Planting potatoes, unearthing the past

As I dug the potatoes in, pulled thistles, and checked on the clusters of radish seedlings, I thought a lot about my Russian grandmother and her time as a World War II evacuee in the Ural Mountains. How she fed her family, the stories I’ve heard about their existence on little but potatoes and mushrooms, their almost complete lack of meat. What would she have given then for this kind of abundance? For a valley so rich in food that even my purchased dirt now comes solely from a small business that picks up and composts local food waste?

In late August 1941, as Germany’s Army Group Nord closed in around Leningrad for what would turn out to be an almost 900-day siege, my grandmother was evacuated from the city with her two small children, my aunt and uncle. They were on posledni poezd, my father has told me, the last train out of the city.

Over a decade ago, I happened to be in St. Petersburg and had a chance to sit down with my father and his brother and record some of my uncle’s memories of this time, with my father translating because my uncle doesn’t speak English and my Russian is elementary at best. It might be the only conversation of that kind my family will ever have a record of, and listening again to their exchanges and infrequent laughter, even interrupted by my own occasional stumbling Russian and the sounds of my aunt in the kitchen, feels like a small treasure.

There is a lot of documentation about the siege (I recommend Anna Reid’s Leningrad over Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days but it depends on your taste; I prefer stories about real people’s lives and experiences rather than extensive details of troop movements, plus Reid had access to far more documentation released after 1991), but asked my uncle for stories because I wanted to have some feel for what my own family had been through. How my grandmother coped in that time.

There are only so many details you can glean generations-removed from any experience. My father and uncle both said that the adults who’d lived through the siege and its aftermath almost always refused to talk about it. Many hadn’t survived, and if they had, that was what they wanted to focus on—not uncommon among generations who’ve lived through an enormous collective trauma.

Those of us who want some intimacy with the stories that live within us have to make do with what’s given. It never feels close to enough.

The train journey from Leningrad to a village a few kilometers from Kushva, around 1400 miles away on the far eastern side of the Ural Mountains, took a month. Eight families lived and cooked for that month in a shared freight car, picking up cold and boiling water whenever they stopped at a station. For the most part, my uncle Tolya said, they ate kasha. “Chyordnaya kasha. Ee belie.” Black kasha. And white. Tolya was five. His sister, my aunt Nela, was barely out of toddlerhood. Their father stayed in Leningrad to work at the factory and monitor communications until he ended up in a hospital after almost starving to death and then being bombed into the water on Lake Ladoga’s frozen Road of Life, and my own father wouldn’t be born for another few years.

“Black kasha,” or just “kasha,” is what we call buckwheat. I’ve had it in my uncle’s house served at breakfast or with dinner, steaming hot grains topped with a chunk of butter, laced with salt. Even decades after the Soviet Union fell and people no longer had to stand in long lines for the occasional sausages or bag of fruit, kasha was a staple I’d been accustomed to seeing for almost any meal.

In the 1940s, it was more than a staple. For Leningrad families sent to live as evacuees, kasha was their only caloric intake for a month. And it was far more than my grandfather and thousands like him would shortly have to eat, left behind German lines to keep the Leningrad factories running and eventually die of starvation and cold.

It was one of the most bitter winters Russia had ever experienced. Poor planning, Stalin’s willful ignorance of the realities of the coming battlefronts, and an early-on German bombing of one of the main storage depots had left Leningrad’s remaining residents on rations so scant that starvation starting setting in almost immediately.

Eventually, people were boiling leather for the nutrition. Eventually, they ate bread so high in sawdust as a replacement for flour they might as well have been chewing two-by-fours. Eventually, they starved to death—around 630,000 people over the course of the siege, though some estimates say it was closer to a million. In the first winter in particular it was so cold, and there were so many bodies, that survivors hauled their loved ones across town on child’s sleds to the cemetery where the corpses stacked and piled in their thousands. I’ve been to that cemetery, overwhelmed at the vast space where the city’s starved are honored in long, endless-seeming rows.

My family, like all the others, was boarded in the village with a local family—who resented their presence—and given a plot of land to grow potatoes: two meters by one hundred. “They lived off the land, basically, survived on the land,” my father and uncle told me. “People could live more or less fed only if they have their own potatoes.” My grandmother grew potatoes, chopped wood, and foraged for mushrooms in between working on the factory line as a metallurgical engineer.

“She had bloody hands.”

Transcribing my father’s translation of that line, which my uncle says matter-of-factly, I remembered the first time I ever met my grandmother, when I was fourteen: the tiny pastries she made to welcome us; my younger sister and I helping to make meat-filled pilmeni in her tiny Leningrad apartment where even the stairwell smelled of cucumbers.

These two clips are of my father and his brother talking about the family’s food situation during their years living as evacuees in the Ural mountains. The first is about potatoes and gardening; the second is about lack of meat. Correction to my own translation attempts on that second one: lard isn’t beef fat; it’s rendered pork fat. Suet is beef fat.