My parents were born into Jewish families in Belarus. My mother, Ida Zarhina, was born in the small town of Verkhutin; my father, Moshe (Mikhail) Kunyavskiy, was born in Zhlobin. There were two children in our family. My sister Raisa was born in 1933. During the blockade of Leningrad she became very ill, and during peacetime, in 1955, she died from the long-term effects of the illness she had contracted then. I was born on March 1, 1938, in the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

      When the war started I was three years old. I remember everything that happened to me during that time. The Germans bombed our city heavily. During one of the bombing raids the Germans destroyed the building across from us. My hair turned gray very early. My mother always said it happened because of the stress from the neighboring building being bombed.

      In 1941, the German army drew closer to Leningrad, spreading their forces out more and more, creating a blockade. The city fell into complete darkness, and life was very difficult. The city had Badayev warehouses, food warehouses of a strategic nature. The Germans probably knew about them and bombed them. After the bombing only 25 percent of the warehouses’ provisions were edible, and from that moment on it was difficult to get food.[1]

      The Vitebskaya railroad ran near our home. About half a kilometer from us was a railroad bridge. On the slopes of the bridge, saltbush and nettles grew. My mom would send us there to gather the herbs and make a vegetable soup with them.

      In 1942, the city was completely surrounded, the shipment of food supplies stopped, and there was nothing to eat. Whole families were dying. There was not enough time to bury them. A cemetery where they took the bodies was set up near the town of Piskarevka. Today it is a memorial cemetery visited by those who live in the town or who visit St. Petersburg.[2]

      During the blockade there were prescribed bread allowances: 95 grams per day for children and 125 grams per day for adults. The bread was given out at bakeries, and every day it was necessary to go, stand in line, and get the allowance of bread. Sometimes bread was not delivered. In addition to hunger, another misfortune struck the city: the winter of 1941-1942 was bitterly cold. The water pipes froze, and the city ran out of firewood.

      The historic Road of Life was created by decree of the war council during the winter period.[3]  Brigades of special navy scouts were ordered to find the thickest ice on Lake Ladoga and an exit to the mainland. Large columns of cars drove along the Road of Life providing supplies, equipment and other such items to the city. But this was a very dangerous path, and on the bottom of the lake lie thousands of pieces of equipment. When the Germans attacked and bombed, all of it (the equipment) disappeared beneath the ice.

      In 1942, a decision was made to evacuate the families along this road. At this time my father was serving in the anti-aircraft forces. He built reinforcements, dug ditches, set up barbed wire, and at night shot down explosive bombs. My father did not want us to leave, but he was later compelled to agree.

      We were gathered together and sent to Lake Ladoga. In Kobona (a little village in the federal region of Leningrad), they built a pier, and people were taken to the mainland by boat. I remember that it was raining as we stood on the dock with our things. The next boat came in. People started to board, trying to get in front of one another. My mother spoke from some kind of inner intuition, “Children, let’s not rush. We will get on another boat.”  When that boat was about 300 meters away, all of a sudden a German plane attacked and sank it. That is how we survived; we got onto a different boat and made it to Kuybyshev. From there we were sent by train to the city of Salinsk (now known as Novokuznetsk) in the Ural Mountains. We were there for a year and a half. My mom worked at a mill and came home late at night.

      In 1944, the blockade of Leningrad was lifted and my father started to work on getting us back home. He served in Leningrad the whole time. He has a medal of courage for the defense of Leningrad. In the tradition of remembrance and recognition, I have a certificate as someone who lived in the city when it was blockaded, since I lived there for a year and a half during that time. The building across from us that was bombed remained in the same condition until 1956. We boys played war games there; we made wooden swords and bows from bucket handles.

      In 1944 and the beginning of 1945, German prisoners of war began to arrive. Next to the street where I lived there were barracks that had been built in the 18th century and were being used to house the German prisoners. They were there more than four years, and they compensated for the destruction and aggression by being used as laborers to rebuild the city. They built new buildings and restored the buildings that had been destroyed. Somewhere deep down we boys understood that the pressure and the indoctrination of the political machine made these people fight against us, and that maybe they were not at fault. Our parents gave us rations or sandwiches, and we ran to the prisoners of war and fed them. They were adults, many of them family men, and naturally they felt the loss and missed their children.

     Everyone survived: my father, mother, and my older sister who died in 1955. I went to school, then entered technical school, and later started to work. In 1957, I was drafted into the ranks of the Soviet Army and served for three and a half years in the Urals. I returned and went to work in manufacturing while simultaneously attending school. I graduated from a food technologies trade school. I repaired home refrigerators for 32 years. In 1964 I got married. My daughter Anna was born in 1965, and my son Mikhail was born in 1972. In 1997, our family immigrated to the United States, to the city of Tucson.

[1] The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days and resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Soviet soldiers and civilians.

[2] Approximately 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers are buried in 186 mass graves at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery.

[3] The Road of Life was created across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga, providing the only access to St. Petersburg.