On August 10, the city government announced mandatory evacuation for all children under the age of fourteen. They were to be sent east without their parents, with their names and destinations written on their hands. This seemed too awful to many parents, and they resisted. Shostakovich and Nina were among those hundreds of thousands who ignored the order.
Shostakovich kept working on the new symphony — sometimes even taking it up onto the roof of the Conservarory so he could keep writing while performing his duties as a fireman. When friends came to his house to say good-bye before they headed off on one of the few train lines that hadn’t been cut off by the Germans, Shostakovich played his sketches for them on the piano. His friend Isaak Glikman remembered:
It was a steel-gray, depressing sort of day. Famine had not yet gripped Leningrad in its deadly embrace; even so, Shostakovich looked as if he had lost weight. Hunger, I was surprised to see, had made him seem taller; it had stretched out his form and given him an air of fragility. His face was unsmiling, frowning, thoughtful. He told me the reason he had wanted to see me was to show me the first pages of a new work that he was planning; one, however, that might be of no use to anybody now that this war of unprecedented savagery was raging.
Shostakovich played the piece through, as it existed at that point. When he got to the plucky, ghastly little march that grew and grew, Glikman heard in it “the Fascist invasion.”
This may have been Shostakovich’s intention: the tune was very similar to an aria from a chintzy German operetta, Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow — one of Hitler’s favorite pieces of music, written by one of Hitler’s favorite composers. Late in the summer of 1941, at about the same time Shostakovich was writing his march, the German propaganda ministry even released a movie about Lehár, celebrating his work. We don’t know, however, if Shostakovich knew of Hitler’s enthusiasm for the operetta composer. The tune may also have had more personal associations for Shostakovich. In Russian, it was sung to the words “I’ll go see Maxim,” so Shostakovich may have used it to tease his little son. Eventually, Maxim and Galina thought of that march as their own special tune. “They often beg their father to play [it] for them,” said Nina, “and they climb onto the lid of the grand piano and sit as quiet as mice, all ears.”
Glikman heard this plucky tune become huge, terrifying, pounded out furiously on the keyboard. “We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play a new work with such manifest emotion. [Afterwards] we sat on, plunged in silence, broken at last by Shostakovich with these words (I have them written down): ‘I don’t know what the fate of this piece will be.’” The composer was worried people might compare this repeated march with another popular piece, Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. “Well, let them,” he said. “That is how I hear war.” Glikman later mused, “I believe that on that memorable August day Shostakovich was still quite unaware of the titanic scale of his symphony, for which a fate unique in the history of music was already in preparation. Parting, we embraced and kissed, not suspecting that before us lay a prolonged separation.”
As the Germans cut off the train lines to the west and to the south, as the Finns cut off the train lines to the north, it became harder for Leningrad to feed itself. By late August, the quest for food took up a lot of the day. One diarist described: “By chance, you might accidentally overhear that in the Petrograd section of town they are distributing something or other. So you run there. After that, to Narvsky Gate. And then on to Vasilevski Island. You buy up everything you can lay your hands on. But there isn’t anything substantial or nourishing. The stores are all but empty. Everywhere there are enormous lines. And the crowds grow whenever sugar or butter appears in the commercial stores.”
Still, Shostakovich and his family stayed on.
Evacuation itself was becoming more and more dangerous. The German advance had swallowed up most of the train lines. (It had engulfed Vyritsa, for example, the town where Nina had been staying just a few weeks before.) The direct Moscow-Leningrad route was blocked, and trains had to be rerouted to the east at a station called Mga.
Still, trains and truck convoys full of child evacuees made their way along the few routes left. With the speed of the German advance, however, this finally led to disaster.
“Now we realize that we were travelling towards the Germans,” a survivor remembers, “but at the time nobody knew that. Why should we have? It was a good area, a remote area.”
On a late August day, children were being settled at collective farms far to the south of Leningrad. The kids had arrived at their destination, and their chaperones were trying to coordinate their placement. “We worked out where everybody was going to stay — and there were several thousand to accommodate. But then an urgent order came through. We had to move the children on. Then we realized that the Germans were moving fast towards us.” At one collective farm, where the children were receiving welcoming cups of tea, someone ran up and yelled, “There are Nazi paratroopers ahead!”
The adult chaperones scrambled the children back to their trucks and rushed them to the Lychkovo train station. The station was now mobbed with thousands of kids. Adults tried to keep order in the midst of panic. “Just imagine! We had a lot of nursery-school children. They were all hungry and exhausted.”
“The children had started to board the train. . . . Then German planes appeared. They circled and came back towards us. It was dreadful.”
A survivor of this scene — Ivan Fedulov, just a boy at the time, standing on the train platform, helping with the younger kids’ luggage — remembered, “Suddenly, I heard a terrible cry. Someone was shouting, ‘Bombers! Bombers!’ A plane flew right over us — and along the length of the train — dropping bomb after bomb, with terrifying, methodical precision. There was a huge explosion, and when the smoke cleared carriages were scattered everywhere, as if they had been knocked off the tracks by a giant hand.”
A woman on the train recalled: “The nursery school teacher was sitting there, with the children around her. Goodness, how many of them there were! And each time a bomb exploded they all cried: ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’ It was dreadful! For the first time in my life I lied to a child. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said. ‘Nothing to be afraid of! They’re our planes!’ As for myself, I went out onto the porch, and, you know, he was flying so low, he’d take a look, press a button — and a bomb would immediately explode.”
She remembered with fury that later on, the Germans claimed they hadn’t known that they were massacring children. “What rubbish! They knew very well, and, of course, they could see everything perfectly well. The fact was that the children from the Dzerzhinsky district were already boarding the train then, and they bombed the kids at the station. It was very fine weather. The children were dressed in their best, bright clothes. He could see very well what he was bombing.”
The boy Ivan Fedulov and some of the kids around him sprinted toward a potato field and tried to hide there. Others followed, scampering through the weeds. “A plane circled, and came back. Then it began machine-gunning the fleeing children. It was flying so low that I could clearly see the pilot’s face — totally impassive.”
A mother remembered: “When they began shelling the coaches, there were immediately dead and wounded. We put the children under the seats with mattresses on top of them for protection and flung ourselves on top of the mattresses. . . . A bomb fell on the engine. . . . All the same, we managed, when things quietened down a bit, to get out of the coach. It was already getting dark. The station was on fire. We couldn’t find anybody. It was absolutely dreadful! The chief of the evacuation train was sitting on a stump, clasping his head in his hands. . . . Every time we heard some kind of noise or the sound of shooting, we would get down into a ditch, the children like this, flat on the ground, and we would lie on top of them. And I would throw blankets over them.”
Eventually, trains filled with Red Army soldiers came limping along the tracks, headed back to Leningrad. Either by catching a ride
on these troop trains or by walking through the countryside for days, people found themselves back in the city, speaking out boldly not just against the Germans but also against the incompetence of the city officials who’d sent children into harm’s way. “When I got back to Leningrad I was told I had dreamed it all,” said one survivor. “More than two thousand children had died at Lychkovo, and others were wandering around the countryside, distraught and lost, but the official version was that this had never happened.”
The massacre at Lychkovo threw the parents of Leningrad into a frenzy. People were desperate to get out of the city, but at the same time, they worried about which routes were still safe.
Time was running out to escape Leningrad before the German noose pulled tight.
Shostakovich’s friend Ivan Sollertinsky came to say good-bye. He was fleeing to Central Asia and was shortly going to catch a train. Shostakovich played him the new piece, now almost finished, or so he thought. Sollertinsky was a professor at the Conservatory and a brilliant man. As they talked it through, Shostakovich realized that the piece needed to be part of something larger. He had a glimpse of a grander design.
He said good-bye to Sollertinsky. They did not know it, these two friends who’d spent their youth cackling together, but they would never see each other again.
When Sollertinsky left, Shostakovich told Nina that this new piece, the Seventh Symphony, was going to be much longer than he had planned. He was reluctant to leave the city, which might disrupt his work.
Nina was furious. She said sternly that the children’s safety had to come first. They had to get out while they still could.
Somewhat gloomily, Shostakovich agreed. The next morning he called the authorities and informed them that he and his family were going to evacuate with Lenfilm Studios (who had made most of the movies for which he’d written music).
He wrote to Sollertinsky, “Dear Ivan . . . We’ll be leaving for Alma-Ata in about two days.” His sister Maria had been exiled to Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, a few years before. Now she was back in Leningrad, and Shostakovich was headed there.
He and Nina made preparations for their evacuation.
They did not know it, however, but it was already too late. They had lost the chance to flee.
On August 25, Mga — the last rail link with the rest of Russia — came under attack. An evacuation train filled with children had left Leningrad in the morning. They were supposed to stop at Mga, the transfer station, to pick up some more evacuees before heading east.
As they drew close to Mga, the train braked and slowed.
A little boy pointed out the windows at the sky and shouted happily, “Look at the balloons! Look, so many!”
People craned their necks and looked up. They saw that it was not balloons that were drifting slowly down around them. It was German paratroopers. They were landing in a nearby field.
Antiaircraft guns fired. The German soldiers struggled free of their parachutes and got into formation.
The train’s conductor did not stop at the station. He accelerated. The evacuation train roared through Mga and kept going.
This was the last train to make it out of Leningrad.
About 636,000 people in all had been evacuated; that left 2.5 million civilians in the city.
After heavy fighting, Mga finally fell on August 31. At that point, the Germans had advanced all the way to the far bank of the river Neva, southeast of the city. Within a few short days, they had taken the town of Shlisselburg, on the shores of Lake Ladoga.
“Leningrad is surrounded,” wrote a woman in her diary. “We are caught in a mousetrap.”
The nine-hundred-day Siege of Leningrad — the longest siege in recorded history — had begun.
The Shostakovich family — along with two and a half million others — were trapped.
SOURCES
I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad, quickly,” Shostakovich remembered. “I couldn’t not write it. War was all around. I had to be together with the people, I wanted to create the image of our embattled country, to engrave it in music.”
War was quite literally all around him. To the north of the city was the Finnish army. To the west was the Gulf of Finland, its fatal waters seeded with floating mines. To the east was Lake Ladoga, which Germans bombed from the southern shore. To the south were the German lines themselves.
The three prongs of Operation Barbarossa stuck deep in Russia’s flesh like the tines of a devil’s pitchfork. German Army Group North surrounded Leningrad. Army Group South had surrounded Kiev, in fertile Ukraine, trapping four Soviet armies; the city would shortly fall to them, yielding up some of the USSR’s richest agricultural land to Nazi occupiers. Army Group Central was now only two hundred miles from Moscow, the capital itself, where Stalin and the State Committee for Defense watched its approach with dread.
Shostakovich, toiling away at his symphony, finished a new draft of the first movement on September 3. He may have wanted to start immediately on the next movement — but the next day, for the first time, German shells tore into the city.
That morning, the avenues were filled with a delicate mist. Soviet snipers took up positions on rooftops south of the city so they could fire if the Germans continued their advance. The sky and streets were gray and shrouded.
At around eleven in the morning, artillery shells blasted into the streets; the city echoed with detonations. At Communist Party Headquarters, the desperate news spread quickly: the Germans were close enough to fire their long-range 240-millimeter siege artillery directly into Leningrad. Though the Soviets did not know it yet, the largest guns in Europe, devised by the famous firms of Krupp, Skoda, and Schneider, were gathered in the city’s suburbs, blasting away according to detailed maps that marked hospitals, museums, and Communist Party Headquarters as targeted “firing points.”
The shells hit freight yards and factories and collapsed Hydroelectric Dam No. 5. The bombardment lasted until six in the evening. It was terrifying, and yet would soon become routine.
On September 6, the people of Leningrad heard a low hum that they had not heard before. This was not the sound of shelling.
People looked up; their windowpanes were rattling.
A small force of German planes soared over the city. They were bombers. People ran for shelter as sirens blared. Antiaircraft guns blasted away in the suburbs. The sky over the avenues was laced with tracer fire. The planes roared by and released their deadly payloads. Incendiary bombs rained down over the city, flaring up on roofs. Home Guard volunteers blew whistles and bounded over copper sheathing to shovel sand on the dazzling thermite.
People looking out their apartment windows saw planes dipping low — saw bombs streaking down the length of the wide, fashionable avenues. Walls catapulted into the street. Homes burned.
This was the first air raid on the city. As diarist Elena Skrjabina wrote, “It has made quite an impression. In the first place, our faith in Leningrad’s being well protected has been shaken. . . . There are crowds around destroyed houses.”
An even more devastating Luftwaffe assault force was to arrive two days later; it would damn the city to a winter of famine.
On September 8, Shostakovich began work on the second movement of the symphony. It is a careful, wary dance movement, supposedly written to recall happier times in Leningrad. He considered calling it “Reminiscences” or “The Dream.” The day before, the city had suffered heavy shelling, but there is no hint of that horror in the elegant opening measures of this pleasant intermezzo, sketched out while a huge, coordinated assault force of Luftwaffe bombers banked toward Leningrad. Shostakovich, unaware, bent over his desk, quietly drawing note heads and stems.
Once again, throughout the city, windows began rattling. The water in the canals quivered. Factory sirens wailed and the loudspeakers screamed warnings. People rushed to their air-raid shelters — basements, vaults, dark warrens beneath munitions plants.
“I looked out the window,” one diarist wr
ote.
We heard the ack-ack guns firing with particular force and fury. Looking at the sky I noticed an unusual thing — instead of individual planes looking like little dots high in the sky, so tiny you could scarcely see them, there came a great mass of planes, flying in a definite, clearly planned, complicated formation. They were massed in such a way that their movement seemed menacing. And they really were menacing. Shells burst around them, we could see bursts of fire from the ack-ack guns. But the planes moved steadily on: there was no looping, none of the complicated aerobatics we had seen in August. Even when one of them fell, wreathed in clouds of smoke, the others carried steadily on. It was obvious that this was no casual raid but a massive onslaught.
Twenty-seven German Ju 88 bombers sprayed more than six thousand incendiary bombs down on the parks and courtyards. “They flew at low altitude,” a rooftop fireman recalled. “You could clearly see their engines, the shining disks of their spinning propellers, and the details of their tails. The aircraft dropped their bomb loads on the southern side of the city, and then proceeded north without changing direction, as if on parade. Where the bombs fell, a wall of smoke and dust appeared, rising higher and higher.”
Shostakovich’s friends Gavriil Popov and Lyubov Shaporina were whiling away the afternoon playing the piano when the air raid started. The nervous Popov ran to the window. They watched an enormous, apocalyptic cloud rising up above the city. “High in the sky there were white balls of explosions — the desperate efforts of the anti-aircraft guns. Suddenly, from behind the roofs a white cloud started to grow; it expanded quickly and other clouds piled on this one. They were all dyed amber in the setting sun. They filled up the entire sky; then the clouds turned bronze, while from below a black stripe started moving upwards. It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I could not comprehend that it was fire.”
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 18