A housewife. Family from a village outside the city. No medals, no poems, no famous name.
She kept a diary during the siege of Leningrad, and it’s one of the thirty testimonies in Writing the Siege of Leningrad. What she wrote down is the everyday of it: bodies stacked by a church waiting for the stretcher-bearers to take them to the mass graves. And her husband collapsing on the pavement while people walked past, because nobody had the strength left to stop.
History tends to remember the siege by its 872 days. She remembered it by who fell where.