May 16, 1910
Olga Berggolts, a poet and author of the phrase, "No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten," was born in St. Petersburg.
No, a person should not be afraid of any of his thoughts. Only here is there absolute freedom.
Olga's parents married when her mother was pregnant. Her paternal grandmother refused to let her granddaughter, "conceived in sin," into the house. Until she was baptized, Olga lived in an orphanage.
What can the enemy do?
Destroy and kill.
And just that?
And I can love...
She began writing poetry at the age of six. She graduated from Leningrad University. Her first husband was the poet Boris Kornilov. In 1938, he was accused of ties to Trotskyists and executed.
Prayer is a silver bucket that a person lowers into his depths to draw strength from within himself, from himself, whom he considers to be God.
Her second husband was journalist Nikolai Molchanov. Bergholz lost their child in 1937 while serving as a witness in the case of the writer Averbakh.
Where am I waiting for you, my desired son?!
- In prison, in prison!
You are like a distant fire, my son,
On the way, in the darkness…
In 1938, Bergholz, heavily pregnant again, was arrested in the "Literary Group Case." After being tortured, she gave birth to a stillborn child. She pleaded not guilty. She was released in 1939.
They took out the soul, dug in it with stinking fingers, spat in it, crap in it, then put it back and said: “Live.”
She was the “muse of besieged Leningrad” – she worked on the radio, read reports, poems, and called on the city’s residents to take courage.
And even to those who would like to smooth everything over
in the mirrored timid memory of people,
I won't let you forget how the Leningrader fell
on the yellow snow of deserted squares
She died in 1975. Her archive was confiscated by the authorities. Fragments of her diaries were only published in Russia in the 90s.
I don't know what's more in me—hatred of the Germans or rage, furious, piercing… toward our government. To shit ourselves like that! Maybe we're fighting so shamefully not only because we don't have enough equipment (but why, why the hell don't we have enough? We should have had enough, we sacrificed everything for it!) <…> but also because people were tired long before the war, they stopped believing, they realized they had nothing to fight for.
