"September 1, 1941. In previous years, this day was the beginning of the school year. I had to sit at my desk in the 9th grade. But the war has changed everything: partisans are sleeping in classrooms, and students are digging anti-tank ditches. Would the classes of 10th begin? I don't think so, the frontline is too close. But I want to study!" wrote Igor Malakhov, a Leningrad schoolboy, in his diary.
But classes, belatedly, began. They began in the following 1942, despite the fact that there were fewer and fewer children in the besieged city, and many schools were bombed or closed. Students of the 208th school of the Kuibyshev district, for example, celebrated the new school year "in a large and cozy apartment of a residential building on the Moika embankment. The classroom rooms are carefully cleaned, washed... all this was done by the hands of teachers and schoolchildren themselves," it was reported in the September 3, 1942 issue of the Uchitelskaya Gazeta, presented on the portal of the Presidential Library.
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