Elena Aleksandrovna Skrjabina (b. 1906)

Abstract

Skrjabina, a graduate student in French literature, was living in Leningrad when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. She and her family underwent the worst of the siege of Leningrad and were finally evacuated across the frozen Lake Ladoga, eventually winding up in Pyatigorsk in the Caucasus. When that city fell to the invading German army, they escaped once more to the Ukraine where she was conscripted into a labor battalion and ended in a forced labor camp in the Rhineland. After the end of the war, she was able to emigrate with her two sons to the United States, where she became a professor of French at the University of Iowa. Her diary recording her war-time experiences in the Soviet Union was published in English as Siege and Survival in 1971.