"At the beginning of The Siege, sudden news of German attack rips the peaceful Levin family from their countryside retreat, throwing their world into unimagined turmoil. Soon all of Leningrad is trapped by the besieging German army, but daily life must go on. While little Kolya plays with his toy fort, his tiny body grows cruelly thin. While twenty-two-year-old Anna dreams of an artist's life, she must forage for food in the ever more desperate city....

In September 1941, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history -- almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943-1944. More than a million citizens perished. Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets, their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Residents burned books, furniture,...