Tanya Savicheva

Zhenya was born in 1909 and had left the family home when she married and had moved to Mokhovaya Street, where she continued to live after her divorce.

Zhenya would regularly walk 7 kilometers (4 miles) to the factory where she worked sometimes two shifts a day making mine cases.

After work she would donate blood.

At this point during the siege of Leningrad, food rationing had been reduced to starvation level, and only small but inadequate supplies were coming into Leningrad across Lake Ladoga along the Road of Life.

It is estimated 100,000 people per month were dying from starvation, rations for an adult having been set at 250g (9 oz) of rye bread or half that for children and the elderly.

Her weakened body was not strong enough to stand the blood donations and she died in her apartment, from complications resulting from exhaustion and malnutrition, in the arms of her sister Nina who had been worried when she had not turned up for her shift at the factory and had hurried round to Mokhovaya Street to check on her.

Savicheva began to record the deaths of each family member in her half empty work notebook.

Tatyana Nikolayevna Savicheva (Татья́на Никола́евна Са́вичева), commonly referred to as Tanya Savicheva (January 23, 1930 – July 1, 1944), was a Russian girl who kept a diary in 1942, whilst enduring the siege of Leningrad during World War II.

During the siege, Savicheva recorded the successive deaths of each member of her family in her diary, with her final entry indicating her belief to be the sole living family member.

Savicheva was born on 23 January 1930, the youngest child in the family of a baker father, Nikolay Rodionovich Savichev, and a seamstress mother, Mariya Ignatievna Savicheva.

Her father died when Tanya was six, leaving his widow with five children: three girls — Tanya, Zhenya (Yevgenia) and Nina — and two boys — Mikhail and Leka (Leonid).

Mikhail had left Leningrad before war broke out.

Whilst in German-occupied territory at Kingisepp Mikhail had joined the partisans.

Mikhail's story was not known to the rest of his family who presumed him to be dead.

The family planned to spend the summer of 1941 in the countryside, but the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June disrupted their plans.

All, except Mikhail (Misha), who had already left, decided to stay in Leningrad.

Each of them worked to support the army: Mariya Ignatievna sewed uniforms, Leka worked as a plane operator in the Admiralty, Zhenya worked at the munitions factory, Nina helped in the construction of city defences and worked at the munitions factory with her sister, and her uncles Vasya and Lesha served in the anti-aircraft defence.

Tanya, then 11 years old, dug trenches and put out firebombs.

One day Nina went to work and never came back; she was sent to Lake Ladoga and then urgently evacuated.

The family was unaware of this and presumed she had died.

Tanya had kept a real diary in previous months.

This diary had been a large, thick notebook in which she recorded her day-to-day life, but the family had decided to burn it at some point early on in the siege when there was no fuel left to heat the stove.

Some time after the burning of her diary Savicheva was given a small notebook that had belonged to her sister, Nina, which would later become her diary.

The smaller notebook had been spared the fire and Nina had used it to make notes about the boiler equipment in the plant where she worked.

Nina had not used the alphabetised portion of the notebook.

Tanya wrote her first entry in the diary on or shortly after 28 December.

This first entry concerned the death of her elder sister, Zhenya, which most likely occurred due to severe malnutrition exacerbated by her work at the munitions factory.

Each page had a letter heading; Savicheva chose the page headed by Russian letter ж and recorded the death of her sister with the following statement written probably in blue pencil, in large handwriting which filled the page, "Zhenya died on December 28th at 12 noon, 1941."

From here on, most of Tanya's family also died in quick succession.

Her grandmother, Yevdokiya Grigorievna, died a month later, two days after Savicheva's twelfth birthday, of heart failure, having lost a third of her body weight.

Yevdokiya Grigorievna refused to go to hospital as she felt the hospitals were overrun enough already.

She was buried in a mass grave in what is today's Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery where there is a memorial complex to the victims of the siege.

Savicheva recorded her death under the page heading for the letter Б with the words, "Grandma died on the 25th of January at 3 o'clock, 1942."

Tanya later admitted that at the behest of their grandmother they postponed the burial and kept grandmother's ration card until the end of the month, thus the official date of her death was recorded as February 1, 1942.

On 28 February Nina disappeared.

On the day of her disappearance Leningrad had come under heavy artillery fire and the remaining family presumed her to be dead.

In fact Nina Savicheva had been evacuated without warning across Lake Ladoga on the dangerous Road of Life ice route.

Although Savicheva was rescued and transferred to a hospital, she succumbed to intestinal tuberculosis in July 1944 at age 14.

Savicheva's image and the pages from her diary became symbolic of the human cost of the siege of Leningrad, and she is remembered in St. Petersburg with a memorial complex on the Green Belt of Glory along the Road of Life.

Her diary was used during the Nuremberg Trials as evidence of the Nazis’ crimes.