Historian reconstructs shelling of Freindlich family

Valery Grigorchuk, a researcher at the Institute for the History of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, reconstructed the chronology of events on 18 September 1941. That day, the family of future actress Alisa Freindlich survived an artillery shelling by taking refuge in a bomb shelter.

According to the summary of the Leningrad Local Air Defense (MPVO) headquarters, the shelling began at 12:50 when a shell landed 200 meters from house No. 64/1 on the Moika Embankment, where the family lived. At 12:55, two more shells followed, and at 13:07, another shell destroyed the wall between the third and fourth floors. As a result, 15 people were wounded.

Alisa Freindlich later recalled: «During a very heavy air raid, we took shelter in a bomb shelter, our apartment was bombed, and we moved into the room of my father«s brother and his family in a communal apartment in the same building, at the address: Moika Embankment, building 64/1, apartment 2, where we all lived together, huddled in one nest.»

Grigorchuk compared these memories with archival documents. «Thus we connected the memory with the document and obtained a specific place and a specific fact,» the historian explained.

In the course of further research, using house registers and the «Book of Memory of the Siege of Leningrad,» Grigorchuk established that the actress«s second cousin Elvira Bukharina died of starvation during the siege. The names of the girl and her grandmother Anna Friedrichovna Zeits are missing from the official lists of the dead.

Earlier, the «Book of Memory» listed 256 residents of this house who died during the siege. Study of the house registers revealed another 53 previously unknown names. «It is very important for me to collect the names of all those who died in blockaded Leningrad… Working with house registers, in my estimation, will allow us to restore the names of more than 50,000 Leningraders,» Valery Grigorchuk stated.

The historian emphasized that archives make it possible to clarify and supplement memories with exact dates and details that human memory does not always preserve.