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bedlinen has not been washed since 15 January. . The wards are completely unheated, so some patients have been moved into the corridors, which have temporary stoves. Due to the very low temperatures patients cover themselves not only with hospital blankets but with dirty mattresses and their own coats. . The lavatories are not working and the floors are not being washed.

Of the hospital’s 181 doctors only 27 were reporting for duty, of its 298 nurses only 163, and over a thousand corpses had piled up in its mortuary and storage rooms. In the Raukhfus Children’s Hospital, which on some days had no heating at all, patients slept two or three to a bed. They had not been washed or had their bedlinen changed for six weeks, with the result that all had lice. Two hundred and ninety-nine corpses awaited removal.15 A pile of dead also grew outside the Erisman’s rear entrance on the Karpovka canal — overflow from its mortuary plus neighbourhood fatalities deposited there by relatives. ‘Each day now’, wrote Inber,

eight to ten bodies are brought in on sleds. And they just lie there on the snow. Fewer and fewer coffins are available, so too the materials to make them. The bodies are wrapped in sheets, blankets, tablecloths — sometimes even in curtains. Once I saw a small bundle wrapped in paper and tied with string. It was very small — the body of a child.

How macabre they look on the snow! Occasionally an arm or leg protrudes from the crude wrappings. . It reminds me of a battlefield and of a doss-house, both at the same time.16

Dmitri Lazarev, who visited the Erisman to take leave of a friend, described overflowing slop buckets — ‘honey-buckets’ — and the only nursing as being done by visitors.17 On 15 January its mortuary went up in flames, the origin of the fire the still-smouldering quilted jackets, lined with raw cotton wadding, of workers killed in a factory blaze. Overall, according to the city health department, 40 per cent of those admitted to its seventy-three hospitals in the first quarter of 1942 died in them. Wide discrepancies between different institutions — the Karl Marx Hospital reported 84 per cent mortality among patients admitted in January, the October District Second Children’s Hospital only 12 per cent — suggest the figure may be less than complete.18

Marina Yerukhmanova witnessed the rapid deterioration of conditions in the hotel-turned-hospital Yevropa. On 16 November a bomb had landed just outside the main entrance, knocking out its electricity supply, and with it heating, lighting, stoves and lifts. Remaining peacetime trappings — starched tablecloths, white-jacketed waiters — quickly fell away, but the hospital managed to keep on operating fairly normally until New Year, when its running water failed and its lavatories froze. Thereafter it quickly descended into squalor and disorder. Patients relieved themselves on the marble main staircase, turning it into a ‘yellow ice mountain’. They set up a black market in the second-floor restaurant, and mugged the orderlies — many, like Marina and her sister, gently reared ‘Turgenev girls’ — carrying food along the dark corridors. Shtrafniki — dark-skinned, glittering-eyed soldiers from the 16th Punishment Battalion, mostly former convicts — took over the grandest bedrooms, pinning rugs over their shoulders and twisting velvet curtains into turbans ‘like the crew of a pirate ship’. A grand piano was gradually stripped of its mahogany casing, which went into stoves for fuel, and the ‘Eastern’ dining room with its stained-glass longboats was turned into a mortuary.

On 4 January, having been working fifteen-hour days carrying buckets of hot water up four flights of ice-covered stairs, Marina collapsed with stomach pains. A kind nurse put the girls and their mother into what had been one of the hotel’s cheaper bedrooms, on the top floor. Its grey-painted walls were covered with fernlike swirls of hoarfrost, the indoor temperature being eleven degrees below freezing. What allowed them to make the room habitable was Marina’s mother’s discovery of a half-litre bottle of alcohol in the hotel’s former pharmacy. With one half of it she bought sukhari, and with the other paid a man to make a burzhuika out of a bucket. Stoked with broken-up furniture and the hotel’s old personnel files — Marina and her sister leafed through application letters from long-gone wine waiters and pastry chefs before feeding them to the flames — the stove turned the room into the Yerukhmanovas’ ‘ark’. Two nurses moved in, one with her elderly mother; no gloomy talk was allowed and everyone got fully undressed daily, so that they could check each other’s clothes for lice. The ‘ark’ could not, however, carry all. A first cousin, twelve-year-old Lesha, came to visit early in the New Year: