In the grueling winter of 1941-42, when the death toll of the Leningrad blockade was the highest, Lia worked at the hospital in Levashovo, registering the sick, wounded and starving. "I worked there until I couldn't stand it anymore," she says. "After a while it was just too much to bear.

"The day I quit, a man who was starving to death had come in. He was begging for something to drink. 'Give me some water! Please!' he kept saying, but the doctors said he was too starved and ill to drink. He needed treatment.

"But the man dragged himself over to a sink in the corner, and suddenly started drinking straight from the cistern, in great gulps. What happened next, I could hardly bear to watch. He started convulsing, screaming and vomiting, the water coming right back out of him. He died right there, by the sink. After that day, I never worked again at the hospital.

"It was a horrible, horrible time," she continues. "Everywhere, people were dying of hunger and cold. You would walk down the street and hear a child crying, because his mother had just dropped dead beside him. Whole families died.

"In Levashovo, there was a warehouse that we used to make into a dance hall for the young people during the summer.That winter, we used it as a morgue. People just dragged their dead loved ones and left them there. And the worst thing of all -- sometimes people would find bodies there with parts cut out of them. Cheeks, or thighs...people cut out human meat to sell at the markets, or to feed themselves."