← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
The botanists of besieged Leningrad
00:38:16
Simon Parkin reveals the remarkable story of the world's first seed bank and its extraordinary survival against the odds during the siege of Leningrad Between 1941 and 1944, the city of Leningrad was subjected to a brutal siege by Nazi Germany.
Loading summary
Transcript31 lines
- [00:00]
Home Depot Advertiser
It's Spring Black Friday at the Home Depot. So what are you working on? If you're sprucing up your lawn, you know there's no such thing as too much mulch, so don't miss this special. Buy five bags of Scott's EarthGrow mulch for only $10 at the home Depot. Promote healthier soil, prevent weeds, and beautify your yard with mulch that maintains its color for up to 12 months. Shop 14 days of deals during spring Black Friday, now through April 16th at the Home Depot.
- [00:30]
McDonald's Advertiser
McDonald's meets the Minecraft universe with one of six collectibles and your choice of a Big Mac or 10 piece McNuggets with spicy nether Flame sauce. Now available with a Minecraft movie meal.
- [00:42]
Susan Ettlinger
At participating McDonald's for a limited time. A Minecraft movie only in theaters. The PC gave us computing power at home, the Internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language using our own senses. But but figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift, a new podcast for Microsoft Azure. I'm your host Susan Ettlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.
- [01:49]
Simon Parkin
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Between 1941 and 1944, the City of Leningrad was subjected to a brutal siege by Nazi Germany. Cut off from the outside world and with food and other essentials dwindling, it's estimated that upwards of 1 million people died. Yet throughout this ordeal, a group of indomitable scientists overcame hunger and injury and and risked their lives to protect the world's first seed bank. Danny Bird speaks to the writer Simon Parkin about the Plant Institute's pioneering work and the astonishing fortitude of the Men and women who fought to preserve a unique botanical collection amid unimaginable conditions.
- [02:45]
Interviewer
How did you first come across this remarkable piece of history?
- [02:48]
McDonald's Advertiser
So I was reading a newspaper article several years ago about a land dispute in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. Really scintillating stuff. But the piece is all about how developers wanted to put up some apartments on this land about 20 miles outside of St. Petersburg. And there was a big outcry in the scientific community because this land happened to be owned by the Plant Institute, the world's first seed bank. And in the 1930s and 40s, the botanists who worked there had planted lots of rare seeds and plants in this particular area. And so, you know, fast forward to today, and there's lots of very rare trees here, you know, exactly on the place where they wanted to put up these buildings. So there was a big outcry saying, you can't build here. That would be, you know, scientific crime, crime against science. And there were just a couple of lines in the newspaper article saying that also during the Second World War, a team of botanists at the Plant Institute had defended the seed collection there with their lives while facing starvation. And it was kind of a throwaway comment, but the sort of thing that as a writer, a journalist, or someone who writes stories about this war, who was interested in people, it just grabbed my attention. And that sent me off trying to find everything I could about their story, which resulted eventually in this book.
- [04:10]
Interviewer
Brilliant. And we should talk about how the seed bank came into existence.
- [04:14]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yeah. So there was a sort of prototype version of it in the very early 20th century. And there was a scientist there who had the idea to try and collect seeds from all around Russia and bring them to this building that he was running in the city where he could study them. And up until the time of the Revolution, he amassed around 12,000 different kinds of seeds just from Russia. Then the revolution happens in what was at that time known as Petrograd. It's a little confusing. The city's got three names. Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg. The revolution happens and there's starvation across the city. And in fact, looters get into the building and eat some of the seeds. And around this time, Nikolai Vavilov, who is an explorer and an educator working at the University of Saratov, receives a letter from the Institute inviting him to come and essentially take it over. And so he gets on a train with 27 of his students, and it's a very long train journey, and then arrives at Petrograd with walks into the building and finds out that this little nascent collection has all but been destroyed. And he then immediately sets to work. He's like, right, we're going to take the embers of this enterprise and turn it into the world's leading seed bank. And so for the next 15, 20 years, he and his colleagues mount expeditions all around the world to five continents. And wherever they go, they're looking for seeds and plants, particularly wild varieties of wheat and rye and barley and oats. And yeah, they bring them back to the middle of the city. By this time they've taken over, you know, two story palace off St. Isaac Square. And there they catalog their seeds, they put them in little tins, they're stored and they undergo scientific experiments. And Vavilov's aim is really to cross breed different varieties of possibly overlooked crops to make super crops, as we would term them today. So types of wheat, for example, that are disease resistant or have a very high yield. So that's really how it comes about. And Vavalo is very successful in this aim and his. It doesn't take long until the seed bank becomes world famous. And he does as well. He's doing so much foreign travel, meeting people wherever he goes. And so in 1933, the Times newspaper in London describes the collection as the world collection of plants. So that just shows how quickly he and his team were able to build up this seed bank.
- [06:55]
Interviewer
And presumably given that level of prestige, it had support and endorsement from the emerging Soviet state in the 1920s.
- [07:02]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yes, that's right. Certainly in the early years. Favelov is being funded by the state and that's why he's able to make his trips overseas and has this funding and has this fantastic premises right in the middle of the city. That does start to change though, in the 1930s. And partly it's Ravalov's sort of fame on the international stage that's to blame for that. Stalin becomes suspicious of how often Vavilov is traveling. I suppose there's also some envy from some of his peers, say, look, you're spending all this money sending Vavilov and his colleagues overseas and you know, what are we getting in result for that? And also, you know, science is highly politicized at this time and Vavilov falls foul of some of those machinations and as a result, his star starts to fall in the latter half of the 1930s, culminating in fact in his arrest in 1940. He's out collecting samples on a mountainside near Ukraine and a black car pulls up with three shady looking characters and It's a Vavilov. You're needed with us on urgent business in Moscow. Can you come? And he gets in the car. But of course, it's a ruse. And these are members of the nkvd, the precursor to the kgb. And they arrest him. He's then interrogated brutal interrogations that people will be familiar with, with hearing those stories from this era. And then he's put on a trial and found guilty of spying for the British, which was not true, and he's sentenced to death. So by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, VAV is no longer on the scene. He's in prison awaiting execution.
- [08:48]
Interviewer
And we will come, of course, more onto Vavilov momentarily. But before we dive into the story of the Institute and the scientists who work there, I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about how Leningrad came to be under siege in 1941.
- [09:02]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yeah. As you said earlier, for the first part of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are allied. It's a very shaky alliance, of course, because they're ideologically at either ends of the political spectrum, but they do have this agreement. And Stalin, I think, probably believed that Germany was going to tear up that promise and attack the Soviet Union at some point, but perhaps not until much later. And in fact, Germany amasses its troops on the eastern border. Stalin receives lots of warnings from his various spies that he's got saying this is happening, but for whatever reason, chooses not to believe them and chooses not to act on them. So in the summer of 1941, the German troops invade the Soviet Union, and they're met with very little resistance from the Red Army. The preparations have not been made. And for this reason, this huge amassing of German forces, I think it's the largest force ever gathered. It certainly was up until that point. Makes very, very quick work heading into Russia and tearing across the country. The plan that comes from Hitler is that the German army is not to advance on Moscow until the city of Leningrad is taken. And there are various reasons for this, but primarily it's because Leningrad is the city from which Communism Bolshevism has arisen. So it's got symbolic value for Hitler to take it out. And so a third of the German force makes its way toward Leningrad, and it's really only a matter of weeks until they arrive in the suburbs. Certainly by August, they're starting to, you know, they're met with a little bit of resistance along the way, but it's a fairly steady, inexorable advance. And it gets to the beginning of September 1941, and the German troops make the decision. Their leaders make the decision that rather than storm the city, they're going to set up a siege ring around it. Of course, you know, age old military tactic to besiege a city and essentially soften up the people living in there, the military forces there, and to stop food and supplies entering the city. And so the idea that when the city is then weakened, it will be much easier to take and there will be far fewer losses. And so that's what happens. The siege begins in September 1941. The German troops almost completely surround the city. There is the very large lake borders one area of the suburbs, but the amount of food and supplies that are able to get into the city are minimal by this point. And all the while as well, throughout September, the German planes are dropping bombs on the city as well. So it's really an assault not only through weapons, but also through the blunt instrument of starvation. And hunger begins in earnest as soon as the siege rings. Closes.
- [12:12]
Interviewer
This must have been a massive undertaking. What was the most surprising or unexpected discovery you made during your research?
- [12:18]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, it's a curious one because in a way, the siege of Leningrad is very well documented. It wasn't for a while because there was essentially a statewide cover up to, you know, minimize the amount of casualties and the suffering that had happened in the city. But by the 1960s and 1970s, people who kept diaries, there were around 3 million people, people living inside the city during the siege. And of course, many of them are keeping diaries and records of what they're going through. And these start to come to light in the 1970s and 80s. And so there is a huge amount of documentary evidence just from ordinary people, what it was like throughout September, October, November of the first few months of a siege, as their cupboards start to run dry, as they start to face the terrible decision of maybe butchering their pets or doing whatever it is that they need to do in order to get some calories into their bodies to prepare for the winter. So on the one hand, you've got this huge amount of diaries and memoirs to go through, many of them dated by the day. So you can really see how things progress and that narrative becomes very clear. Then on the other hand, the botanists who work at the Plant Institute did not keep the same kind of records, none of them, or if they did, they've never been seen. And so they did keep much drier records of, you know, whenever an incendiary bomb landed on the institute roof or anything like that. But, yes, I was much more reliant on, I suppose, the things that they wrote in the years afterwards which were much more staid. And perhaps because they were government employees, you didn't get this sort of human sense of what it was like to be in a seed bank surrounded by all this food while the city is starving. But nevertheless, you know, in some of their recollections were completely startling. There was one extraordinary act of heroism that came from two of the botanists who, just before the siege ring closes, decide to travel to Pavlovsk, which is the little village or town in the suburbs of Leningrad that I was talking about right at the start, where the Plant Institute had a field station where they planted out their potatoes and did loads of experiments. And they decide that these varieties, I think they had around 6,000 varieties of potatoes, many of them very fragile, from South America, from their collecting trips. They're in the ground or in special plots in this field station, and they don't want them to be trampled by the advancing German forces. They don't want them to be dug up or anything like that. So two of the botanists start to mount this rescue attempt for the potatoes. And Abraham Kamaraz, one of them, is in Pavlovsk as the German army enters the town. He's digging up potatoes, putting them in burlap sacks, when they start shelling the fields where he's working. And he's actually knocked to the ground in the explosion of one of these blasts and knocked unconscious. When he comes to, he sort of checks himself over, sees he's not wounded, and puts all of the potatoes he'd been collecting back in their sack and then makes his way back to the city, you know, really well, only 500 meters or a kilometer away from the German troops. So there are moments like this of extreme high drama, even though writing about scientists, not soldiers. And so some of those stories certainly were amazing to uncover.
- [15:46]
Interviewer
As you've mentioned, one of the central figures in this story is Nikolai Vavilov. His vision for preserving plant biodiversity was truly ahead of its time. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about his legacy and why his work was so revolutionary.
- [16:00]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yeah, well, Vavilov, as I said, he was a well liked, well regarded scientist. He'd studied in the UK at Cambridge, he visited the us so he had very good connections. He was a member of the New York Geographical Society, honorary member of the American Botanical Society. So he had all of these connections with scientists around the world, and his work was pioneering because he had this principle, this idea that hundreds of years ago, when farmers were selecting the seeds that they were going to use for crops to create the food that would feed populations and offer food security, his theory was that when the farmers had been selecting these crops to use to plant out their fields, they may have overlooked wild varieties of crops that had particular qualities that would be useful to farming. So this might be a wild variety of wheat that was particularly resistant to the cold or to diseases or had a slightly higher yield than perhaps the ones that they selected. So his idea was to visit remote areas, try to find these wild varieties of plants and see if he could then cross breed them with the ones that were being used by farmers, which was, I suppose, you know, the precursor to much of the farming that is done today. These are the same principles that are being used to give us the wheat, that gives us the bread that we eat every week today. And he was also motivated by this idea of trying to build up a library of seeds and plants in the event that habitat was lost. That through warfare, through human habitation, through the expansion of cities, whatever it may be. And of course, this work is extremely. Was prescient and is what so many botanical scientists and seed banks are involved in today, the preservation of threatened types of plants. So yes, in that, in that sense, his work was extremely pioneering. And the legacy is that, you know, so many of the plants and seeds that he discovered and put in the seed bank in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, are. He was proved correct. I think 90% of the seeds and the planted crops that are held in the seed bank today are found in no other scientific collection in the world. So that just shows the power of his foresight and legacy, I think.
- [18:28]
Susan Ettlinger
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out well? With the name your price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance and they'll help you find options within your budget. Try it today@progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliate price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
- [19:00]
Home Depot Advertiser
When you think about super successful businesses that are selling through the roof like Heinz or Mattel, you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But there's a secret. The business behind the business making selling simple for them and buying simple for their customers. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify, upgrade your business and get the same checkout as Heinz and Mattel. Sign up for your $1 per month tr period@shopify.com promo all lowercase go to shopify.com promo to upgrade your selling today.
- [19:34]
Interviewer
Shopify.com promo and of course you've mentioned that he met a very sad and tragic demise, as was, well, fairly typical of this era for a lot of people operating within the Soviet apparatus. Could you go into a little bit more about what it was like to work in the Institute during these years of Stalin's burgeoning terror and paranoia? What was it like for the scientists working there alongside Vavilov?
- [19:59]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to know for I suppose the, the average worker or department head what it would have been like, how aware they would have been of the pressure that Vavilov was under in the mid-1930s. But there was certainly a sense that Vavilov and his adherents, people who were loyal to him and followed his scientific principles, they certainly would have been aware that they were increasingly in opposition to the state's aims and favor. There was a peasant botanist called Trofim Lysenko who held very different scientific ideas to Vavilov. He believed that plants acquired the characteristics of the environment where they were placed or planted. So, you know, if you planted a seed in a particular cold area, then it would sprout and it would inherit the qualities of being resistant to the cold simply because of the environment in which it was placed. Whereas Vavilov believed that these traits were passed down via genetics. So these were two very different principles. Lysenko had various things going for him in terms of the Soviet regime. He was firstly came from peasant stock, which made him more well aligned with the communist principles than Vavilov, who came from a more well to do family. And crucially, Lysenko estimated that his plant breeding schemes would yield much greater results in a much shorter amount of time than Vavilov's. So, you know, just in that very practical sense where the Soviet Union has experienced since the late 1800 these repetitious waves of famine. And Stalin wants to find a way to eradicate these waves of hunger and famine. Lysenko's principles are very attractive. So for this reason as well, his ideas are promoted and Trofim finds himself propelled through the ranks while Vavilov's star falls. So I think there would certainly be an awareness from Ravalov's colleagues and the people who are working under him that their leader is increasingly out of favor and the amount of trips that he's able to do declines throughout the 1930s. And Vavlov's health also is greatly affected by the stress that he's under. And as well, even within the Institute, there is quite a lot of political wrangling where you've got Lysenko and his adherents. There are factions of those even within the Institute in the years leading up to the siege. So, yes, it was. Was fraught, I would say.
- [22:43]
Interviewer
What struck me most whilst reading the book was the sheer dedication of the scientists working in the Institute. They were literally starving during the siege, of course, and yet they refused to eat the very seeds they were safeguarding throughout it. What do you think drove them to such extreme levels of self sacrifice?
- [22:59]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yeah, this is the key question, I think. So the reality is that by the winter of 1941, food supplies in the city have completely emptied. People are actively starving, even on the rations that they're receiving are insufficient to keep a human being alive, even aside from the fact that it's a historically brutal winter. So when you're consuming even more calories just by virtue of trying to stay alive in such cold temperatures, and the botanists make this collective decision that they're not going to touch any of the seeds. So by this point, there are more than quarter of a million seeds and plants inside the Institute in little tins. Many of them are edible. There are nuts and things that they just could have taken off the shelf and eaten on the spot that would have prolonged their lives. And yet they make this decision that they're not going to eat any of them. And they gather up the sees and they put them in two of the rooms, stack them up and then bolt the doors shut so that no one can get in and touch them? And what is it that drives them to make this decision that results in the loss of life of 19 of the botanists who work there? Some of them die while at their desks, while continuing their work. Abraham Camaraz is perhaps the most startling example of this, who is found at his desk. And when one of his colleagues tries to rouse him by shaking his shoulder, a packet of almonds spills out of his his hands. And it's clear that Alex Stutchkin, his name was, that Alexander has died while at his desk, while sorting through these almonds and cataloguing them. So what is it that would lead you to make that sort of decision? They do have discussions about what they're going to do. And after the end of the siege, some journalists do ask the scientists, what is it that that drove you to this decision. And I think it's various things. Firstly, when you're actively starving and your mind is not as sharp as it should be, and you don't really know what you should be doing, having a very clear, simple purpose every day is actually really helpful and even perhaps life saving. So they knew every day my job is to get up and not eat the seeds. And that, I think, gave some of them a clarity of purpose that other people lacked in the city and perhaps succumbed to death more quickly as a result. They also knew that some of these seeds were irreplaceable, priceless, that in many ways this was like the museums in Leningrad in that just as those famous paintings could never be replaced and were priceless, so some of these seeds, the habitats had been lost where they had been collected, and there was no way to get them back. So eating them would have been a betrayal of that work and of their colleagues. And also there's just this sense that this was their life's work. After the war, a journalist says, why did you choose not to eat the seeds or give them to the starving people? And one of the botanists says, well, look, you're a writer. If you'd spent 10 years working on the manuscript for your book, and you had just one copy of this manuscript, and you're freezing to death, and it's the only thing you have to hand to burn to give you some warmth and keep you alive, would you burn that manuscript or would you not? And he says, well, maybe you can now understand why we chose not to eat the seeds, because to do so would have just torn up and destroyed our life's work.
- [26:35]
Interviewer
The seed of Leningrad was lifted in 1944. And you've mentioned that journalists were interviewing the scientists after the war, and just how widespread was their story known? The work they were doing was that well known within the Soviet Union?
- [26:50]
McDonald's Advertiser
No, it takes years for the story to begin to emerge for various reasons, but partly because the huge number of deaths. You know, by most conservative estimates, around three quarters of a million people died in the siege of Leningrad. And some historians have certainly made the case that there was no need for such widespread death in the city, that if the city's authorities had been better organized, if they had acted sooner to build up the stores of food, then far fewer people would have died. So for some of these reasons, I think the story of what had happened in the city is, to a certain degree, repressed. The first stories of what happened at the Plant Institute start to emerge in the 1960s. Again, it's complicated by the fact of what happened to Nikolai Vavilov, because he also starves to death while in prison before the end of the war. And that is as well, quite embarrassing for the Soviet Union because you've got this great scientist who had been charged with crimes that he did not commit and then essentially murdered by the state, and they don't especially want that story coming out. It takes many years for that story to emerge. And in fact, it's only because of the dedicated worker of a Russian academic called Mark popovsky in the 1960s that we even know that story. He manages to get access to the NKVD papers against all the odds and manages to write a book and smuggle it out of the Soviet Union. So the story of, you know, of course, the institute's founder and then of his acolytes as well, takes a long time to emerge. In the 1960s, two of the more senior members of staff do write chapters in a book about the siege where they talk about some of the things that they did. And eventually, by the 1980s and 1990s, there's been work in Russia to change the narrative about Vavilov and to view him, to herald him as a hero. And so, as soon as that starts to happen, I think the full story of the heroism of the botanists who worked for Vavilova is free to start to emerge. But even so, I think this story is well known around plant scientists, people who work at seed banks, because it's obviously a story of bravery and sacrifice by people who share that profession, but outside of that small community, it's not well known at all. And I think even people who know lots about the siege of Leningrad might not know this story. And there is only. Only ever been one book in Russia, written in the late 1970s by a journalist from Pravda who interviewed some of the survivors. It's a short, almost like a pamphlet, and that's really the only book that had been written about what had happened. So, yes, this, my attempt to try to reconstruct what it was like week by week, is the first one, certainly in English, I think. So it just shows you how little I think this story has been celebrated, when, for me and for many other people, it's just a story of tremendous heroism and bravery from ordinary people.
- [30:01]
Interviewer
Absolutely. It's incredible how this historical event resonates with some of the challenges we face today, whether it's food security, the role of science and policy or even the threat to biodiversity. And were you aware of these things and these modern parallels, whilst you were writing the book?
- [30:18]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And I did, you know, as part of the research for the book, go to visit the Millennium Seed bank, which is in Surrey. It's run by Kew Gardens, and they have an almost identical mission to vavilof from the 1920s and 30s. They're particularly interested in collecting wild varieties of seed from threatened habitats, and they've been engaged in that work for the last 25 years. And going to see. I visited Wakehurst and met one of the botanists there who led me down. And you walk through this sort of almost bank vault door with a huge. One of those big wheels that you turn and it's bomb proof and fireproof and flood proof and all of those things. And you walk in and then you can look into rooms where they have boxes or tins or jars of seeds arranged very neatly in rows on the shelves. And it was astonishing to see almost an identical site to the rows of tins that Vavilov had in the 1930s and with such a similar mission and aim. And there had obviously been collections of seeds prior to Vavilov's work. But the term seed bank, I think, has used. Used for the first time in Russian, referring to Vavilov's project. So this was really the template, I think, for so much work that's done today and for the famous Svalbard Seed bank, whose founder is, of course, very aware of Vavilov's institute and the work that they've done. And in fact, was one of those scientists who I mentioned right at the start, who came out saying, you can't build apartments on this land. He was one of the main voices in that, was the founder of the Svalbard Seed Bank. So there are all these amazing threads that run from the 20s, 30s and 40s through to the work being done today by botanists and scientists around the world. And I think that's particularly why this story is so meaningful to that community of people and so inspiring.
- [32:25]
Interviewer
Finally, Simon, what do you hope people take away from this harrowing story?
- [32:30]
McDonald's Advertiser
It is a harrowing story that's true. And obviously there was so much death and suffering during the siege. And the brutality of a siege is undeniable. And sieges continue to happen today. And it is one of the worst things, I think, that human beings can do to one another. And I do not shy away from that in the book and try to show what it's like and try to, I think, inevitably, from a position of historical remove when you're reading about these things, when you're Reading about people going into the center of the city and posting up advertisements on lampposts saying, well, you know, does anyone want to trade my typewriter or my sewing machine for half of a loaf of bread? You know, we can very quickly imagine what it would be like for us to live through a siege today. And we can imagine how long do we think we could survive for on whatever rice and pasta we have in our cupboards? How long until we're having to look down the back of the sofa or through the Christmas decorations to see if there are some old almonds, which is something that happened during the siege of Leningrad. So there are all these. Even though we're talking about a story from 80 years ago, it's still very relatable in some ways and awful. And I think, you know, it's good to be reminded of how quickly we could find ourselves in those situations, how fragile food security is, how it doesn't take much for those systems to break down and suddenly for there to be no food in our local supermarket and what effect that would have. And then to add to that, just to juxtapose all of that misery and hopelessness with the nobility and the bravery of this group of people who were so dedicated to their mission that they chose death in some cases rather than betraying what they were doing. And I think that just brings to life the ordinary heroism of some people. You know, there are so many books that talk about the heroism of soldiers, which is of course something that should be celebrated. But I was interested in this book at looking at, you know, how sometimes these conflicts can provoke in just ordinary people incredible acts of nobility and bravery and fortitude. And so I hope that's what people take from it.
- [34:52]
Simon Parkin
That was Simon Parkin, award winning writer and journalist whose book the Forbidden Garden of Leningrad is out now published by Hodder and Staughton. Simon has appeared on the podcast previously to discuss his book A Game of Birds and Wolves. Search for real life battleships, the sea that countered German U boat attacks during World War II. To bring that up. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.
- [35:26]
Susan Ettlinger
Thanks to VA I have a place to call home with the VA home loan and education with a GI Bill, the highest quality, most affordable healthcare and the financial support I need to manage the disabilities that I have for my service. Get what you earned. Visit choose.va.gov not all veterans are eligible.
- [35:40]
McDonald's Advertiser
For the type or amount of benefits mentioned here.