The Night of All Things WWII

So, for those who already guessed it, I ended up moving. My recent silence hasn't been due to being busy, however, but rather due to the fact that every time I would try to get on facebook, blogspot or one of an ever growing list of websites, my computer would say that it was busy and then the website would simply die. It was a rather frustrating period of my life...

But while it is still (relatively) fresh, I thought I would like to share one of the last nights I had with my old host mom, which I fondly call "The Night of All Things WWII".

Story One: How Croutons Saved a Family

While Princess and I were eating dinner, my host mom had toasted some bread and was cutting it up. As she filled a small bowl with what basically amounted to croutons, she told us this story:

Once, there was a grandmother in her family who used to take all her bread and toast it. She would cut the bread up, and the family would eat it in soup; and the crumbs from when she would cut the toast, she would feed to the chickens. She would always have one or two foot high piles of toast lying around, because she would always toast her bread; and normally, the family would eat that for dinner.

Well, there was a grandson who was apparently about to graduate from school, and a family tradition was to go out to the dacha. That being said, the grandmother made a ton of the croutons; and then, right before they were able to go to the dacha, WWII broke out. 

Food was horribly scarce, and many people died of starvation. A common food for people to eat was to boil leather for two, three hours and then drink the broth. But because of this grandmother's stockpiling croutons, this family had actual food for the winter; and it was a godsend, because it saved that family from starvation during the winter.

Story Two: A History of Museums During WWII

In the town of Pushkin, there is a beautiful park called "Pavlovsky Park" (I think) with a palace which serves as a museum. This was the first museum to reopen after WWII; and this is the story of why.

When there was word of the Nazi invasion, most of the large museums undertook an evacuation effort for their artwork. The smaller things, they took all the way to the Ural Mountains; the larger things, they either buried, or (like a statue of Lenin that was too big to bury), they built an artificial hill around it. Unfortunately, many of these museums were bombed (Peterhoff was in absolute ruins, for example), and many of the pieces of artwork lost or destroyed. (The firebombing was so bad that there were people who would stay on the rooftops all day and all night with sand, so that if something was firebombed, they could run over and put it out. That's why Russia wasn't destroyed at the time like Britain was.)

The Pushkin Palace, however, was so remote that they were unable to take their artwork to the Urals. They didn't have cars; they didn't have trains. So the workers at the museum took their artwork underground, directly underneath the palace, and built a giant wall in front of all their works of art. Then, they went through the palace and made it look like it was 100 years old, cutting up the curtains with scissors, smearing dirt on everything.

This museum became the Italian headquarters for the war effort. Thus, the palace was saved. Additionally, while every other museum had to wait for their artwork to come back from the Urals, and lost many pieces in the process, the workers of this museum happily went back underground, took down the wall, and retrieved their artwork. All told, they lost exactly one piece.

Additionally, Italian soldiers would cut down trees to send home as souvenirs. However, one woman who worked at the park decided to go through the park and transcribe the location and type of every single tree in the entire park, creating essentially a map. When the Italians left, this enabled the Russians to go through and replant every tree that had been cut down. 

Moral of the story?

Russians have some pretty crazy stories of taking the worst of times and situations and turning them around. If you ever have the chance to talk with a Russian babushka, I'd highly recommend it.