Symphony for the City of the Dead

In September of 1941, Nazi troops surrounded Leningrad, a Russian city known as Saint Petersburg. Adolf Hitler’s armada was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history—almost three years of bombings and starvation. In the end, more than a million people died. Survivors recall corpses littering their frozen streets, their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Residents burned books, furniture, and floorboards to keep warm; they ate family pets—eventually—and even other humans to stay alive. Trapped between the Nazi invading forces and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens.