Between controversy and emotion, the case of Anne Frank has practically monopolized the interest in personal impressions of ordinary citizens in the context of the Second World War . But at least there is another similar case that took place on the Russian front, specifically during the Siege of Leningrad . This is the diary ofTatiana Savicheva , a Russian girl who also left in writing, in a few pages, the impressions she experienced in that conflict.
Tatiana was the youngest daughter of a baker and a seamstress. Her father died when she was six years old, leaving the widow in charge of five children , three girls and two boys. Except for one of them, Mikhail, who was sent away, the rest were in the city when the Wehrmacht entered the USSR . The whole family contributed their grain of sand in defense, either at the front or in the factories. Only one of her sisters, Nina, sent on an assignment, was evacuated to Lake Ladoga without warning and was left for dead.
The city that was once called Saint Petersburg and was the winter residence of the tsars, had become a target of the German army, which surrounded it in 1941 and subjected it to a hard siege of almost three years . The Germans were unable to break through the lines because, although the supply situation in Leningrad was desperate, they managed to open a corridor around the lake and introduce some supplies, precariously but more or less regularly. This did not prevent the hunger the population was preyed upon and more deaths were added to the purely military ones, those caused by cold and disease, so that the number of victims was around the shocking figure of seven hundred thousand dead .
In this terrible and devastating context, Nina's disappearance inevitably affected Tatiana, then eleven years old, who inherited a notebook from her. The girl already had, apparently, a diary , but she had to burn it to fuel the fire in the home stove. However, he kept her sister's notebook and began to make annotations on its pages from December 28, 1941. I say annotations because it was not an orderly writing of experiences like that of Anne Frank:barely a dozen sentences in what constitutes a kind of family obituary .
To be exact, there are nine sentences with the dates of the successive deaths of her relatives. Scarily simple and tragic:
- Zhenia died on December 28, 1941, at 12:30 p.m.
- Grandma died on January 25, 1942, at 3:00 p.m.
- Leka died on March 17, 1942, at 5:00 a.m.
- Uncle Vasya died on April 13, 1942, two hours after midnight.
- Uncle Lesha on May 10, 1942 at 4:00 p.m.
- Mom on May 13, 1942 at 7:30 a.m.
- The Savichevs died.
- They all died.
- Only Tania remained.
Indeed, in the end, only she was still clinging tenaciously to life. In the summer of 1942, Tatiana was rescued from the rubble of a bombing raid and evacuated to Krasny Bor , a town located about twenty kilometers to the southwest where a bloody battle would take place a few months later between the Red Army , which was already on the counterattack, and the German 50th Corps, supported by theBlue Division Spanish. If the course of the war began to be adverse to the Axis, little Tatiana also declined in her fight to survive . A teacher from the orphanage where she was, wrote a letter to Mijail, that brother who had managed to leave Leningrad at the beginning of the war, explaining that the girl was very sick .
In fact, she had to be admitted to a hospital .And there she came to the end of her road. Tatiana Savicheva died of tuberculosis on July 1, 1944 leaving as a reminder of her odyssey those terrible loose sheets written in her own handwriting, that her sister Nina de ella (in the previous photo with Mijail) rescued from the ruins of her home at end the conflict. They constituted one of the pieces of evidence used by the prosecutors of Nüremberg to illustrate the suffering of the Russian people in the face of the German invasion.
That brief diary can be seen today in the Leningrad History Museum . In addition, the memory of Tatiana is kept in the country through a memorial and in the entire universe as an asteroid belt was named after her. discovered in 1971.