To be a Leningrader is to have a “distinction which is as rare as any human being possesses.”—From the Foreword

 

In the siege of Leningrad, August 1941–January 1944, between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 persons died, of hunger, of cold, of disease, of German bullets, bombs, and shells. The unprecedented magnitude and suf­fering of this most devastating of all episodes of war has been told by Harrison E. Salisbury in his recent best-seller, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. Yet, as Mr. Salisbury notes in his Foreword to this book, “the best way to feel the Leningrad epic is to read it in one of the diaries and that of Madame Skrjabina is outstanding in this regard.”

 

Elena Skrjabina, a young graduate student and mother of two boys, had lived in Leningrad most of her life. Her eyewitness account covers the first winter of the siege, her escape over frozen Lake Ladoga with her mother, two children, and old nurse, and the odyssey of her flight for sur­vival to the Caucasus, where in August 1942 she was captured by the Germans and again faced an uncertain future.