Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War

In the other, smaller room were two elderly men, factory workers. She remembers the fear on her motherБЂ™s face when she said that: БЂњThe walls have ears.БЂ«The school authorities asked her mother to join the party, and she talked about it with her husband, who said that if she joined she would need to attend meetings and would have less time with the children, so she declined the invitation. Years later she told Masha that by not joining, she had probably saved herself, because had she joined she would have risen in the ranks, and all the high party members among her colleagues were arrested and shot. The links to her family in the Ukraine wore thin through the thirties. Her fatherБЂ™s leather shop was taken over by Communists, and in 1939 he died of a heart attack. The rest of the family disappeared into the storm of war. In the early months of the war, with the German Army advancing upon Moscow, the city was at first chaotic, mobs of drunken and hysterical people roaming the streets looking for German spies, and then the streets were suddenly still, no traffic, no pedestrians, and nobody knowing what to do or where to run, and long lines at the bread stores ...»