"...Save my sad story…": The Siege Diary of Lena Mukhina

The Leningrad schoolgirl Lena Mukhina began to keep a diary in May 1941, not expecting that very soon the entries in this small notebook would turn from a chronicle of youthful love into a chronicle of one of the most... terrible catastrophes in human history and become part of a dramatic collective text called the "siege diaries." What can one oppose to the torment of dying from hunger in conditions where commonly accepted moral norms collapse? What can save one from spiritual degradation in conditions where the struggle for survival strips away the "human face," and hunger and the fear of death turn a person into an animal? One means of salvation turned out to be the orderliness of letters. An attempt to understand what is happening through words, to understand oneself. And also: an intuitive knowledge that one needs to preserve their story, their experience—for others. Today, as more and more siege diaries are transcribed and published, we understand how great the enduring value of these documentary testimonies of a tragic era is. Like Anne Frank's diary, Lena Mukhina's diary rightly belongs among the most dramatic and poignant works of the 20th century.