Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

"There’s a picture I have of all of the cousins in a row, from the smallest to the oldest, a row of cute, smiling children taken, I guess, in the early 1930s. But after World War II broke out, they ended up fighting on opposite sides. One cousin was conscripted into the German army and was killed at the siege of Leningrad (on which battle, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 is highly recommended on Five Books and my husband absolutely loved this one, for young adults , as well). My mum’s favourite cousin, Guy Schubert, fled to England and died, aged 20, flying a bomber for the RAF over the Netherlands. (My daughter and I are currently listening to this memoir by an RAF pilot in World War II, also much recommended on this site). One cousin, Hubert, went into hiding in the part of France that had not been occupied. Meanwhile my mother’s great aunt, Hélène, who lived in Paris and had never married, was taken to a camp at Drancy and died en route to Auschwitz. She had been registered in Paris as Czech Jewish."

"This was the longest and most devastating siege in the history of World War II. Hitler was determined to take over the Russian city for symbolic reasons, and during the two-and-a-half-year siege 750,000 civilians were deliberately starved to death. This amounted to a quarter of Leningrad’s population. Much has been written about Leningrad in the past. One famous book is The 900 Days : The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury, and although it is excellent there weren’t any archives open at that particular stage so he was limited by what he could obtain through official sources in Leningrad. It is still a remarkable book. But Anna Reid’s book goes far further because, with excellent research in archives which weren’t available before, she is able to show how totally cynical Stalin’s attitude was to Leningrad. Indeed it was a major factor in the appalling loss of life and suffering, which is very hard to appreciate. When I was researching my own book Stalingrad , and for years afterwards, I couldn’t look at a plate of food without thinking what that would have meant to about a dozen people in Stalingrad. In Leningrad it was even worse. There are photographs, for example, of the same woman taken just a few months apart for her identity documents and in a matter of months she has become an old hag, even though she started off as a rather plump young woman. So the effects of starvation on a whole society is indeed worth studying and I think that Anna Reid has done it brilliantly. Another interesting aspect of her book is her exploration of the extent to which people living in Leningrad had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive."