The job was an extraordinary one. The teachers lived full-time at the school, together with 120 four- to seven-year-olds. At night — when not taking the children down to the air-raid shelter — they slept on pushed-together tables, and during the day not only taught, but stoked stoves, hauled water up two flights of stairs from the unlit basement of a neighbouring building, washed and dried sheets (six of Olga’s group were bed-wetters), flushed out lavatories, folded and unfolded camp beds (four times a day, taking into account afternoon naps) and shaved the children’s heads to rid them of lice. In the evenings they repaired the children’s clothes, reusing buttons and elastic. There was no soap, no toothpaste and so little crockery that everyone drank from saucers. Staff were also drafted to outside ‘voluntary’ work, demolishing buildings for firewood and emptying bedpans in a nearby military hospital. Though it was forbidden to talk in front of children about the war — they were to be ‘transported to a world of fantasy, fairy tales and art’ — reality inevitably intruded. On walks they competed for spent shot from the anti-aircraft guns on the Kirov, moored nearby on the Neva embankment, and at break-time distressed Olga with their games:

Today the children found some sort of hole in the yard, and began to dig, chanting, ‘Come on, come on, dig quicker. Our little ones are in there. The Germans have killed them all!’

Lida: ‘My Vovochka’s in there!’

Rufa: ‘And my Lilenka and Granny!’. .

Tearing the girls away from this game was very difficult. It fascinated them and they came back to it again and again. It was always Rufa, five years old and the oldest in my class, who started it. She hadn’t been to kindergarten before and had been living with a Granny who fell asleep and didn’t want to wake up any more. Before that there had been a Lilenka — probably a younger sister — who also fell asleep forever.29

Never having had much to do with small children before, Olga initially found controlling her ‘collective’ almost impossible, but quickly learned the tricks of the trade. At mealtimes she quietened them with the help of a floppy-eared dog glove-puppet that had been her own childhood toy. During air-raids she repeated again and again a tale from the Brothers Grimm, of a magic pot that produces a non-stop flow of sweet golden kasha, so much of it that it pours out of the house and floods the whole town. ‘A mass of energy, time and starch’ went into preparations for New Year’s Day 1943. Besides having to recite crass poems in praise of Voroshilov, distributed by the city education department, the children dressed up as snowflakes, rabbits and bears, and a teacher as Snegurochka — Russia’s Little Snow Girl, grand-daughter of Grandfather Frost — juggling snowballs made of cotton wool. Aunt Motya, the incorruptible eighty-year-old School cook, made pirozhki out of carefully hoarded flour. Olga stayed with School no. 43 all the way through to the autumn of 1944, before resuming her university degree. It had not only saved her from despair but given her ‘a place in the world’. ‘I felt that I needed people’, she wrote later, ‘and that they might need me.’

*In private he was more cynical: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell’, he famously told his private secretary later the same night, ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

21. The Last Year

Hitler’s objectives for 1942 included Leningrad. It was to be stormed, a Führer Directive of 5 April instructed, as soon as victory in the Crimea had freed up the necessary armour and artillery, in an operation to be code-named Nordlicht, or ‘Northern Light’.1 Ignoring his generals’ pleas for another attempt on Moscow, Hitler reiterated his intention after Sevastopol’s capture, ordering Manstein to lead five divisions and a giant railway gun, the ‘Heavy Gustav’, north.2 ‘St Petersburg’, he mused over lunch a few days later, ‘must disappear utterly from the surface of the earth. Moscow, too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia.’3 Far from retiring to Siberia, in mid-August the Red Army launched its fourth attempt to break the Germans’ hold on the southern shores of Lake Ladoga, concentrating on the already blood-soaked Sinyavino ridge south of Shlisselburg. Manstein’s new divisions were able to prevent a breakthrough, but not to embark on Nordlicht. Meanwhile, Hitler also launched Operation Blau (‘Blue’), his mighty southward push towards rhe Caucasus and Central Asia. Rostov-on-Don fell in the last week of July, and by mid-August panzers were pushing into the foothills of the Caucasus, within tantalising reach of the Baku oilfields.