Schoolgirl Lena Mukhina from Leningrad began keeping a diary in May 1941, not realizing that very soon the entries in this small notebook would turn from chronicles of youthful love into chronicles of one of the most terrible disasters in human history, becoming part of the dramatic collective text called "siege diaries." What can be opposed to the agonizing death from hunger in conditions where commonly accepted moral norms collapse?
What can save from spiritual degradation in circumstances where the struggle for survival strips away "human faces," and hunger and fear of death turn a person into an animal? One means of salvation turned out to be the orderliness of letters. An attempt to understand what is happening through words, to comprehend oneself. And also: an intuitive knowledge that one must preserve their story, their experience - for others.
Today, as more and more siege diaries are transcribed and published, we understand how great the enduring value of these documentary testimonies of a tragic era is. Similar to Anne Frank's diary, Lena Mukhina's diary rightfully belongs among the most dramatic and most poignant works of the 20th century.
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