In order to show their confidence in the victory over Germany, the Soviet authorities demanded that all entertainment venues must be opened, and that the opera stars of the cities should stay behind to sing the praises of the motherland and provide the people with a rich leisure life.

Jophnia remembers that at the curtain call of the play, Natasha, the actress on stage, held her head high like a queen, and colorful streamers floated down from the theater. There were people in the audience who shouted that the Soviet Union would win, and then the sound of "Ula" (long live) rang out.

In this atmosphere, the family did not realize that the most brutal siege in human history was approaching.

The mushroom cloud grew larger and larger that day, turning from white to pink. Fire trucks rushed in the direction of the clouds, one after another.

"That's when we learned that the powder cloud was formed after the granary burned." Zophnia told Sun Hui that on September 8, 41, the Germans destroyed the largest granary on the outskirts of Leningrad with bombers. The fire burned all day and devoured enough food for the citizens of the city to eat for two years.

After seeing the pink clouds, Jophnia decided to keep a diary.

At the end of 41, she wrote in her diary: "Life has not changed very much, there is still food, and every family has food." Before World War II, it experienced a war with Finland and is believed to be over soon. I'm still studying music. It's coming soon to the New Year, and hopefully everything will be fine. ”

But the better life that Jophnia was looking forward to didn't come to fruition. Surrounded by the Germans, the city soon fell into a winter of water, electricity, heating, and minus 40 degrees Celsius.

Ruophnia told Sun Hui that even in the summer, she still wears thick cotton slippers, which is a problem that Ruophnia fell after 42 years of harsh winters. The old man insisted that cold meant death and loss.

The first to die were in the suburbs, where the soldiers refused to allow the nearby peasants to enter the city, and the peasants did not want to return to the villages where the Germans were coming. So when the cold came, the refugees who were guarding the blockade line froze to death in the wilderness one by one. Next, the breath of death spreads into the city, and the refugees who fled to the city early to be placed in schools and squares are also frozen to death in their frozen rooms due to the lack of stoves and food.

The widespread famine soon spread to the city centre. Although the Soviet government provided a supply of 125 grams of bread per person per day, this was only equivalent to the supply of a slice of bread at the moment, and did not solve the problem of people's survival.

During the days and nights of the siege of Leningrad, the hungry citizens of Leningrad thought of many ways to fill their stomachs.

They ate the leaves, then the weeds, and finally the wildflowers in the cemetery. "In the summer of '42, the whole city was gray, and everyone ate up the leaves and grass." The old man told Sun Hui that because there was no food, he often saw hungry rats in the corner of the kitchen.

Compared to ordinary citizens, Ravnia's family has many more ways to find food.

"Mom is great." Jophnia remembers the food for the first half of the family that year.

Glue soup (a soup made with some flour), grain depot soil (grain can be eaten after being incinerated and soaked into the soil and purified), boiled sweaters (flour was used when washing clothes before the war, and it can be eaten after purification), sawdust yeast flakes (wood is fermented to make yeast).

After all these years, Ruophnia, who is in her 90s, cries when she mentions those days. She told Sun Hui that although the family survived the winter under the control of her mother, her mother did not survive the summer. "The homemade food was not nutritious, and my mother left me with all the bread rations."

In the summer of that year, Jophnia lost her mother.

"You know, people starve to death, first they can't move their hands and feet, then their faces turn black, they lose their teeth, they lose their hair, but their heads can still be used." She told Sun Hui that her mother was lying in bed before she died, and she recited Pushkin's poems to her softly.

After her mother's death, Zophnia's father found a way to survive. The pianist discovered that he could climb over the barbed wire fence and steal carrots and potatoes from the German-occupied fields, as long as he was not afraid of German fire.

In Jophnia's opinion, the days of stealing potatoes were happy. To be able to eat, my father also used potatoes to change a rag doll for himself.

However, this happy time did not last long, and my father died. One of his neighbors, who went with him to steal potatoes, told Jophnia: "Your father stepped on a mine planted by the Germans while digging potatoes, and it was blown away, leaving nothing behind. ”

After her father's death, all the people in the apartment building where Jophnia lived gradually died. The 250 grams of sunflower oil left behind after the death of the last neighbor became Jophnia's food, and by this time, Jophnia had begun to hallucinate frequently under the influence of hunger.

"When I saw bread in the kitchen, I had bread when I walked, and I ate bread in my dreams, and my saliva flowed all over the floor." Ruophnia said to Sun Hui, I must overcome these illusions, or I will die.

Talking about the past, Jophnia always believed that the illusion of food was fatal.

Ruophnia told Sun Hui: "When people hallucinate, they lie at home for a while, and you think you have eaten food, but you don't, so when you wake up, you find that you can't walk, you can't get bread if you can't walk, and if you can't get bread, you can only starve to death." ”

She said that at that time, many mothers gave food to their children, and it was often the adults who died and the children lived.

One of her friends died, and the child was sent to an orphanage, where the child starved to death. "The reason is that the director of the orphanage starved to death first."

In the autumn of '42, the constant hunger made the magic of a loaf of bread work unimaginably in the city of Leningrad.

Many police officers also starved to death, and society fell into a state of semi-chaos. It's fine during the day, but at night for a piece of bread, hungry people go crazy, and there are frequent robberies and murders against bread. More than 3,000 robbers, thieves and murderers were executed by the police during the war, which is 100 times the number before the war.

People get crazy for a piece of bread. Jophnia said that her two friends were very elegant people before the war, but that both were executed by the police during the siege. The first person turned into a thief, and every night he went to the frail old man's house to grab the food card. The second, a girl, reported to the government that she had adopted many orphans, but the police found many of the children's bodies in her home. "She starved the children to death and ate the children's bread herself."

It was a terrible thing to faint on the street. The bread on the body will be snatched away and the clothes will be stripped naked. "I've met several times that as soon as a person faints, his clothes are stripped of by the people who come around, and he quickly freezes to death."