Maja Fundová

"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."

"One thing that stuck in my head and that I still remember is when my mom brought bread home, and she was cutting it and my brother and I were standing by the table and looking at the pieces of bread. We wanted to eat all of them at once. But that was out of the question. Our mom has saved us, because she observed this rule always."

"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."