, of course, the story of this 95-year-old eyewitness who was given the opportunity to speak at the German Bundestag at such a worthy event is very impressive,” Erler said. According to him, Granin tried to explain the incomprehensible to the German deputies, but at the same time showed that it is possible to preserve human dignity even in such harsh conditions. For Renate Künast of the Soyuz 90 / Greens faction, Granin's speech was an occasion to think about the need to take a fresh look at the history of World War II. “We do not fully understand all the suffering, all the meanness of this war,” she said in an interview with DW. "We know about the millions of deaths, but the grief that befell the civilian population was even greater than we talked about."

According to Künast, the Wehrmacht tried to turn the inhabitants of Leningrad almost into animals during the blockade. "How many people in Germany complain about Stalingrad," she said, "but what did the German army do in Leningrad, whose inhabitants were starved to death for 900 days!"

Deputy Chairman of the Left Party faction Dietmar Bartsch was also impressed by Granin's speech "here in the Reichstag, which, in fact, was the starting point of the war and the blockade of Leningrad." Bartsch added that this speech should encourage those born later not only to reflect on the past, but also to remember their responsibility and pass it on to the next generations of Germans.

The German federal parliament has probably never heard such a passionate and terrible - according to the facts given - speech. The Petersburg writer, who was 95 years old in 2014, cited facts and figures about the blockade that cannot be heard without tears. It is unlikely that this information can be found in German history textbooks. And in the building of the Reichstag, from the lips of such a person as Granin, they sounded a revelation. Daniil Aleksandrovich did not set out to embarrass and reproach members of the government, the President of Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, by the way, listened with her eyes downcast. Granin accepted an invitation to speak in Germany on January 27, the day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi blockade. It so happened that a year later, on the same day, the prisoners of Auschwitz were also released, therefore, since 1996, the Germans have been celebrating this date. They listened to almost an hour-long speech of the Petersburger in deathly silence, at the end they applauded standing.

I had some strange and latent desire to tell this to all my dead brother-soldiers who did not know that we had won, ”Granin explained. - They died with a feeling of complete defeat, confident that we had surrendered Leningrad, that the city would not survive. I wanted to inform them that we won, after all, and you did not die in vain.

"They put crackers on the graves"

Today in St. Petersburg people go to the Piskarevskoye cemetery. This is one of the emblematic cemeteries of the city. They are going in order to remember and pay tribute to all those who died during the years of the blockade. They put crackers, sweets, biscuits on the grave hills ...

All connections of the huge metropolis were cut off from the mainland. And the blockade began, which lasted 900 days.

And then, one after another, catastrophic phenomena began, the supply of electricity stopped, the water supply, sewerage, and heating ended.

"Hitler ordered not to enter the city"

What is a card system? She looked like this. Since October 1, they have already given 400 grams of bread for workers, 200 grams for employees. And already in November, they began to catastrophically reduce the issue rate. Bread was given to workers 250 grams, and employees and children 125 grams. This is a slice of low-quality bread, half-and-half with cellulose, duranda and other impurities. There was no food delivery to the city.

Winter was approaching. And, as luck would have it, a fierce winter, 30-35 degrees. The huge city lost all life support. He was mercilessly bombed every day.

Houses burned for days. And from there, from the front, turning back, we saw columns of black smoke and wondered where and what was burning.

There was no lighting at night. Patrols and rare passers-by walked with fireflies. People began to lose strength from hunger. But they continued to work. They went to factories, especially military ones, to repair tanks, make shells, mines.

Hitler ordered not to enter the city in order to avoid losses in street battles where tanks could not participate. The army repulsed all our attempts to break through the blockade ring. German troops, in fact, quite comfortably, without much difficulty expected that the coming famine and frost would force the city to capitulate.

"I wish I could live to see the grass"

"I fed my daughter with a deceased brother"

... Once they brought the diary of the blockade. Yura was 14 years old, he lived with his mother and sister. The diary amazed us. It was the story of a boy's conscience. In bakeries, exactly, up to a gram, a portion of the put bread was weighed. Yura's duty in the family was to wait in line for bread and bring it home. In his diary, he admits what torment he should have not pinched off a piece of bread on the way. Especially tormented by his appendage, irresistibly wanted to eat this little piece. Neither mother nor sister, it would seem, knew about this. Sometimes he could not stand it and ate. He describes how ashamed it was, confesses to his greed, and then to shamelessness - a thief who stole his daily bread from his own, from his mother, from his sister. Nobody knew about it, but he was tormented. In the apartment, the neighbors were a husband and a wife, the husband was some kind of major chief for the construction of defense structures, he was entitled to an additional ration. In the common kitchen, my wife cooked dinner, cooked porridge. How many times Yura was drawn, when she went out, to grab, scoop up hot porridge with his hand at least. He punishes himself for his shameful weakness. In his diary, the constant battle of hunger and conscience, attempts to preserve his decency is striking. We don't know if he managed to survive. The diary shows how his powers diminished. But even already a complete dystrophic, he did not allow himself to beg for food from his neighbors.

"I hated the fascists"

Speech by Daniel Granin in the Bundestag. The hour of memory of the victims of Nazism in the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany this year was marked by the 70th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade of Leningrad.