In Europe

before, and we all knew that we would experience one or more wars in the course of our lives. But this time my parents were terrified. My father said: ‘This is horrible. This is disgusting. This is death.’ He sensed it beforehand.
    ‘There was a huge run on the shops that same afternoon. Whenever anything happens, of course, Russians expect a food shortage, so everyone started stockpiling matches, salt, sugar, flour, things like that. And sixweeks later there really was nothing left in the shops. The war was approaching fast. In July the air-raid sirens went off all the time, we didn't have any bomb shelters, so we crawled under a couple of stone archways in the garden. We had to help dig antitank trenches outside the city, thousands of people were out there with shovels. Meanwhile, at the theatre school, classes went on as usual.
    ‘On 8 September, the Germans reached the ring around our city, and the siege began. There were two million of us packed in there, closed off from everything else. You had to be in line at the bakery at 5 a.m., by 11.00 there was no bread left. It wasn't easy to walk around when you were starving, you had to drag yourself along by force of will. If possible, you kept all your clothes on in bed. You lay there like a big ball of rags, you forgot you even had a body. But, well, we were young Soviets, we had absolutely no doubt that we would be victorious. On the radio they said the whole war might last a year or two, but that the siege of Leningrad would be over soon. They kept saying that. And we believed it, what else could we do? No one told the truth. There were no newspapers, no letters arrived, all we had was the radio.
    ‘Excuse me if I become a little emotional, I don't talk about this very often.
    ‘The total lack of heat and water was the worst. Everyone who had a job tried to stay at work as much as possible, sometimes there was still a little heating there. The Marunsky theatre never closed, but the ballet dancers had to wear special costumes because it was so cold. There was no more transport. And that winter was so incredibly cold, it has only rarely been that cold.
    ‘I think that's what killed my father.
    ‘In mid-February 1942 the theatre school closed down and I was admitted to the hospital. I was so hungry I couldn't move any more. So my mother was given a package of dry bread, a little pork and some sugar. My sister fed that to me and got me out of the hospital. I started walking again, I was able to stand in line again for food.
    ‘That was my great stroke of luck. A few weeks later I ran into a student from my old school. “You're just the person I've been looking for!” he shouted. It seems they had set up a special theatre brigade, and their singer had fallen ill. My old schoolfriend had come back to thecity from the front to look for a new one. “I'm completely worn out,” I told him. “We'll fix you up,” he said. And that's what they did. In April 1942 he took me to the front, and from then on I performed for the troops.
    ‘The theatre brigade saved my life, if only because they had food to eat. I was even able to save my mother and my sister by tucking away whatever I could for them. It was too late to help my father.
    'This is how it went.
    ‘It was in late 1941, six months after that Sunday when the war started. All our money was gone. It was incredibly cold in our room. He needed warmth and medicine, but there was nothing. He just died of the cold, right there in our room. That was on 5 January, 1942. It was the worst day of my life. Most people died in January and February, those were the worst months. My sister took his body on the sled, through the snow, as far as she could. She probably just left him on the street somewhere, she had no strength left either. That happened a lot back then. But she has never talked about it.’
    ‘It was the women who won the war, everyone knows that. Their lot was the heaviest to bear. The party bosses could leave the city and come back by plane. They had their own food flown in as well, we found out about that a few years ago. They told dramatic stories about all their heroic hardships, but meanwhile they took good care of themselves. The common people couldn't do that. We wasted away, we were being shelled all the time. On Nevsky Prospect, next to the Crédit Lyonnais, you can still the blue lettering on the wall from back then: “This side of the street is the most dangerous during a