“A Person Becomes Better after a Great Trial” (Tanya Wagner’s Letters, 1939–1945)

Abstract

The article contains letters (1939–1946) of a Leningrad teenage girl Tanya Wagner preserved in her family archive. Most of them were addressed to her mother Maria F. Wagner, deportee after her husband had been arrested and then shot. These letters are at the same time a diary, a chronicle of life in pre War and then besieged Leningrad. The appendix contains an extract from her unpublished memoir on the siege of Leningrad, written in later years.

Keywords

• repression in the soviet union
• the great patriotic war
• the siege of leningrad
• the soviet school