6 June 2014. A Poem by Olga Berggolts. Здесь лежат ленинградцы (Here Lay Leningraders)

Bread During the War

Andrei Drozdov

2005

______________________________

Здесь лежат ленинградцы

Здесь горожане — мужчины, женщины, дети.
Рядом с ними солдаты-красноармейцы.
Всею жизнью своею
Они защищали тебя, Ленинград,
Колыбель революции.
Их имён благородных мы здесь перечислить не сможем,
Так их много под вечной охраной гранита.
Но знай, внимающий этим камням:
Никто не забыт и ничто не забыто.

******

Here Lay Leningraders

Here are city dwellers, men, women, and children
Next to them, Red Army soldiers.
They defended you, Leningrad,
The cradle of the Revolution
With all their lives.
We cannot list their noble names here,
There are so many of them under the eternal protection of granite.
But know this, those who regard these stones:
No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.

Olga Berggolts

******

Just as Leningrad was under siege in the VOV, Slavyansk is under siege today. Just as the Nazis wanted to exterminate their foes, the same is true of the Uniate fascist fanatics. Hero-Slavyansk still stands. By the way, Никто не забыт и ничто не забыто (No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten) is one of the most recognised phrases in Russian. A similar saying is “They all had faces, they all had names”… and Westerners accuse us of lacking emotion.

BMD

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