Tanya Savicheva
January 23, 1930 — July 1, 1944
Tanya Savicheva was a Soviet Russian girl whose nine handwritten pages, recording the dates of death of every member of her immediate family during the German Siege of Leningrad, became one of the most powerful and heartbreaking documents to emerge from the Second World War — a child's witness to catastrophe, preserved in a small notebook that is now among the most visited objects in the museum history of the war.
A Leningrad Childhood
Born on January 23, 1930 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Tatyana Nikolayevna Savicheva grew up in a large, close family in the city. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Leningrad was quickly surrounded; by September, the city was completely encircled by German and Finnish forces, and the nearly 900-day Siege of Leningrad had begun. The siege was one of the most catastrophic events of the entire war: approximately 800,000 to 1 million civilians died in Leningrad during the blockade, the majority from starvation. Tanya was 11 years old when the siege began. Her father had died before the war; her mother, her siblings, her grandparents, and her aunts and uncle were all in the city.
The Diary
Beginning in December 1941, Tanya began recording the deaths of her family members in her sister Zhenya's address book, using each letter of the alphabet to begin each entry. The entries are as brief and bare as registry records: "Zhenya died on December 28th at 12:30 in the morning, 1941." "Grandma died on January 25th at 3 o'clock, 1942." "Lyosha died on March 17th at 5 o'clock in the morning, 1942." "Uncle Vasya died on April 13th at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, 1942." "Uncle Lyosha died on May 10th at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, 1942." "Mama died on May 13th at 7:30 in the morning, 1942." "Savichevs died. Everyone died. Only Tanya is left." She was 12 years old. The diary fills nine pages. There are nine entries.
Did You Know?
Tanya was evacuated from Leningrad in 1942 with other children but was already gravely ill from dystrophy, tuberculosis, and the long-term effects of starvation. She never recovered. She died in a children's home in the Gorky region on July 1, 1944, at the age of 14. Unknown to her, her sister Nina and her brother Mikhail had survived the siege — Nina had been evacuated before Tanya began her diary, and Mikhail had been wounded at the front. Neither sibling knew the other had survived until after the war. The diary was found in the Savicheva apartment and given to historians.
Symbol of the Blockade
Tanya's diary was submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1946, presented alongside other documentation of German atrocities during the siege. Pages from the diary are displayed at the State Memorial Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad in St. Petersburg, where they draw visitors from around the world. A minor planet, 2127 Tanya, was named in her memory. Monuments to Tanya Savicheva stand in St. Petersburg and in other Russian cities, and her diary is read in Russian schools. She died on July 1, 1944, and her nine pages remain, as they have always been, among the most direct and devastating records of what the Siege of Leningrad did to the people who endured it.