Excerpt 5: The Concert (Feb. 1)
This is an excerpt from my new book, The Concert.
Based on a true story from World War II, The Concert traces the efforts of a group of musicians, writers and artists to defy Hitler’s invasion of their beloved city of Leningrad and attempts to starve them to death. Caught between the twin tyrannies of Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism, they summoned their strength, against the odds, to perform a symphony written by Dmitri Shostakovich, about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, that lifted their city’s morale. They persevered, and I believe we can too.
If you like this excerpt, please buy the book here. Audio book is available here, but has some glitches (especially chapter 7) that are being re-edited.
Chapter 5: The Invasion, September 1941
The first thing I remembering hearing was the shriek of air raid sirens, waking me. Next came the thud of objects hitting the ground.
“Oh my God, are those bodies?” I yelled, running to the windows. “Bozhe, are they bombing us?”
“Get back from there!” Nikolai shouted.
I looked stunned, immobile. He ran to the windows and buried me in his arms, dragging me to the couch. We spent twenty minutes there, huddled together in fear, listening to a cacophony of sirens, explosions and ear-splitting screams. Later, when I was in the broadcasting booth at Radio Leningrad, I would describe the sound as a dragon’s squeal, with the guttural authority of grief.
But it was really more than that. It was a marker, from one era to another, from peace to war, from family to nation, from relative comfort to abject misery. It was also the day I told Nikolai we were pregnant again. I had waited a few months, to make sure I could hold a child after all the scars of my imprisonment. Now we both worried. Were we crazy to bring an infant into this mad world?
Only the day before, I announced on Radio Leningrad that German troops had encircled the city. After months of gobbling up little towns to our south and east, Nazi panzers had finally arrived at our doorstep. There was a rumor that Hitler had decided not to take our city. In my romantic myopia, I assumed it was because Leningrad was too beautiful to destroy. But no, it turned out it was not our majesty he wanted to preserve but the Aryan blood of his Wehrmacht Army soldiers. So he ordered his troops to encircle Leningrad’s three million residents, to starve us to death.
“You cannot say that the city is now blockaded,” Vadim told me before I went on the air that day. “You cannot say that we are encircled.”
“But we are. The noose is tightening around our city.”
“The Kremlin does not want to frighten people.”
He sighed in exasperation, as if I were a spoiled child who didn’t understand why she couldn’t have any more dessert. “Olga please, if ever there was a moment to stay in Stalin’s good graces, this is it.”
How could I stay in Stalin’s good graces, I wondered, I who had been his prisoner.
I thought back to that day I was arrested. After my release, I had asked Dhazdat what happened to his boxed ears.
“I went to see a doctor. Katarina insisted.”
“Of course. And?”
“The doctor said my hearing would recover, but recommended I avoid bar fights in the future.”
We had laughed about it then. Now I thought it was a good prescription for all of us. Maybe we didn’t start it, but it looked like we were in the bar fight of our lives.
If you like this excerpt, please buy the book here.