CANNIBALS OF LENINGRAD

Alone in her home, 12-year-old Tanya Savicheva scrawled in her diary the words: “The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.” The notebook, in blue pencil filled with misspellings, lists each of her family members who she had seen die of starvation.

First her older sister Zhenya, her grandmother Yevdokiya, her brother Leka, and her two uncles, and finally the entry: “Mama on May 13th at 7:30 in the morning, 1942.” Tanya was alone, abandoned in a city that had been entirely cut off from the outside world. But she was not alone in writing a diary. Across the city, hundreds of people were chronicling the horrors of one of the deadliest sieges in history – the extent of which would not be revealed until decades later.

In spring