Leningrad

Incredibly, the city authorities actually tried to prevent such rescue missions. District Party Committee secretaries were instructed to forbid enterprise directors from giving staff time off to go and fetch children home, to reassure parents that their children were safe, and to ‘liquidate all provocative rumours’ to the contrary.13

A second round of evacuations, of mothers and children under fourteen, was announced in early August. Unsurprisingly, families now often preferred to take their chances at home. ‘This time’, wrote Skryabina,

they are letting mothers go with their children. However, people have been so frightened by these first disastrously unsuccessful attempts that they use illness as an excuse to get a postponement. . There is still another fear — epidemics of typhoid, cholera and other stomach disorders are raging along the railways. That, plus the fact that evacuation trains are exposed to bombardment. The family of the director of the factory where my husband worked left, and soon after came the news that their fourteen-year-old son had died of typhoid fever.14

Okhapkina, by contrast, desperately wanted to leave, but was delayed when Tolya got lost during an air-raid warning. By the time she found him at a police station the following day they had missed their train. ‘I couldn’t start petitioning all over again for evacuation papers. That incident decided everything — I remained in Leningrad.’

She may have been lucky to miss her slot, because the evacuation trains, instead of going east to Vologda province, were still being sent south, directly into the path of Busch’s Sixteenth Army. Bombers preceded the panzers, hitting roads, railways and telegraph lines. The worst of the resulting tragedies occurred at Lychkovo, a small town just south of Lake Ilmen. A convoy of nursery-age children was going through the welcoming ceremonies at a collective farm forty kilometres away when news arrived that German parachutists had landed nearby. ‘We were just being offered tea’, recounts a survivor, ‘when the farm director rushed up. I still remember his words — “There are Nazi paratroopers ahead!”’15 The children were put in lorries and driven back to Lychkovo railway station, where several thousand more evacuees were already boarding a train. As they waited their turn a Stuka appeared overhead. ‘He was flying so low’, remembered a teacher. ‘He’d take a look, press a button, and — bang! Later they claimed they hadn’t known. What rubbish! It was a fine day and the children were dressed in their best, most colourful clothes. He could see exactly what he was hitting.’16 The plane flew the length of the platform, bombing with methodical precision. Then there was a huge explosion, and when the smoke cleared the train’s carriages lay scattered ‘as if by a giant hand’.

There are accounts (strenuously denied) of the adults in charge of children’s evacuation groups fleeing amidst the chaos, or getting their own children back to Leningrad but abandoning the rest. ‘The station was on fire. We couldn’t find anybody, it was absolutely horrible!’ remembered a mother of her passage through Mga. ‘The man in charge of our train sat on a stump with his head in his hands. He had lost his own family, and had no idea who was where.’ Wandering infants were unable to give their names, and thus lost their families for good.17 Returning to Leningrad, evacuation trains were met by mobs of enraged parents who behaved so threateningly that district soviet representatives were warned not to get off.

Other evacuation groups were spared air attack, but endured epic, circuitous journeys punctuated by long, hungry halts. A train that left for the Siberian city of Omsk towards the end of August carried 2,700 children between the ages of seven and sixteen. In peacetime the journey would have taken three days; now it took seven weeks. Most of the children, a doctor accompanying them remembered, carried food for the trip, but after a few days it started to go bad and had to be thrown out. Evacuation bases along the way only supplied flour and water, which she took outside during halts and cooked up into a sort of bread. ‘Sometimes they got a little milk, but not regularly. They often went hungry. Occasionally we could pick things out of a field — tomatoes or carrots — but we couldn’t wash them properly.’ Measles as well as lice spread in the overcrowded carriages, killing five children en route.18