"Boom." "Crash,"
"Hiss." "Drip." "Boom." "Boom."
All day yesterday I kept looking out the window or looking at the clock. Was it noon? Was I hearing the daily 12 o'clock cannon shot from Peter and Paul fortress? No. It was earlier. Or later. But throughout the day I couldn't help but to look up when the snow slid off our metal roof with a hiss and a swoosh; after the roof cleaners hit the roofs with their shovels, the crash of the snow falling down always seemed too loud; I was worried for their safety. When I looked down I was happy to see that the worst that happened was cars covered in snow; as the weather turned warmer, the dripping we heard on the landing outside of our door slowly came to a stop, while the dripping from the melting icicles only increased.
Then as
I was returning home with Martin in the evening, it sounded like
hundreds of roofs were being cleaned at once. It might seem like a
strange time of the year for fireworks, but January 27 is a special
day in St. Petersburg - "The Day of the Final Lifting of the
Blockade."
Like a
number of holidays here, January 27 is related to the events of World
War II. If you are familiar with the history of that time (and I
personally wasn't until I began to study Russian history), you know
that in 1941-1944 Leningrad lived through one of the worst sieges in
the entire history of warfare. Hitler intended to raze the city, and
thought that the best way to do that was to first starve its
inhabitants to death.
Even
more than 70 years later, signs of the time of blockade are an
important part of the life of the city, from the memorial site with
mass graves of victims (above) to the notice still maintained on
the city's main street, Nevsky Prospekt, that "in case of aerial
bombing this side of the street is more dangerous." The horrors
of this time are almost indescribable. You don't know where to begin
and where to end - with the bread rations that were made with
sawdust? With record cold the city encountered that first winter,
when there were as many as 100,000 victims a month? Suffice it to say
that 8 year-old Martin was crying after school when remembering the
documentary film they watched in class.
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| Much related to remembering the history of "the Great Fatherland War" here seems to me to be unhelpful - not only because it associates greatness with military might but also because the memory of the war is used either to support a rather superficial patriotism based on past achievements or disassociates the country's current citizens with the heroic efforts of the past. Remembering the Blockage of Leningrad, though, is different. I think it is helpful for all of us to think about it. It puts us face to face with the horrors of war. It emphasizes the incredible sacrifice and suffering that humans can endure and from which they can emerge. It helps us to value what we have (to this day it is considered quite immoral to throw away bread in St. Petersburg) and helps us all to keep perspective. |
I didn't
see the fireworks yesterday. It was my impression that they really
weren't meant to be seen, they were meant to be heard. Loud, unusual
noises that are a little scary at first - a boom and a crash and a
hiss to make us think, to make us remember, both the suffering we
cause (there were many Lutherans, after all, who participated in the
blockade - from the Finnish army in the north to the Germans in the
south) and that there is a time when acute suffering comes to an end.
For Christians in Petersburg, thinking about what happened in the
very streets that surround us help us to seek ways to grow in
empathy, to look out for one another, and to have hope that one day
there will neither be the suffering that is a boom and a crash nor a
constant dripping, but that instead the siege of sin will come to an
end, and that we have the privilege and responsibility to live in
that hope today.
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| Last night's historic reconstruction of the celebrations of 1944 |
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