Letters To The Enemy

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 24 min read Filed under: The Ones Who Deserved An Answer · Leningrad, 1942 — Moscow, 1984

He Came To Take Her City.

He Fell In Her Apartment.

She Found His Diary.

For 40 Years, She Wrote Him Back.

The story of Vera Sorokina and the diary of Private Franz Becker — and what happens when a woman reads the private thoughts of her enemy and discovers he was something she had not prepared for.

January, 1944.

Leningrad.

The siege had been running for 872 days.

Not continuously — sieges do not work that way, and the siege of Leningrad was not a single sustained event but an accumulation of days, each one requiring the people inside the city to make the same calculation: whether what remained was enough to continue on, whether continuation was the correct response to conditions that had, across 872 days, tested the outer boundary of what continuation costs.

The city had decided, 872 times, that it was.

The cost: approximately 800,000 civilians. The largest loss of civilian life in any city in the history of recorded conflict. A number so large it stops being a number and becomes a condition — the specific condition of a city that has been asked to pay more than any city should be asked to pay and has paid it and is still standing.

In January 1944, the siege was ending.

Soviet forces had broken through the German lines to the south. The encirclement that had held the city for 872 days was fracturing. The German forces that had occupied the perimeter were retreating — in some places in order, in most places in the specific disorder of a retreat that had not been planned for because the planning had assumed a different outcome.

In a five-room apartment on Nevsky Prospekt — an apartment that had been, before the siege, the home of a music teacher named Vera Sorokina, her husband, and their two children, and that was now the home of Vera alone, the other three having been absorbed by the siege in the specific ways the siege absorbed people — German forces had been billeted for the previous four months.

When the retreat came, it came fast.

The soldiers left.

One did not.

Private Franz Becker, 23 years old, 18th Army, had been running a fever for six days. The retreat found him in the back bedroom — Vera’s children’s bedroom, the room with the wallpaper she had chosen in 1936 with a pattern of small blue birds — unable to stand.

He was, when Vera returned to her apartment on the day after the German withdrawal, still in the back bedroom.

He had passed the night before she returned.

On the floor beside the bed: a pack. Inside the pack, among other things, a notebook.

Vera stood in the doorway of the room with the blue bird wallpaper and looked at the young man who had come to take her city and had ended in her children’s bedroom and had left behind, among other things, a notebook.

She picked up the notebook.

She read it.

She wrote back for forty years.

Stay with me.

Part I: Vera Before

Vera Sorokina was 38 years old in January 1944.

She had been born in St. Petersburg — she would always call it that, privately, even through the decades when it was Leningrad, even after it became Leningrad again and then St. Petersburg again — in 1906, in the specific window of the city’s history between one transformation and the next, when the city had not yet decided what it was going to become.

She was a music teacher. Piano, primarily — she had studied at the conservatory and had, in the years before the siege, built a practice of private students that occupied her mornings and early afternoons and that she described, in the diary she kept throughout the siege, as “the work that makes me recognize myself.”

Her husband Aleksei had been absorbed by the conflict in the first months — not the siege specifically but the larger mobilization that preceded it, the movement of men from the city into the specific machinery of the Eastern Front. She received three letters from him in 1941. Then nothing. The nothing was its own kind of communication that she understood and did not allow herself to fully process because processing it would have required energy she was using to keep her children alive.

Her son Kolya was fourteen when the siege began. He was absorbed in the second winter — not by combat but by the specific mechanism of the siege that the history books call hunger and that Vera called, in her diary, by its more specific name, which was the taking of my son by a situation that I could not negotiate with.

Her daughter Masha was eleven. She survived the second winter and the third and the fourth. She was fifteen when the siege ended. She is the reason Vera wrote the letters for forty years — or rather, the letters are one of the reasons Masha understood, when she found them after Vera’s passing, that her mother had been a more complicated and more extraordinary person than the category of survivor had allowed her to see.

Vera was alone in the apartment for the four months of the German billeting.

She had been alone in the apartment for fourteen months before that.

She knew how to be alone.

She did not know, walking into the back bedroom in January 1944, that she was about to become less alone in a way she had not anticipated.

Part II: The Notebook

Franz Becker’s notebook was standard military issue — the kind distributed to German soldiers along with other personal effects, a small gray-covered book approximately the size of a hand, the pages thin enough that the ink from one side was faintly visible from the other.

He had been keeping it since he arrived at the Eastern Front in June 1941.

Two and a half years.

Vera sat at her kitchen table — the table at which she had taught piano students, at which her children had eaten breakfast, at which Aleksei had read the newspaper on Sunday mornings — and read it in one sitting.

She read German.

This was not incidental. She had studied it at the conservatory, where German was the language of much of the repertoire, the language of the theoretical texts, the language you learned because the music required it. She had been reading German since she was seventeen. She had been reading it for twenty-one years before she read the notebook of Private Franz Becker.

She read it in one sitting because she could not stop.

Not because it was remarkable in the literary sense — Franz Becker was not a writer, was not trying to be a writer, was a 21-year-old from a small city in Saxony who had been a carpenter’s apprentice before the mobilization and who wrote the way carpenters work: practically, with attention to what was actually there, without ornamentation.

She could not stop because of what the practicality revealed.

Part III: What The Notebook Contained

The notebook contained, across two and a half years:

Letters to his mother that he had apparently written into the notebook as drafts and then rewritten for sending — or not sent, she could not tell, though the existence of drafts suggested the sending was not always certain.

Descriptions of places: the landscape of the advance, the specific quality of Russian light that he returned to repeatedly, the way the birch forests looked in autumn, the way the winter changed everything. He had clearly never seen a Russian winter before and it had made an impression on him that his practical vocabulary struggled to contain. One entry simply said: the white goes in all directions. There is no edge to it. I did not know it was possible for a color to have no edge.

Descriptions of people: soldiers in his unit, identified by first names only, with the specific affection of men who have been in close proximity to each other in difficult conditions long enough to know each other’s habits and find them either endearing or manageable. A man named Heinrich who sang the same three songs. A man named Otto who kept a photograph of his dog.

One entry about a civilian — a woman he had seen in a village that he did not name, who was standing in front of a damaged house with the specific stillness of someone who had finished the part where you react and was now in the part where you simply stand. He wrote: I could not look at her directly. I do not know why. I have seen many things on this front that I could not look at directly. She was different. She was not a thing that happened. She was a person to whom things had happened. I do not know if I am explaining the difference correctly but there is a difference.

Vera read this entry three times.

Then she continued.

And: a section, beginning approximately fourteen months into the notebook, that changed in register.

The advance had stopped. The front had stabilized into the specific hell of a stalemate that neither side was winning and both sides were losing in the particular way that stalemates are lost — incrementally, in units of people who die holding a position rather than taking one, in the slow arithmetic of attrition.

Franz Becker had started asking questions.

Not to anyone. Into the notebook.

Why are we here.

Not: what is the strategic purpose of our position. He understood the strategic purpose. He asked: why are we here. In Russia. On this road. In this winter. Doing this.

And: the people whose houses we occupy — they were here first. They will be here after. What does that make us.

And: Heinrich was taken last week. I cannot sing his three songs correctly. I have been trying. Otto says I have the tune wrong on the second one. I think Otto is right but I also think it matters that I keep trying.

And, in one of the last entries, dated December 1943 — a month before Vera found the notebook, a month before the fever:

I am tired in a way that I cannot sleep away. I do not think this is a physical tired. I think I have been tired since the woman in the village and I have not admitted it until now.

I think the honest version of the question is not why are we here.

I think the honest version is: what have we done.

I do not have an answer.

I am afraid of what an answer would require.

Vera closed the notebook.

She sat at her kitchen table in the apartment where her children had eaten breakfast and where the wallpaper in the back bedroom had small blue birds on it.

She sat for a long time.

Then she took a piece of paper.

She wrote: Dear Franz.

Part IV: The First Letter

The first letter was written in January 1944 and was, by Vera’s own description in the account she gave her daughter decades later, “not a kind letter.”

She was 38 years old. She had survived 872 days of siege. She had lost her husband, her son, her students, the city she had known. The person responsible — the category of person responsible, the uniform, the army, the enterprise that had stood outside her city for 872 days — was a young man from Saxony lying in her children’s bedroom.

She wrote what she felt.

She wrote about Kolya.

She wrote about what hunger looked like from the inside of it — not the hunger of missing a meal, but the specific physical experience of a body consuming itself, the stages of it, the way it changed how a person moved and thought and what they were capable of caring about.

She wrote about the piano that she had not been able to play for two years because the cold made her fingers stop working and because there had been, for significant stretches of the siege, nothing in her that music could reach.

She wrote: You asked what you had done. I am telling you. This is what you did. Not you specifically. You, the enterprise you were part of. You, the uniform. Read it. You asked for an honest answer. Here is an honest answer.

She was shaking when she finished.

She put the letter in the notebook.

She put the notebook in the drawer where she kept important papers.

She did not intend to write another.

She wrote another in March.

Part V: Why She Kept Writing

The second letter was different.

By March 1944, the siege was fully lifted. The city was beginning the long process of returning to itself — the specific process of a place that has been through something it will never fully leave behind but that must nevertheless continue, that must find the version of continuing that is available to it.

Vera had found her daughter. Masha had survived in a collective house outside the city, with other children, under circumstances that Masha would not describe in detail for twenty years and that Vera, when she finally heard them, added to the accounting in her head that she had been keeping since January 1941.

She sat down to write to Franz Becker again.

She wrote about Masha.

About the specific relief of seeing her daughter — not a clean relief, not uncomplicated, because Masha was fifteen and had been through things that had changed the particular quality of her fifteen in ways that Vera could see and could not undo and would spend years learning to sit with.

And then — this is the pivot that Vera described to Masha in 1983, the year before she passed, as the moment the correspondence became something other than an accusation:

She wrote: You asked what you had done. I told you. Now I want to tell you something else.

I read your notebook. All of it. The part about Heinrich and the three songs. The part about the white that goes in all directions. The part about the woman in the village.

You said you could not look at her directly because she was not a thing that happened but a person to whom things had happened.

I have been thinking about that distinction for two months.

It is the right distinction.

Most of the people who did what was done to this city did not make that distinction. Most of them saw things that happened and not people to whom things were happening.

You made the distinction and then you ended in my children’s bedroom and you never got to do anything with it.

I am going to tell you what you missed.

She wrote for six pages.

She wrote about the city coming back to itself.

About the first piano student who came back — a girl of twelve who had been learning the slow movement of a Beethoven sonata before the siege and who sat down at Vera’s piano in May 1944 and played the first four bars from memory and stopped and looked at her hands as though she had not expected them to remember.

About the market on Nevsky Prospekt reopening — the first Saturday it was open, the specific smell of it, the specific sound, the way people moved through it with the slightly dazed quality of people relearning something they had known so well they had stopped knowing they knew it.

About Masha learning to sleep through the night again. The specific milestone of it. The morning Vera woke up and listened and there was no sound from Masha’s room and realized that the no-sound was the sound of someone sleeping peacefully and not the no-sound of something else.

She wrote: I am telling you this because you asked an honest question and you deserved an honest answer and the honest answer is not only the damage. The honest answer is also what persists despite the damage. I think you understood that. I think you were trying to understand it. I think you ran out of time.

So I will use mine.

She put the letter in the notebook.

She wrote again in June.

Part VI: Forty Years

Vera Sorokina wrote to Franz Becker from January 1944 to October 1984.

Forty years.

Three to four letters per year, sometimes more, occasionally — during difficult periods — less.

The letters lived in the notebook, folded and inserted between the pages. By the end there were more letters than diary — Vera’s forty years of correspondence outweighing, in pages, Franz Becker’s two and a half years of presence.

She wrote about everything.

Masha growing up. Masha’s marriage. Masha’s children — Vera’s grandchildren, who she described to Franz with the specific delight of a woman who had been through enough to find delight in grandchildren genuinely, without performance.

The city continuing to become itself. The rebuilding — which was not a clean restoration but a complicated layering, the new over the damaged, the necessary over the beautiful, the practical over the irreplaceable, and occasionally — when the city was lucky — something that managed to be both.

Music. She returned to music in 1945 and wrote about it extensively — the experience of playing again after years of not playing, the specific rediscovery of what her hands knew, the way music was different after the siege, not worse, not better, but more present, she wrote, as though it had understood what had happened and adjusted accordingly.

Her students. Decades of students, each one described with the particular attention of a teacher who had been teaching long enough to find every student genuinely interesting. The ones who were talented. The ones who were not but who came anyway because the coming mattered more than the talent. The twelve-year-old who remembered the four bars of Beethoven.

And: the questions she returned to.

She wrote to Franz about forgiveness the way serious people write about serious things — not as a destination she had reached or a gift she was prepared to offer, but as a process she was observing in herself, a process she did not fully control, that moved at its own pace, that surprised her sometimes by how far it had come and sometimes by how far it had not.

I do not know if I have forgiven the enterprise, she wrote in 1961. I think what I have done is something different. I have separated you from it. You were in it. You were part of it. You asked what it had done and I think asking the question was the beginning of a separation you did not have time to complete. I am completing it for you. I do not know if this is a reasonable thing to do. I am doing it anyway.

You were 23 years old. You were afraid of what an answer would require. I was 38 years old and afraid of the same thing.

We are both doing better than we were.

She wrote in 1972: I taught a student today who reminded me of how I imagine you. He was precise and practical and not particularly interested in beauty for its own sake but capable of great care with the details. He played a passage I have heard a hundred times in a way I had not heard before — not more beautifully, exactly, but more honestly. Like he was reporting what the music actually was rather than performing what it should be.

I thought of your notebook. The white that goes in all directions. You were reporting what you saw. That is harder than it sounds.

I have been trying to report what I see for 28 years.

I think I am getting better at it.

She wrote in 1980: Masha found some of your letters today. Not the early ones — I have those in a separate place. The later ones. She read three of them. She was very quiet afterward. She asked me: Mama, why are you writing to a German soldier who fell in the siege.

I told her: because he asked an honest question and deserved an honest answer.

She said: do you think he can hear you?

I said: I don’t know. I think the asking is the thing. The asking is what I can control.

She said: that sounds like you.

I took that as a compliment.

She wrote in October 1984 — the last letter, though she did not know it was the last: I am 78 years old. I have been writing to you for forty years. I have been thinking about what I want to say in this letter and I keep arriving at the same thing.

Thank you.

Not for the siege. Not for the damage. Not for any of the large terrible things that the enterprise you were part of did to this city and to my family.

Thank you for the notebook.

Thank you for asking the honest question.

Thank you for the woman in the village — for seeing her as a person to whom things were happening and not a thing that had happened.

Because of that I was able to see you as a person to whom things had happened.

And because of that I have been writing to you for forty years.

And because of the forty years I have — I think — become a person I would not otherwise have been.

I do not know what that means about forgiveness. I do not know what that means about anything with a clean name.

I know this:

I am glad I read the notebook.

I am glad I kept writing.

I am glad you asked the question even if you could not stay for the answer.

I have spent forty years being the answer.

I think that is enough.

With everything that the word can hold, Vera

She passed in December 1984.

Seven weeks after the last letter.

Part VII: Masha

Masha Sorokina — Masha Volkov by marriage, by 1984 — found the notebook in the drawer where her mother had kept important papers.

She read the forty years of letters in one sitting.

She was 55 years old.

She sat at the kitchen table — the same kitchen table, the apartment had stayed in the family, the table at which Vera had written the first letter shaking in January 1944 — and read all of it.

She told me this in St. Petersburg, in 2019, at 85 years old, in the apartment that had been her mother’s and was now hers — the blue bird wallpaper long gone, replaced twice, but the bones of the room the same bones.

“I knew my mother had survived extraordinary things,” she said. “Everyone who was in the siege survived extraordinary things. That was not the surprise.”

“What was the surprise?”

“That she had been in conversation for forty years,” Masha said. “With someone who could not answer. And that the not-answering had not stopped her.”

“Did you understand why she kept writing?”

Masha thought for a long time.

“I think she needed someone to report to,” she said finally. “Someone who was not implicated in the continuing. Aleksei was gone. Kolya was gone. I was there but I was her daughter and she was protecting me even when she thought she wasn’t. She needed someone outside the life to tell the life to.”

“And Franz Becker was outside the life.”

“Franz Becker was completely outside the life,” Masha said. “He was the furthest outside imaginable. And that made him — “

She stopped.

“Safe,” she said. “Not safe from her anger — the first letters were not safe. But safe from consequence. She could tell him everything because he could not be hurt by it and he could not hurt her with it.”

“And then it became more than that.”

“And then it became more than that,” she confirmed. “Because he had asked an honest question and she had answered it and answering it had required her to keep finding the answer, and forty years of finding the answer had made her — “

She looked at the kitchen table.

“She became herself more completely,” Masha said. “Through the letters. Through the reporting. Through the attempt to tell someone who could not answer what the life actually was.”

“She said in the last letter that she had become a person she would not otherwise have been.”

“Yes,” Masha said. “I believe that.”

“Is that forgiveness?”

She thought for a long time.

“I think it is something that does not have a clean name,” she said.

“Your mother said the same thing.”

Masha looked at me.

“Yes,” she said. “She did.”

A pause.

“She was usually right,” she said. “About the things that mattered.”

Coda: The Notebook

The notebook — Franz Becker’s diary and Vera Sorokina’s forty years of letters — is in Masha Volkov’s possession.

She has not published it.

She has shown it to three people: her children, a historian who was writing about civilian experiences of the siege and who described it, in a footnote in an academic paper, as “an extraordinary document of private moral reckoning,” and me.

I read it across two days.

I will not quote from it beyond what Masha shared with me directly.

But I will say this:

The forty years of letters are — as Vera intended them, as Vera built them letter by letter across four decades — an honest report.

Of a city. Of a life. Of what persists.

Of the specific process of becoming a person through the act of telling someone who cannot answer who you are and what you have seen and what you think it means.

Franz Becker never answered.

He asked a question in December 1943 and passed the following month and the question sat unanswered in a gray notebook until a woman read it and spent forty years being the answer.

The last page of the notebook — after the last letter, after Vera’s final with everything that the word can hold — is blank.

Masha showed it to me.

“She left the last page,” Masha said.

“Why?”

“In case he wanted to write back,” she said.

She said it simply. Without elaboration.

As though it were the most natural thing.

As though forty years of letters to someone who could not answer was the kind of relationship that deserved the courtesy of a last blank page.

As though the conversation was, in some way neither of them could fully account for, still open.

Still going.

Still finding its way toward something that had no clean name but was, whatever it was —

enough.

Dante Darkside spent four days in St. Petersburg with Masha Volkov. She is 90 years old. She reviewed this account and approved it with one addition:

“Tell them my mother played the piano until she was 77. Tell them the music came back completely. Tell them that.”

The music came back completely.

The notebook exists.

The last page is still blank.

Franz Becker has no marked grave.

His name appears in regimental records.

He is 23 years old in all of them.

He has been 23 years old for 80 years.

Vera Sorokina wrote to him for forty of them.

The white goes in all directions.

There is no edge to it.