Leningrad was besieged by the German Wehrmacht for 900 days before the Red Army broke the siege on January 27, 1944. More than a million citizens perished in the city - a war crime that has still not become part of German memory culture. Unlike many artists and intellectuals who evacuated, Lidia Ginsburg endured hunger and cold because she did not want to leave her elderly mother alone. It was only decades later that she published her records of a blockade survivor - a report that resembles less a diary and more the working notes of a behavioral researcher. What is a blockade survivor? It is someone who slowly and fully consciously succumbs to hunger and cold: not in a camp, but in the city, among colleagues, within the family circle, in the apartments where people freeze to death.