After Leningrad: From the Caucasus to the Rhine August 9, 1942-March 22, 1945 (Volume 2)

The odyssey of a Leningrader who es­caped the siege continues here from the point of this remarkable woman's cap­ture by the Germans and shows the "courage, almost to the point of com­plete abandon, and a grim determina­tion to live [that] had to be her motives for survival" (Best Sellers) . Elena Skrjabina's struggle to survive World War II began September 8, 1941,with the blockade of Leningrad, which she describes in an earlier diary, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader (Southern Illinois University Press, 1971) .After a year of hunger, intense enough to banish even the fear of Nazi bombs, she, her sons Dima, fourteen, and Yuri, five, and her mother followed a trail marked by frozen corpses across the ice of Lake Lagoda. Incredibly, only her mother perished before they had run the gauntlet of bombs and Arctic cold that led finally to relative safety in Pyatigorsk.The present diary begins August 9, 1942,the night a German invasion transformed Pyatigorsk from safe har­bor to inferno. Five months later, the Red soldiers returned, and to escape vengeance from their own troops, who had been ordered to shoot all males between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five, the Skrjabina's and thousands of other Russians retreated with the routed Ger­man army.Written as the events unfolded,Elena Skrjabina's diary re-creates that massive retreat, ending at a forced labor camp in Bendorf, Germany, from which deliverance came only at the end of the war in Europe.