125 grams of siege bread
Leningrad
- of bread a day, the ration for children and office workers in late 1941
- 125 g
- of bread a day, the ration for children and office workers in late 1941
- pages in Tanya Savicheva's diary
- 9
- pages in Tanya Savicheva's diary
In the winter of 1941–42 Leningrad had no heating, no electricity, no running water. For a time, children and office workers received only 125 grams of bread a day, a piece the size of a palm. A schoolgirl, Tanya Savicheva, kept a tiny diary that became one of the best-known testimonies of the siege.
People burned furniture and books in little iron stoves and fetched water from holes in the ice of the Neva. Trams stood frozen in the streets. But factories kept working, and when there were no programmes the radio played a metronome: as long as it ticked, the city was alive.
Tanya Savicheva wrote down in a small notebook the days on which her family died. Tanya was evacuated, but she could not be saved: she died in the summer of 1944. Her diary is kept in the Museum of the History of St Petersburg.
The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.