"I Still Can't Stand the Smell of Bay Leaves"...

Memories of Serafima Korolyova, a St. Petersburg woman who lived with her family in the Mariinsky Palace during the Leningrad Blockade

As of early 2026, more than 37,000 survivors of the Leningrad Blockade still live in St. Petersburg – people who endured the horrors of life in the besieged city during the Great Patriotic War. Among them is 96-year-old Serafima Korolyova. She spent the first and most brutal months of the blockade in the Mariinsky Palace, which served simultaneously as a hospital and a dormitory, where people starved and froze to death just as they did everywhere else in the city. In this first person account, Serafima Ivanovna recalls how she and her sister were brought back to Leningrad just two weeks after being evacuated, and how the two schoolgirls survived all 872 days of the siege.

This article was originally published in January, in Russian, by The New Tab. 
Text and photos by The New Tab.

When the [Great Patriotic War] began, we were living in the Mariinsky Palace. We had ended up there in the 1930s – Papa, as an employee, was given a spot to live – a tiny corner on the shared kitchen on the second floor. He had gotten work chopping wood and distributing it around to the various rooms. Later, Mama took a job there as a cleaning woman.

When I was five, after I recovered from bronchitis, we were given a separate small room in another wing on the top floor, and we lived there until 1942.

Before the war, my younger sister Kira and I would play in the Mariinsky Palace courtyard with the other children – round lapta, regular lapta, twelve sticks, hide-and-seek. We loved hiding behind the woodpile that Papa chopped. Our childhood was there: always lively, always noisy, and the garden was enormous. What sort of childhood, then, did we have during the blockade?

We didn't really play with toys – we grew up too fast. When the war began, I had just finished fourth grade. I was 12, Kira was 10, and our baby brother Valerik had just been born.

We heard about the start of the war from a loudspeaker – a huge one that boomed all the way across St. Isaac's Square. People came out of their apartments and walked across the square. A large crowd gathered: women were weeping, children were running around and shouting. It was a Sunday. Papa had the day off, and on Monday he went to the military commissariat. I never saw him again.

Our father was a very kind man. We always lived in cramped quarters, but with a great deal of love. Papa often took us for walks or read us books. In those first days, we missed him terribly. We received two letters from him at the front. When there was nothing left to burn, we used Papa's letters to start the stove.

Mama scraped together what she could by working as a cleaning woman. People offered more than once to take her children out of the city, but she didn't want to let us go [alone]. When they began evacuating many of the children, Mama sent us away on the advice of some party official. She was told there was no need to pack anything, and they took us to a village near the Mstinsky Bridge and assigned us to various cottages. This was July of 1941.

We worked in the fields there, weeding flax. I was very energetic about it, and they put me in charge of distributing bread to the other children. For that, I was entitled to a small extra piece, which I shared with Kira. Even then the food was poor – everything was being carted off to the Badayev warehouses.

We had been there [in the village] exactly two weeks when the bombing started in earnest. It was terrifying: just Kira and me, alone, with no family and no one we knew.

I wrote Mama a letter – letters were still getting through at that point – asking her to come and get us. She sent my godmother, and we boarded a train for Leningrad. The raids never let up: the train would start moving and the bombing would begin, and we would all dive into the ditches. When the planes left and the bombing stopped, we climbed back aboard. We'd travel ten kilometers and again a plane would appear. Our train made it through, but the train behind us was destroyed completely.

[The blockade began in September, and as the cold set in, the Mariinsky Palace] children began to die. A child who lived in the next room died very quickly of starvation. Then another room, and then another. I wasn't alone in the building, but fear seemed to settle in all at once.

We lived on the top floor of the Mariinsky. When the bombing began, at first we went down to the air raid shelter – there was even water down there. But eventually we stopped going: getting down was easy enough, but coming back up was another matter. Through the window we watched the Badayev warehouses burn. Our food was going up in flames.

And then things got truly frightening. All of a sudden there was no water, the sewage lines froze, and the cold was brutal. But we didn't regret staying – it was calmer with all of us together.

To take our minds off things, we often listened to the radio. I remember the metronome, but it was Maria Petrova we waited for. She was our favorite – her voice was so pleasant. Kira and I would listen to her, and somehow things felt a bit calmer.

In the evenings we used a smoky little oil lamp in place of a proper light. Ours was homemade, with a small wick, but there was nothing to burn in it – no linseed oil. Yet our neighbor did have some. So I started carrying water for her and taking out her buckets, and she would pour a little oil into a small jar for me, just enough to cover the bottom. That's how we kept the lamp going, until the neighbor was evacuated.

In November 1941 we were receiving just 125 grams of bread [per person]: one dependent's ration card for Mama and three children's cards – 600 grams of bread for the whole family. Nothing else was distributed besides bread. I was the only one who went to get it.

At first, it was handed out at the bakery across the street, but that closed soon enough, and I began making the trip to the shop on Gorokhovaya Street. The bakery opened around nine. There had been no bread for several days, and one morning I came to get our ration, and we stood there pressed together, a big crowd. Suddenly there was a commotion near the salesperson – shouting. It turned out that a boy had grabbed a piece of bread right off the scale and shoved it in his mouth. They were hitting him, but the bread was already in his mouth and there was nothing anyone could do.

I took my bread and tucked it inside my coat for safekeeping. I kept my hand in my pocket – the bread was still warm and smelled wonderful. I couldn't help myself and broke off a small piece; I was so hungry. Then another small piece. I wasn't really eating it – I would tear off a bit of crust and just suck on it. By the time I got home and reached for the bread, there was almost nothing left. I hadn't even noticed how much I'd eaten. I walked down the hall crying, and my voice echoed through the whole building. Mama got frightened and came out to meet me, asking, "What happened, did you lose the ration cards?" And I told her, "No, someone attacked me and tried to take the bread." I didn't understand myself why I lied – I couldn't bring myself to tell Mama the truth. But Mama understood right away that the bread had been torn off little by little by small children's fingers. She didn't scold me, but I couldn't forgive myself for a long time afterward.

When the war began, a hospital was set up in the Mariinsky Palace. There were many wounded, and they had to be fed. One day a truck pulled up to the building with provisions, and I happened to be stepping outside at that moment – I couldn't get through because the truck was blocking the way. I stood there waiting while they unloaded it, tossing down crate after crate, sack after sack. Then one of the workers looked at me and called out, "Catch!" He threw me a fat, bulky package. I caught it and ran straight home, and when I got there and unwrapped the paper, I saw it was bay leaves. Mama was overjoyed. She boiled water with the bay leaves and added crusts of bread to it. She cooked them for about three minutes so they wouldn't fall apart completely and we could still chew them a little. After the war, I always cooked without bay leaves, and to this day I can't stand the smell of them.

Our diet [in the early days of the blockade] was as follows: in the morning, plain tea with a scrap of bread; at midday, soup with bread crusts in bay leaf water and a small piece of bread; in the evening, bread and plain tea. That is how Mama parceled out our 125 grams across three meals.

We were fortunate to have gathered firewood in advance – some had been left over from the previous year – so there was wood in the cellar, and Mama was able to keep the stove going and cook for us.

I felt terrible for little brother. We fed him as best we could: bread scraps packed into a makeshift nipple, warmed water. But he needed milk. Mama had nothing left to feed him with – she had grown so thin that her milk had dried up.

Kira would sit with Valerik by the stove, rocking him with her foot in his little wooden pram – she would slip her foot under it and rock it so he wouldn't cry so much.

One winter evening, Mama's cousin came to visit. She worked as a building superintendent and lived in a small janitor's room on the ground floor of a building on Zhukovsky Street. She took one look at the baby and said he was dying. She gave orders to pack up, leave all the junk behind and bring only what was absolutely necessary. Valerik died on February 13, 1942, just a few days after we moved in with our aunt. He lasted three days there.

Our aunt took Valerik to the hospital, saying he would be taken to Piskarevka for burial in a mass grave. Kira and I watched them load bodies into the backs of vehicles: trucks would pull up, and the dead were thrown into the bed and stacked in rows. It was something terrible.

After we moved to our aunt's janitor's room, I had to go back to St. Isaac's Square for the porridge ration, since we were still registered there.

We had a ration in Valerik's name through mid-March, and I was still able to go and collect it on his voucher. Perhaps the right thing would have been to surrender it so others could use it, but we were so terribly hungry. They would ladle out 200 grams of porridge, just a thin layer at the bottom, but it smelled so good and was so warm. I would stick my finger in the jar right away, lick it off and head home. Along the way, a man sitting against a wall was already dead; another lay on the ground. The road was long and frightening. I made that walk every time, and Mama lived in fear the whole time – afraid I wouldn't make it, that somehow I might be killed.

I remember us boiling carpenter's glue and rendering it into a sort of aspic. I wouldn't touch it – it seemed so inedible to me. But Kira ate some. Then she went back for more and said, "When the war is over, I'm only going to eat aspic made from carpenter's glue." Mama had a ration card for vodka and had traded some of it for the glue.

In the summer of 1942 we gathered chickweed. It's a tiny little plant, the most awful-tasting thing. But there was nothing else – everything within the city limits had been stripped bare, and you couldn't go far. When we found nettles, we made soup. The chickweed we mixed into flatbreads; that was the only way it was edible.

When our aunt was evacuated in March 1942, we had to move out of the janitor's room and into her room in a communal apartment on the fourth floor – a 20-square-meter room with just two neighbors.

We went back to school in September 1942. I started fifth grade, Kira third. We had been enrolled in a new school back in May and were immediately sent to a collective farm near Okhtinskoe Cemetery to work in the gardens. We weeded the beds while being bombed. When the bombing started, we would lie down between the rows in the ditches, cover our heads and wait. From above you we were all plainly visible to the planes circling overhead. Eventually we started hiding in the raspberry bushes so we couldn't be spotted, and we all walked around covered in scratches. And there was so much broken glass in those garden beds. I think I still have scars on my hands.

Later [still during the blockade], children began returning from evacuation and the classes grew larger. I remember [the returning children] taunting us at school, calling us dystrophics. What can you say – they were children. We'd argue and then make up again.

After school we went to the hospital to write letters for blinded soldiers, and to read their letters aloud to them. We helped the wounded, put on small concerts, sang songs. Later I was taken into the medical unit to roll up bandages after they had been washed.

Mama went back to work. For a while she was somewhere knitting socks, then she got a job as a ward attendant for wounded soldiers near Smolny.

The lifting of the blockade was a great celebration. Everyone poured out into the streets – some crying, some laughing, everyone embracing. My friend Sofa and I went out together. We stood by the Palace Bridge and believed that it was all behind us, that a new life was beginning. And life did become more cheerful: we started going to the cinema, the trams were running again, the city was being rebuilt. My friend Sofa and I started going to the theater at the end of 1943. The Theater of Musical Comedy was the only one that had stayed open during the blockade.

I began taking part [in the reconstruction work] when I got my first job in 1945. On top of your regular work, they would send you out for more after hours. I remember being sent to help clear the rubble of Andreyevsky Market that had been on Vaska. Oh, what a sight that was...

When our aunt returned to Leningrad after the war, in the summer of 1946, she filed suit against us for occupying her room. An investigator came to our apartment, threw us out and dumped all of our belongings onto the landing. Our aunt put locks on the door, and by then autumn was coming on, the cold... Where were we to go? Two single women lived in as neighbors to our aunt’s apartment; we had always been on very good terms with them, and they offered to let us stay in their kitchen. We lived there for nearly a year, sleeping in one bed and burning kerosene lamps.

Mama went to the Kuybyshevsky district administration every day seeking help, but they were not able to offer anything. Then one day Mama came home and said they had given us an apartment on Sofya Perovskaya Street – now Malaya Konyushennaya. And off we went. This was December 1947.

As it turned out, the apartment belonged to a military servicewoman. We moved in at the beginning of December, and she showed up at the end of December saying she was the rightful tenant and had a reservation order in hand.

We were evicted. But as luck would have it, there was a storage closet attached to the apartment, about eight square meters. We moved into that little closet and lived there for about six months. It was terrible, of course. But then Mama was called in again about housing and offered a room on Sadovaya Street. The apartment was enormous – nine rooms – but it was livable. The room was bright, with a balcony, and the apartment had a telephone. We lived in that apartment from 1948 until 1972.

Things only began to improve toward the end of the war. But even then, everything was still rationed. In 1946 the first commercial shops appeared, where you could buy certain goods with money, but we lived on ration cards for a long time after that. By comparison with what had come before, the rations were generous.

After seventh grade I went to study cooking. Mama insisted – she said at least I'd always be well-fed. But I didn't like it; everything smelled of food all the time, your clothes smelled. So I stopped going [to class]. My ration cards were taken away because I was neither working nor studying. And so I got a job at the Leningrad House of Trade.

In 1950 I got married, and [my husband] Sasha and I had a daughter, Lera. The four of us lived on Sadovaya Street: me, Sasha, our daughter and Kira – until 1955, when Kira married and moved in with her husband.

Mama had died in 1949. By the time we were given the room on Sadovaya, she was already a second-group disabled person and had nearly lost her sight as a result of the war. They told her it was from the chickweed we had eaten so often during the blockade.

No more word ever came about Papa. It was only in 1945 that Mama began to make inquiries, going to the military commissariat. They sent us a notice saying he had been listed as missing in action as of December 14, 1941.

When I think back on the blockade, my only thought is that nothing like it should ever happen again. It's terrible to recall – sometimes you just don't want to. Children in our time all grew up quickly, they all knew everything. We lived in nine-room apartments with so many people, yet everyone got along. And just look at me and my husband – together our whole lives. It's hard to believe: 74 years together!