Read Online Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan - Free Book Online

scuttled, completely destroyed to keep it out of the hands of the Germans. Even the newspaper finally admitted our danger. The headline in Leningradskaya Pravda said LENINGRAD—TO BE OR NOT TO BE?
    â€œMama,” I said, “the whole city will disappear.” I knew how much she loved the city.
    Usually she managed a smile, no matter how bad the news. Now her face was cold. “Would you have the Germans marching down the prospekt and Hitler giving a speech at Palace Square with the angel looking down? Never.”
    â€œMama, the French let the Germans march down the Champs-Elysées, their main street, rather than destroy the whole city.”
    â€œThe French have their own priorities and may do as they please,” Mama said, and would not say another word.
    I remembered the watercolors of St. Petersburg Marya had made for Mama and Papa when we were in Siberia, but this was not the same city. The early-fall weather was mild and the sun like gold, yet the city was ugly. After supper one evening Yelena and I walked along the prospekt. We could hear guns inthe distance. To stop the German tanks, there were machine-gun posts and concrete blocks and cruel-looking steel contraptions called hedgehogs because of their bristly steel teeth. Lumber was piled every which way. Everything that could be done to stop the German army from rolling through the city had been done.
    â€œIt’s as if some witch had put a curse on the city,” Yelena said. “I can’t even remember what it used to be like.”
    The Summer Garden where we had had our picnic was nothing but muddy earthworks to protect the air-raid shelters under the garden. The city’s buildings were covered with nets; even the sky over our heads was full of ugly barrage balloons like so many buzzards. Only when we stood at the edge of the seawall and looked down at the Neva could we forget the war for a moment.
    Yelena said, “Rivers are beautiful, but they are cruel as well. The Neva flows on as it has for thousandsof years and will keep flowing on to the sea. It doesn’t care one way or the other what happens to the city.” She sounded discouraged.
    â€œIs something wrong?” I asked.
    â€œI feel so helpless, Georgi. All I do is sit all day long in the library.”
    â€œI know what you mean,” I said. “It’s the same for me.”
    â€œGeorgi, you have been out every day. You helped to save the paintings, you dug the air-raid shelters, you are a member of the volunteers, you even risked your life to get food from the farms.”
    â€œAll that is nothing,” I said. I felt as useless as Yelena did.
    On the night of September 17 there was a high alert. All of us in the guard were summoned to our posts and told that we would not go home. We were to sleep right there. Dmitry and I were stationed near Palace Square. We were supposed to be armed, but there were not enough guns to go around. Ancientguns were yanked from the walls of the Russian Museum. People brought shovels and brooms.
    â€œThe Germans are going to break into the city tonight,” Dmitry said. “I feel it in my bones.”
    It was hard to know what to be most afraid of, the Germans or the whole city going up in one terrible explosion from the dynamite we had set ourselves. There were rumors everywhere: the town of Pushkin had fallen, the railroad that circled the city had been taken by the Germans, the Baltic fleet at the Kronstadt naval base had been scuttled. No one knew the truth. We knew only that in the morning, after sleeping at our posts, we were still alive and Leningrad was still there.
    The next day we heard the Germans were within ten miles of Palace Square and only two miles from the great Kirov plant where munitions and tanks were being made. The laborers at the plant worked sixteen hours a day turning out munitions, and then at night they armed themselves and slept at the plant to protectit from the Germans. It