For children as for adults, of course, recovery entailed much more than better rations. Survivors remember persistent anxiety, dull-wittedness, distrust of adults and obsession with food. Asked if she liked gingerbread, a girl in evacuation in the Urals didn’t understand the question: ‘I remember sitting there and wondering — What does it mean this “nice” or “not nice”?. . What is this phrase “I don’t want to eat”?’ At night she sneaked outdoors and dug in a nearby field for bread, which she believed grew underground like potatoes. ‘I thought that all I had to do was dig a small hole and there I’d find a fresh loaf. I’d take it and eat my fill.’23 A paediatrician gave the children on her ward drawing materials: one drew a clock face, captioned ‘This is our watch. It tells us when we can eat the next little piece of bread’; another, a nine-year-old boy, drew a large black square.24 An entrant in a story competition imagined the vegetables she was cultivating in her school allotment as tiny people with green legs and heads, who ran up the stairs of an apartment building to save a thin, golden-haired girl, or raced through shellfire to a Red Army dugout.25 Other children hoarded obsessively, collecting crumbs in matchboxes, developed stammers or would not speak at all.26 For teachers, one of the most cheering signs of recovery was when their pupils started misbehaving again. One girl, told to report to her headmistress for running out on to the street, was amazed when the usually stern woman burst into tears: ‘It was our first childish prank; it meant that we were returning to life and that made them very happy.’27
Saved by a school, in the role of teacher rather than pupil, was Olga Grechina. Since the beginning of the war she had dug trenches, worked in factories, cleared snow, had several close shaves during air raids and lost her mother to starvation. Her sixteen-year-old brother Vovka had turned into a stranger, appearing at their flat only rarely and with odd new possessions — clothes, a bicycle and jars of half-rotten salted tomatoes — which he fantastically claimed had been lent by relatives or turned out of the Smolniy’s cellars. ‘Already’, she wrote, ‘he wasn’t the same happy little elephant who all my schoolfriends adored, a bit of a coward and none too keen on his lessons.’ In May 1942 all became clear, when she heard that he had been arrested for stealing — not only from bread shops, she discovered, but from neighbours and relatives, including two spinster aunts whose cards he had taken, promising to return with their rations; they had subsequently died of starvation. Despite doing the rounds of the police stations and joining the long, silent queues outside the Kresty, Olga had no further news of her brother until the summer of the following year, when she received official notification that he had died of ‘dystrophy’ in a camp in Yaroslavl province.
After Vovka’s arrest, Olga suffered a nervous breakdown. Forced to sell remaining family valuables to an avaricious schoolfriend (her parents’ silver wedding anniversary tea set went for a few roubles, an oak table for two kilos of millet), she felt surrounded on all sides by loss and betrayal, started to suffer hallucinations and fell into deep depression. Attending teacher training in response to a radio appeal for nursery school staff, she sat at the back and slept:
I woke rarely and couldn’t write or remember anything. Luckily there were no exams — I would have failed them. There were a couple of nice girls there but I spoke to them robotically — I think they thought that I was mentally handicapped. And this was actually true, since I remember nothing from June. I don’t remember what I ate, who I saw, or any other details of my life then. I didn’t feel that I was dying, but that I was already dead.28
Her salvation was Boarding School no. 43, a tightly run, well-connected institution housed in a handsome nineteenth-century building one block down from the Hermitage on the Neva (and still there today). The headmistress, presented with a skinny, spectacled twenty-year-old with a plait pinned round the top of her head and darned socks, immediately despatched her to dig potatoes at the school’s affiliated collective farm, where she was fed cabbage soup, dozed through the days with her ‘nose in the earth’, and opened up to fellow staff, mostly newly widowed university lecturers, through the long pale evenings. In September they returned to the city and Olga was put to mending schoolbooks (‘It was very hard not to eat the paste, made from pure white flour’) before being given charge of a class of thirty-five ‘no longer starving, and quite lively’ four-year-olds. ‘You are not herding children’, she was told, ‘you are bringing them up.’
