User:Darya Kukhareva

Legacy of victory

Everybody knows that war always affects people without exception: rich and poor, working and unemployed, sick and healthy, old and young. But these are adults. How did the war affect children?

The blockade of Leningrad

At the time of the outbreak of the war there were about four hundred thousand children in the city. We can learn about what they felt, saw, about their life even now, seventy-five years after those events, because many of them kept their diaries. Here is one of the notes of a seven-year-old girl who was in Leningrad at the beginning of the war: "The war began for me with a sudden panic that suddenly gripped people in the street, with the hum of airplanes and the anxious cry of my mother calling me home." Everything that happened in the city was terrible not only for adults but also for children. Then everything only got worse because the city was attacked by severe winters, hunger, sometimes I had to be content with just one piece of dry, tasteless bread, after which I was more and more hungry and which was so difficult to get. The first childhood fears go aside, giving way to what they observed at that time every day. They began to perceive all this as the most ordinary life. They stopped smiling. A kind of holiday for the children of the blockade was a bowl of soup handed out without a ticket".

They had to grow up much earlier than the rest. Some worked in factories, producing weapons and shells. The main motto for all of them was: "Everything for the front, everything for victory." Very often they performed one and a half or even two times more than the daily adult's norm. Other guys helped the elderly and the wounded, delivered mail, worked in the fields near the city, collecting record harvests.

Children of the besieged Leningrad became an example of overcoming all adversity, fighting to the last. And who, no matter how they are, deserves the title of Heroes who saved not only the beloved city but also our lives!