Ленинград қоршауындағы Таня Савичеваның күнделігі

Russian diarist and Holocaust victim

Tatyana Nikolayevna Savicheva (Татья́на Никола́евна Са́вичева), commonly referred to as Tanya Savicheva ( – 1944 07 01), 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. 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.

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). 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. 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. 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. Nina had no opportunity to send word to any of her relatives, the ice route being reserved only for essential food, fuel, medicine and evacuation purposes. She remained ill for several months and was not able to return to Leningrad to find out what had happened to her family until 1945. Savicheva made no reference to Nina in the notebook. It was Nina who eventually found the diary on returning to Leningrad. Grandmother's death was followed by Savicheva's brother Leka in March 1942. Nina Savicheva and Mikhail Savichev returned to Leningrad after World War II. Mikhail had continued fighting until 1944, sustaining injuries which led to him being discharged and transported back to Leningrad. According to several sources, one of the documents presented by the Allied prosecutors during the Nuremberg Trials was the small notebook that once belonged to Tanya.

Tanya and her diary have become an iconic image of the victims of the siege of Leningrad in the postwar Soviet Union. In 1968 a memorial was constructed in her honor which was later expanded to a memorial complex. At Krasny Bor cemetery where Savicheva is buried there is a red marble tomb with a grey marble grave stone depicting her image in bas relief, sculpted by T. Holueva. Close by is a tall stele with a monumental wall depicting carved pages from her diary. Serbian poet Mika Antić penned a poem dedicated to Tanya Savicheva named "A lost rendez vous". 2127 Tanya, a minor planet discovered in 1971 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh, is named in her honor. There is also a mountain pass named after her in the Dzungarian Alatau mountain range which lies between Kazakhstan and China. There are memorial plaques on the wall and in the courtyard of her home on Vasilievsky Island, St. Petersburg, and a museum housed in the school she attended. Copies of the diary have been displayed in exhibitions around the world and the original is displayed at The State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg at Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.