BUILDING THE BLOCKADE: NEW TRUTHS IN SURVIVAL NARRATIVES FROM LENINGRAD
The taboo topics discussed by Blockade survivors included wartime KGB
activities, black marketeering, mental illness and perhaps most importantly,
Blockade cannibalism
Speakers often bracketed comments on these topics
with phrases such as "until recently, the truth about this was hidden,"
"for a long time no one spoke of this" or "before, saying
such things was forbidden."
Like these narrative moments, discussion of mental illness and cannibalism
served to expand the images of life during the Blockade to include the
sordid and the cruel
Details of individual encounters with crazy people, or with the evidence
of cannibalism, even if reported second-hand, were incorporated into narratives
in ways which communicated the shock and fear which the narrator experienced
personally
to
barely escape alive when he found a room of butchered corpses behind a
closed door
clipped from: condor.depaul.edu