Olga Fedorovna Bergholz (Berggolts) was born on May 16, 1910, in St
Petersburg, Russia. Her father, Fedor Bergholz, was a Medical Doctor.
Her mother, Maria Timofeevna, was a homemaker. Olga Bergholz had a
junior sister named Maria. She studied arts and literature at the State
Institute of Arts, then at the Department of Philology of the Leningrad
University, and graduated in 1930 majoring in Russian literature. Her
first poems were published in 1924, then she worked for several
Leningrad newspapers.
In 1938, Olga Bergholz was arrested during the repressions of the
"Great Terror" under the dictatorship of the increasingly paranoid
Joseph Stalin. She was imprisoned on false
accusations, because her name sounded like a German one. At that time
she was pregnant and her child was stillborn in the NKVD (KGB) prison
in Leningrad. She kept writing a secret diary of her experience in that
famous prison, "interrogations were focused on breaking my will and
messing with my soul, trying to degrade my life by making me feel
helpless and hopeless." She was released a few months later. Her
husband died in November of 1941, when the Nazi Armies surrounded the
city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and cut all communications for nine
hundred days. The siege of Leningrad was ordered by
Adolf Hitler.
Olga Bergholz served at the Leningrad Radio during the siege. She had a
calming voice. Her radio performances helped lifting the spirits of
survivors in the besieged city of Leningrad. Olga Bergholz was reading
her own prose and poetry as well as the news from the front-lines of
the war. She was supported by her friend,
Anna Akhmatova, who also lived in the
besieged Leningrad during the first months of the war. During the siege
civilians were plunged into a reality so terrible that for survival
people ate all their pets, and many ate the dead. By the end of WWII
the population of Leningrad decreased from 3,5 million to 0,7 million.
More than a million people were evacuated in cold winter months, but
many of them died on the road. Hundreds of thousands of men and women
were killed while defending their city, and at least 1,000,000
civilians succumbed to the ravages of starvation, cold, and disease
during the 900 days of the siege. Olga Bergholz witnessed the siege and
recorded many important facts in her writings.
The Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) is the
place where over half-a-million people were buried in mass graves. The
granite entrance to the Memorial is decorated with the inscription from
the poem by Olga Bergholz, "Nikto ne zabyt i nichto ne zabyto" (No one
is forgotten and nothing is forgotten). She received awards and
decorations for her courage during the siege of Leningrad.
Olga Bergholz died on November 13, 1975, in Leningrad (St. Petersburg)
and was laid to rest in the Literatorskie Mostki of the Volkovo
Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia.
