Washing off the sign which says, "This side of the street is dangerous", after the German threat to the city receded in 1944

"By January 1944, the Red Army had pushed the German army beyond Leningrad allowing the city to celebrate the end of its siege. Alexander Werth was a correspondent for the London Sunday Times and the BBC who accompanied the Soviet troops as they pushed the Germans from their soil. He interviewed a number of Leningrad residents shortly after the siege was lifted.

The Astoria looks like a hotel now, but you should have seen it during the famine! It was turned into a hospital - just hell. They used to bring here all sorts of people, mostly intellectuals, who were dying of hunger. You just stepped over corpses in the street and on the stairs. You simply stopped taking any. It was no use worrying. Terrible things used to happen. Some people went quite insane with hunger. And the practice of hiding the dead somewhere in the house and using their ration cards was very common indeed. There were so many people dying all over the place authorities couldn't keep track of all the deaths..."