The unbreakable men and women of Stalingrad have picked up the thread of life where they dropped it five months ago. The siege of the great Russian city on the Volga was lifted late yesterday. And after a night of eerie quiet, the people crawled out of their dugouts to breathe the clean, fresh air of freedom.
Around them, in twisted heaps of rubble, are the homes in which Russian mothers once lullabyed their babies to sleep. That was before the Germans came on August 26th -- on orders from Hitler to take Stalingrad at all cost.
Today the women, children and old men who survived the siege are confident the Germans won't be back. Every file of rubble -- like the similar piles that litter the streets of Leningrad -- is a monument to valor and to victory.
Many of Stalingrad's civilian survivors spent the weary months just past caves in the high Volga bank. A few lived in deep dugouts. Any place that was protection from artillery fire and bombs that fell almost constantly from the skies.
When they emerged, some dragged behind them a few rags of clothing, the start of a new wardrobe, however homely.
One old man was carrying a chair -- the nucleus of a new collection of furniture. The survivors were joined by some 12,000 of their neighbors, freed when the city fell to the Soviet armies.
Hitler had planned to send those prisoners to Germany to work in slavery. Instead they will stay in Stalingrad to work for freedom.