Leningrad

The next day she had her first uneasy intimation that the Nazis really were a different breed from the Heine and Schiller of her schoolroom, when she picked up an anti-Semitic leaflet dropped by a German plane. ‘What mediocrity, stupidity, coarseness. “A muzzle that asks for a brick!”; “Fight the Yid-politruk!” And what vulgar, mutilated language. . Is it possible that we are mistaken, that the Germans really are as bad as Soviet propaganda makes out?’ On the 19th the waiting was finally over. ‘It’s happened’, she wrote exultantly in her diary, ‘THE GERMANS HAVE COME! At first it was hard to believe. We climbed out of the shelter and saw two real German soldiers walking along. Everyone rushed up to them. . The old women quickly dived back into the shelter and brought out sweets, pieces of sugar and white bread.’ ‘NO MORE REDS!’ the entry ends. ‘FREEDOM!’9

She was horribly wrong — or wilfully blind — of course. One of the refugees from Pushkin into Leningrad was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who before being sent with other musicians to load timber at the Leningrad docks had lived in a wing of the Catherine Palace. Shortly after Pushkin’s fall he bumped into a former neighbour, who had witnessed the town’s takeover before escaping to the city on foot:

She told us of awful things. . An ordinary German language teacher at the Pushkin middle school took a ‘leading role’, volunteering as an interpreter and identifying various Communists, among them sweet Anechka Krasikova from the Palace administration. Anechka often used to drop round — pretty, young, always cheerful. Her little face wasn’t even spoiled by pince-nez, though they didn’t really suit her at all. Her husband and five-year-old boy managed to get away in time. But she was put in charge of the palace’s air-raid shelters, in which much of the town was hiding, and so missed getting out either by truck or on foot. The fascists shot her and various others on the lawn opposite the parade ground, next to the Monogram Gates, having first made them dig their own graves. An elderly Jewish couple — the Lichters from the right-hand wing — were hanged. (The old lady was so proud of her boy, the tankist!) So were three Jews from the left wing. Two of them were the boys with sticking-out ears, aged about seven or eight, who were always dashing about outside our windows.10

The Germans’ initial searches for Pushkin’s Jews and Communists were followed by an order that all Jews appear for ‘registration’ at the Kommandant’s office — opposite the ‘Avant-Garde’ cinema on the corner of First of May Street — on 4 October. Several hundred, mostly women, children and old people, did so. From there they were marched to the Catherine Palace and imprisoned in its basement for several days without food or water, before being taken out in groups and shot, either at the aerodrome or in one of the palace parks. Their clothes were thrown to a waiting crowd from a second-floor window of the Lyceum, the court school where Pushkin had studied. The round-ups continued for several weeks. On 20 October another fifteen adults and twenty-three children were shot outside the Catherine Palace. Having been left lying in the open for twelve days, some of the corpses were thrown into a bomb crater in the palace courtyard, and the rest buried in the gardens. There are examples of Jews being sheltered by non-Jewish neighbours, but examples, too, of denunciation — often motivated, as during the Terror, by desire for the victims’ living space. The Catherine Palace’s bookkeeper and her husband, for example, were denounced by one of its carpenters, who took over their apartment in the palace’s right wing and subsequently worked as an informer for the SS. Though the Leningrad area’s Jewish population was relatively small (it lay outside the tsarist Pale of Settlement), altogether the German authorities murdered about 3,600 Jews in the region, nearly all in the first few weeks of occupation.11

At the same time that it lost Pushkin and Pavlovsk the Red Army was also driven out of Alexandrovsk, a small suburban town at the end of Leningrad’s south-western tramline, and Pulkovo, defended to the last by the opolcheniye’s Fifth Guards Division, whose bones still lie, amid rampant shrub roses and philadelphus, in a benignly neglected mass grave next to the rebuilt observatory. Along the Gulf, Reinhardt’s motorised divisions took Strelna and Peterhof, confirming the Soviet Eighth Army’s isolation in the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’. His attempts at counter-offensive having failed, Zhukov ordered the establishment of a new defence line, running from Leningrad’s south-western outer suburbs through Pulkovo round to the Neva where it jinks northwards halfway between Ladoga and the Gulf. This time, he stated in a characteristically brutal Combat Order of 17 September, there would be no retreat: