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| ‘An unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe': The siege of Leningrad, 80 years on |
| 2021-09-08 |
| [France24] The Nazis began their siege of Leningrad on September 8, 1941 — trying to starve the USSR's second-largest city into submission just a few months after launching their invasion of the country in Operation Barbarossa. For 872 days, the inhabitants of this industrial centre (now known by its original name, Saint Petersburg), went through hell as hunger, cold and bombardments killed nearly a million people. FRANCE 24 looks back at the siege, 80 years on. The simple statements of the extraordinary 11-year-old diarist Tania Savitcheva capture best the helplessness in Leningrad: "Jenia died on December 28 at midnight. Grandma died on January 25 at three in the afternoon. Leka died on March 5 at five in the morning. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Tania is all alone." Evacuated before the end of the siege, Savitcheva died of exhaustion on July 1, 1944. She became a symbol of this 872-day siege — the longest in modern history until that of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996 — after her elder sister Nina, who had managed to escape the surrounded city, discovered and published the diary. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |