I finished reading this book for the second time while I was on my last trip, and when I say I read it a second time, I mean it was so fascinating that when it was done, I turned right around and read it again. It’s City Of Thieves, by David Benioff and it’s about Leningrad during the siege of the Germans in WWII when the Germans were invading Russia. The main character, a 17-year old kid, has stayed behind while his family was evacuated, and gets arrested, which typically means an instant bullet in the head. But instead, he’s paired up with a 20-year old army deserter and given the job to find a dozen eggs for a general in 6 days. In a country that is under siege and where most of the people are starving, and if they don’t, they won’t get their ration cards back, and then they’ll die as well…

Despite the book being highly rated, I expected something totally different before I read it. I couldn’t figure out if it was fiction or not, since the author talks about interviewing his grandfather for this book and they have the same last name (I can never tell with these things). And I had already decided that I wasn’t going to like the characters, since they had done something illegal enough to get arrested. Ah, grasshopper, live and learn.

The reason it impacted me so much, I suspect, is because my grandmother took my mom and her 2 other kids as refugees to Czechoslovakia, where first the Russian soldiers occupied the area, and then the German soldiers (or maybe it was the other way around). So when I was reading the descriptions of how people scrounged for food, how exactly the two of them had come to be arrested, how much danger people were in from the nightly bombing — it really brought home what they had to go through. In the book, the people of Leningrad (and elsewhere as well, certainly) ran out of fuel and it was winter in Russia, so there were no trees, no fences, no park benches — all had been taken to be burned for heat. There were no pets, since who could feed a pet? and it could feed you instead, and the rats would have run amok without the cats, except there was nothing in the garbage for them to eat either. It was argued that people already skinny before the siege were better equipped for the shortage of food, since their bodies were used to doing with very little, but it was hard to argue with the fact that a couple of days without food wouldn’t turn a fat person into a skeleton.

The descriptions of hunger… let’s just say that none of us have EVER felt that. Which is why I have always corrected people when they say, “I’m STARVING!” — um, no, you’re just hungry.

Then I look around me. We’re in the longest war the U.S. has ever been in, but can you tell? Is anyone suffering besides the soldiers and the families of the soldiers? No, we have no invader on our shores, and God knows we are not short of food (perhaps THAT would solve our obesity problem!). There’s no rationing of anything and we march along, quite clear in the fact that this war is involving only the soldiers/government, and those ungrateful countries over there that are making us look bad in our efforts. Memorial Day just means a 3-day weekend, and whatever weak outrage we had about invading Iraq has now been directed towards the BP oil spill. Until we get tired of that as well…

It’s not that I think one has to have experienced hardship to be strong, but I suspect that there IS something to the maxim “A little suffering is good for the soul”. Kind of like hiking in the rain — a little is a good reminder to appreciate your bed with clean sheets and a roof, but too much of it is simply misery. Reading books about REAL suffering just points out to me again and again how insulated we are…