After Leningrad: A Diary of Survival During World War II

Elena Skrjabina

tammi 1988 · Transaction Publishers

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This second volume in the odyssey of a Leningrader who escaped the siege continues here from the point of this remarkable observer's evacuation from the city. It tells of her nomadic wandering to the Caucasus and later to the Rhine, in an "unadorned but eloquent prose that is remarkably affecting" (Publisher's Weekly). After Leningrad begins August 9, 1942, the night a German army invaded Pyatigorsk, the city to which she and her family had escaped across the ice of Lake Lagoda, a harrowing tale concluding the first volume of this series. After surviving the inferno created by the Germans, the Skrjabinas and thousands of other Russians endured the return of the Red Army five months later, which had been ordered to shoot all males between the ages of 16 and 55. To escape this vengeance, the Russians retreated with the routed German army. This diary recreates that massive retreat, ending at a forced labor camp in Bendorf, Germany, from which deliverance came only at the end of the war in Europe.