Elephants extinguished "lighters", and vipers basked in the boiler room: How animals were saved in Soviet zoos during the war

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

If there is a catastrophe with a large number of victims and, moreover, a war, official statistics usually record only human lives. As a rule, no one counts the dead animals, and if some compassionate citizen suddenly pays attention to this, he will immediately hear from all sides: “How can you compare people and some animals? Apparently, this is why it is not so widely known about what happened in the war with the inhabitants of the zoos. But the staff of the menagerie showed real heroism, rescuing animals day after day!

Zoo in Leningrad

By 1941, the Leningrad Zoo was no longer just a zoo for the demonstration of animals. A youth circle appeared here, a scientific department was opened, thanks to the work on breeding, bears, lion cubs and other large animals began to be born, a playground for young animals was opened.

Already in July 1941, most of the animals (for example, rhino, polar bears and tigers) were prudently evacuated to Kazan. However, it was not possible to transfer all the inhabitants of the St. Petersburg zoo, so a lot of pets remained in Leningrad.

In September, on the first day of the blockade, several bombs fell on the zoo, one of which killed the elephant Betty, the favorite of the children. During another enemy raid, a bison fell into a deep crater, and the attendants were unable to pull out the heavy animal at once. Only two days later - when the workers managed to build a wooden ramp, they were able to lure out the bison with the help of bundles of grass laid out on the boards.

Soon, electricity stopped working in the zoo of the besieged city, the sewerage and water supply system went out of order. The workers had to insulate the premises with improvised materials and use wooden structures from the nearby children's attractions as firewood.

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Due to the catastrophic problem with food, the animals had to be fed with hay (for this, all the grass was mowed in the city), acorns and rowan trees collected from the streets, as well as sawdust. To deceive carnivorous predators, zoo attendants stuffed old rabbit skins with grass, and on top of this "prey" they smeared animal fat - for smell.

The hippopotamus named Beauty was especially hard to endure the blockade - and not only from hunger. Due to the lack of water, her skin was dry and bleeding. To save her, the worker of the zoo Evdokia Dasha had to carry water in buckets from the Neva and wipe the hippo. And since the animal was also panicky afraid of the roar of air raids, during the bombing, Evdokia had to be close to the pet and hug her.

The hippo and many other animals were saved. At the same time, one should not forget that in those years it was not healthy strong men who worked at the zoo, but women and elderly people - and even exhausted by the blockade. By the way, the St. Petersburg zoo was open to visitors throughout the war - even during the blockade.

Zoo in Moscow

The Moscow Zoo was also not closed during the war, because the townspeople needed positive emotions. Only some of the animals were evacuated. In total, the zoo was visited by 4 million people, and, like their Leningrad colleagues, its employees heroically rescued their animals.

During the air raids, the zoo staff was constantly on duty on the territory. For example, on the night of January 4, 1942, high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the capital's zoo, and the lion's house and monkey house immediately caught fire. Monkey Paris was very frightened: the animal rushed about, smashed everything and tried to tear down the door. Then the employee Lipa Komarova climbed onto the roof, extinguished all the bombs and, while the workers were ventilating the room, rushed along with her colleagues to save the elephants: there the blast wave knocked out the windows. The local old carpenter got hold of sheets of plywood somewhere and began to hammer the windows. The windows also turned out to be broken in the parrot. Exotic birds die at low temperatures, so employees quickly covered all the cages with blankets taken from local residents and their coats, and then moved the parrots to another territory. Summer enclosures were broken into planks to block the windows.

And then the workers of the zoo until seven in the morning dragged the vipers into the boiler room of the steam heating, saving them from hypothermia.

In this air raid, the commandant of the zoo was killed and the watchman was seriously wounded, but not a single employee escaped from his workplace - everyone extinguished the "lighters" and rescued the animals.

But the most terrible for the zoo was the very first raid, which happened at the end of July 1941. Firstly, because the workers have not yet had such experience. Secondly, there were a lot of fires that night. The "lighters" that fell on the lion's house stuck into the ceiling and the door. Zootechnicians managed to drive lions, jaguars and leopards to other cages in a matter of minutes - before they started to panic, and put out the fire.

During such airstrikes, of course, individual animals died. For example, a fox was killed by a direct hit, a pair of parrots died from being wounded by glass fragments, etc.

According to the recollections of the staff of the Moscow zoo, during the bombing, the animals behaved differently. Large predators and reptiles were calm. But deer, goats, rams, which in nature instinctively try to flee at the slightest danger, during air raids and fires immediately began to rush and became uncontrollable. At the same time, they caught on the walls of the cages and received bruises and scratches.

The elephants behaved very touchingly during one of the air raids. When an incendiary bomb hit their premises, they calmly walked towards the water ditch. There the animals just as calmly began to pour water on themselves from their trunks and even (of course, by accident) extinguished several "lighters" that were burning nearby.

And the zoo staff had to save waterfowl, but not from bombs, but from the townspeople - so that the birds would not be eaten during the famine.

Zoo in Rostov

In the Rostov Zoo, most of the animals, alas, died. The city was taken by the Germans, and one of the enemy units settled right on the territory of the zoo. The Nazis sometimes shot their ungulates - to feast on. But even here the employees showed heroism. For example, when one of the soldiers wanted to shoot a bear, the worker ran to him and began to scream loudly. A German officer came out to the noise and stopped the soldier. Another time, overhearing that the Germans wanted to kill the deer, the director of the zoo smeared their necks with grease - they say that animals have infectious lichen.

The Nazis ate hearty food, and in order to feed the animals, the zoo employees took scraps from the Germans. Some of the exotic animals were taken home by the employees, so it was easier to save them.

And the workers of the zoo hid Soviet demolitions right on its territory, who did not have time to leave the city before the arrival of the Germans. They arranged for our sappers something like a dugout, covered with thickets, using for this a hole where the tours used to live, and secretly carried food there, pretending to go to feed the animals.

People often selflessly save their pets. And it happens the other way around - animals save the lives of their owners.