The first winter of the siege of Leningrad was the most terrible. The ring closed already on September 8, and the city was not ready for it. There was no heating in the apartments, there was nowhere to get firewood, and already in November the thermometer began to drop below minus twenty degrees. No electricity, no water, no transport, just constant bombing and shelling. And, of course, those same “one hundred and twenty-five blockade grams with fire and blood in half,” which were very conventionally called bread. There were two weeks in December when cards were not sold at all. Leningraders performed military and labor feats, teenagers stood at the machines instead of older ones who had gone to the front. For children like Zhenya Titova and Yurka Egorov, a real feat was simply to survive until spring, left without adults in the middle of the largest humanitarian catastrophe of the 20th century - the Siege of Leningrad.