If you dare, read The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, is
a riveting narrative nonfiction epic by Harrison E. Salisbury about one of the
harrowing and heroic chapters in the annals of history. In nine hundred days,
beginning in 1941 when a German army blockaded the city, as many people died in
Leningrad as the entire war losses suffered by the United States in the whole
of its history – nearly a million and a half men, women and children. They died
fighting in citizen militias on the front line, fell to the incessant German
shelling that pounded the streets and avenues of city, starved in their
unheated apartments and hospitals and froze to death in the frigid cold and
deep snow of the brutal Russian winter.
It is also believed
that some even died to feed a thriving market in human flesh that sprang up in
The Haymarket, a great peasant market before the war but now operated by fat,
oily, steel-eyed men and women, the most terrible people of their day. There is
no question people practiced cannibalism on a large scale during the darkest
and most desperate months of the siege: the evidence clearly shows that people
butchered corpses on a widespread basis.
More people died in
the Leningrad blockade than ever died in a modern city – anywhere and anytime.
But 600,000 people remained when the Russians finally broke the siege and
Salisbury weaves the stories of these survivors, and those who died in this
city of ice and death, through the fabric of this searing narrative.
Review by Peter Critchley from the Vernon Branch of the ORL
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