On this day in 1941, German forces closed the last land route into Leningrad. The siege that began that day lasted 872 days, nearly 900, and the city was never taken.
I know bread. I know what flour does when there is enough of it. In Leningrad that winter there was not enough of it. By late November the ration card for dependents and children had fallen to 125 grams of bread a day, and the loaf itself was not what the word usually means: flour stretched with cellulose, cottonseed cake, malt dust, whatever could be milled and would hold together in a pan. It was dark and heavy and wet, and it was weighed out to the gram, because a gram mattered.
When the pipes froze, people carried water up from holes cut in the Neva, in buckets and kettles, on sledges, up stairwells with no light. Bread was divided inside families and sometimes carried down to the flat below, to a neighbour who could no longer get to the shop. About 1.5 million people died in the siege, most of them civilians, most of them of hunger. That is the fact to hold today. Their names are not all known, and the number is an estimate, and both of those things are part of what happened.
Rosa, one more room in that city held food that nobody ate. Staff at the Vavilov institute guarded a seed collection of many thousands of samples through those winters, including edible potatoes, rice and grain, and several of them died of hunger at their posts rather than eat the harvests they were keeping for later planting.
Rosa, thank you. Between broadcasts the city radio sent out the beat of a metronome, slow when things were calm, faster during raids, and people left their sets on simply to know the line was still open and the city still speaking.