Savina Evgeniya (Zhenya) Nikolaevna_x000D_ _x000D_ My wife Zhenya was 9 years old when the Great Patriotic War began. Her parents urgently took her and her younger brother Borya from a children's summer camp at the end of June 1941. Father Nikolai was drafted into the army, and Zhenya with her mother and brother remained in Leningrad. The war reached Leningrad, German troops sieged the city. Zhenya and Borya's mother taught music and piano, but when the war broke out, she went to work in a defense factory. During the day, she worked at the factory, and in the evening, together with Zhenya and Borya, she went to the roof of the house and extinguished incendiary bombs that the fascists dropped from planes on residential buildings. The children helped their mother by carrying sand from the yard to the roof in buckets. The famine began in Leningrad, the ration was offered by food stamps. In January, a funeral was held for their father, who was killed in the fighting on the Pulkovo heights near Leningrad. My mother was grieving, but had to take care of children. Ration cards were issued for a decade(10 days) and had to be cut into days, but Zhenya's mother forgot to do this in her grief. When she was standing in line at the store, the candle went out at the checkout, and in the dark, my mother did not notice how all her food stamps were stolen. Zhenya, her brother and mother were going to starve. _x000D_ They were offered to be urgently evacuated along Ladoga, the famous Road of Life. The family was driving in the back of a truck on the ice of lake Ladoga, and people sitting next to them were starving on the road. Children saw how cars that were driving alongside, along with people, fall through the ice. It was very scary. Then they were put on a train successfully, but in Vologda, their mother died of dystrophy. Zhenya and Borya were sent to a children's distribution center. Zhenya wrote a letter to her aunt in Kazakhstan. Across the entire war-torn country, a letter written in a child's handwriting reached its recipient. _x000D_ My aunt came to pick them up, but the workers at the children's distribution center warned her that the children were in the last stage of dystrophy, that they would not reach Kazakhstan and would die on the way. But my aunt did everything to save them. She gave starving children only a tablespoon of milk and half a potato, and gradually increased the amount of food so that their exhausted bodies could properly digest food. After the war ended, Zhenya, Borya and their aunt returned to Leningrad. Before the war, the family lived in a separate three-room apartment, but when houses were destroyed by bombing during the war, people had to move in to empty apartments that were not destroyed. So in the apartment there were neighbors. Of the three rooms, only one remained. But they were alive and happy that the war was over. My wife never forgot the horrors of war for the rest of her life.