Today Katie, Jessica and I went with Sveta to Victory Square and the biggest cemetery in the world. It was very much like our morning adventures but better because Sveta was there to be tour guide and explain the things that we were looking at.
Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me. I brought Katie's though.
On Victory Square there was a big obelisk and a circle wall where there were bunch of plaques. Sveta didn't really read them or translate them but I took pictures of them. Again with Katie's camera though which I have not at this time. But what Sveta did talk about was the blockade. Leningrad was under siege for 900 days from 1941 to 1944. It was forever and a lot of people died. There were approximately two million people in Leningrad before the war and then after there were less than a million.
Sveta emphasized that one of the things that they can be really proud of was even though during this time they had little to nothing (125 grams of sawdust bread a day) they would still go to school and be cultural and have the opera and the theater. This greatly affected the German soldiers.
Victory Square is in the south of the city. We then went to the north of the city to go to the cemetery where most of the people (both civilian and military casualties) were buried. There were more than 490,000 people that were buried in that cemetery. I didn't see any individual headstones. Instead there were marker stones that had a year, either a star for military or a hammer and sickle for civilian, and an oak leaf (which signified there determination to fight even to death) and then a number. If a person had documentation that their relatives had been buried there then they could find out exactly where their relatives were buried but other than that things were kept quiet.
Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me. I brought Katie's though.
On Victory Square there was a big obelisk and a circle wall where there were bunch of plaques. Sveta didn't really read them or translate them but I took pictures of them. Again with Katie's camera though which I have not at this time. But what Sveta did talk about was the blockade. Leningrad was under siege for 900 days from 1941 to 1944. It was forever and a lot of people died. There were approximately two million people in Leningrad before the war and then after there were less than a million.
Sveta emphasized that one of the things that they can be really proud of was even though during this time they had little to nothing (125 grams of sawdust bread a day) they would still go to school and be cultural and have the opera and the theater. This greatly affected the German soldiers.
Victory Square is in the south of the city. We then went to the north of the city to go to the cemetery where most of the people (both civilian and military casualties) were buried. There were more than 490,000 people that were buried in that cemetery. I didn't see any individual headstones. Instead there were marker stones that had a year, either a star for military or a hammer and sickle for civilian, and an oak leaf (which signified there determination to fight even to death) and then a number. If a person had documentation that their relatives had been buried there then they could find out exactly where their relatives were buried but other than that things were kept quiet.
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