Maja Fundová

"Gulags were never discussed, and I later asked my mom why they had not been speaking about them. She told me: 'How can you ask such a stupid question?' How could they talk about it to a child or an adolescent, when the secret police was everywhere, and one could be sent to a camp just for mentioning it? There was no talking about it, not at home, nor within our family."

"Our family was lucky because my mom had set her mind on changing the wallpapers during the summer. Somebody had advised her that instead of buying a special wallpaper glue, she ought to buy pea flour which was allegedly also good for gluing wallpaper. She did so, and purchased several kilos of this flour (...). It was good for us because every day my brother and I would get a full cup full of pea mash. We ate it with bad bread, which was not only scarce, but was also made of bad ingredients...there was very little flour in it, and sawdust or would pulp was added into the dough."

"There is a widespread opinion that there were countless cannibals in Leningrad. That’s not true. There were cases of cannibalism, that is without a doubt. (...) There were three men in Leningrad, possibly from the NKVD, and as soon as it was proven that they were cannibals, they were shot. As for myself, I saw it only once, in front of the bakery as I was walking to school. I saw a man lying there in his clothes. When I was returning from school, the man’s buttocks were not there. They had been cut off. That was the only time I saw it during the entire siege."

"Today is the 9th of February, 2012. We are in Třeboň and I’m ready to talk about the siege of Leningrad which I have experienced. My name is Maja Fundová, my maiden name was Maja Zakirovna Evelit, I’m a Latvian and I was born in Leningrad. My parents divorced early, and there were just three of us who lived through the siege together: my mom, my younger brother and me."