When her school, like so many others, closed down, Alexandra Mironova lost her job as a history teacher. But she soon found a new position in Leningrad in the autumn of 1941 — working in an orphanage.
Rather than teaching children, it became Alexandra's job simply to keep them alive. With a city of two million people blockaded since September 8 by the Nazi war machine, Leningrad had swiftly become a place of famine rather than a bustling centre of life and culture.
Part of Alexandra's role was to travel around Leningrad, braving constant German bombardments, to seek out and rescue abandoned children. What she saw was truly the stuff of nightmares.
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