Статья, посвященная ВОВ
статья по английскому языку (10 класс)

Symbols of Victory

The following extract shows the people sufferings in a besieged city

[…] On Nakhimson Prospekt Luknitsky found his sled colliding with those of others passing him with corpses. One was a sled on which there were two corpses, the body of a woman with long hair trailing in the snow and that of a small girl, probably ten years old. He passed carefully in order to avoid tangling the whitish-yellow hair of the corpse with the runner of his sled.

On the Volodarsky near the Liteiny Bridge he encountered a five-ton truck with a mountain of bodies. Farther on he met two old women who were conveying their corpses to the cemetery in style. They had hitched their sleds to an army sledge which was slowly pulled through the streets by a pair of starving horses. There he met the shadow of a man who carried nestled to his breast

an incredibly thin dog — one of the rarest of city sights. The eyes of both the man and the dog were filled with hunger and terror, the dog’s terror, no doubt, because he sensed his fate and the man’s, perhaps, because he feared someone might rob him of the dog and he would not have the strength to defend his possession. So Luknitsky walked through the city, passing hundreds of people, struggling to survive, pulling the corpses of their relatives towards hospitals and cemeteries, pulling their little sleds bearing pails of water. Among the hundreds he met another kind as well — a man with a fat, self-satisfied face, well-fed, with greedy eyes. Who was this man? Possibly, a store worker, a speculator, an apartment house manager who stole the ration cards of the tenants as they died and with the aid of his mistress exchanged the miserable bread rations in the Haymarket for gold watches, for rich silks, for diamonds or old silver and golden rubles. The conversation of this man and his mistress would not be of survival, of how to live through their terrible times. On such things this man would merely spit. Was he a speculator? A murderer? A cannibal? There was little difference; each was trading on the lives of starving, dying people, each was living on the flesh of his fellows…

DISCUSS                                                                                                

Do you share the author’s attitude to the man?

Say what emotions you felt while reading the extract.                                                                     

ACTIVITY

Describe victims of the Siege