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The Concert Ensemble. L-R: Vladimir Ulrich (accompanist), singers Sofia Preobrazhenskaya and Vera Shestakova, violinist Alexander Pechnikov; standing: S. Fleishman (the Narrator), a military commander, Arkady Lyzhin. Photograph from 1941–1942
Preobrazhenskaya’s son Vladimir, who was seventeen in 1942, recalled that “After the performance by the artistes the military commanders organised a small dinner for them. Mum (so she said) placed a small open bag on her knees, then put some food in her mouth but, instead of swallowing, dropped it in her bag. When she came home she shared it between us all. Her trips to Kronstadt were a great help to us. After one concert on a ship the commander, discovering that she had four children in Leningrad, summoned the head of provisions and ordered him to give her a loaf of white bread and a kilogram of pasta. <…> Pasta soup and white bread – it was utterly unbelievable, the more so as the bread had been baked from flour that divers had salvaged from the food stores in the bow of the battleship Marat that had been split open and flooded. <...> Another time mum took one of her two silver fox furs and exchanged it for a small bag of rye.”
V. Gureyev. Memories of S. Preobrachenskaya // http://preobrazhenskaya.com/publikatsii/vospominaniya/category/323-v-n-gureev.html