Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [104]
He recalled the unmerciful agony of the winter of 1941. Leningrad was cut off from Russia except for a single passage over Lake Ladoga at their backs. There were not enough ships on the lake to either evacuate the old and young or to bring in sufficient fuel, food, and ammunition, and they were forced to cross under the guns of the enemy. The Communist leaders, harangued from Moscow, in turn harangued the masses.
In those days, a Red Air Force engineer slept little. Igor was involved in the building of a half-dozen small airstrips to attempt an airlift of supplies. The plan fell woefully short.
When Lake Ladoga froze he and the other engineers performed the perilous feat of cutting roads over the top of the ice to keep the meager convoys of trucks and sleds moving. There was that grim day when all the wooden homes in Leningrad were ordered dismantled for firewood and the peat bogs around the islands had to be worked by battalions of women under German artillery fire.
Yet, somehow, the people bore it. The Russians demonstrated their limitless capacity to endure suffering. In Leningrad, as in all of Russia, practically no civilian goods were produced. The workers were compelled to labor unbelievable numbers of hours for the meagerest existence. In the hinterland twenty million men and women were armed and trained in the nation’s singular dedication to survival.
In Leningrad ration cards became the key to life and the means of controlling the masses and inducing more labor from them. Inside every factory, labor battalion, and army unit was the political commissar, the party member, political intelligence, and the informer to apply unrelenting pressure and fear tactics. There was a shortage of almost everything except slogans and portraits of Stalin. The news of German atrocities was pounded into the brains of the masses day and night. There was no respite even in this hell. As coal reserves diminished, power failures stopped industry, transport, light, and heat.
The dagger of death in 1941 was an icicle and the dagger struck 400,000 civilians dead. The sight of frozen corpses in Leningrad’s gutters became as common as the sight of the slogans. Starved, bombarded from within and without, frozen, half crazed with fear, the people of Leningrad clung to the thread of life and were driven to exert yet one more ounce of energy.
As the siege guns pounded, the unyielding stone of Leningrad began to crumble away, bit by bit. The casualties in hospitals, schools, and factories were appalling. Stukas and Messerschmitts screamed down from the skies ... days ... weeks ... months ... years....
In the spring of 1942 a recovering Red Army broke through from the south to open an eight-mile corridor in the siege ring called the Schlusselberg Gap. Karlovy’s engineers and hordes of women laborers built a rail line through the Gap and constructed bull-dog defenses on either side of it. The Germans were never able to close this thin bottleneck. Hitler continued in the belief that he could starve the Russian into submission, but from the first trainload of supplies through the Schlusselberg Gap to Leningrad, the city was destined to hold.
Despite this lifeline opened to the rest of Russia, the saga of the siege was still being written. The hunger, disease, artillery, air raids, and cold of two more Russian winters would claim yet another half-million lives.
DEATH TO THE NAZI BABY MURDERERS!
Yes, a million dead. That was the price for Leningrad.
Igor was standing on the Sovietsky Prospekt when Children’s Home #25 crumpled under a shell hit. He ran toward it with the screams of the children drumming in his ears. “God! My baby is in there! My baby! Yuri! Yuri!” Yuri Karlovy was born, lived and died during the siege.
At dawn the Russian guns were white-hot and warped from firing. Boris and Feodor