had decided to burn it at some point early on in the siege when there was no fuel left to heat the stove. Some time after the burning of her diary Savicheva was given a small notebook that had belonged to her sister, Nina, which would later become her diary. The smaller notebook had been spared the fire and Nina had used it to make notes about the boiler equipment in the plant where she worked. Nina had not used the alphabetised portion of the notebook. Tanya wrote her first entry in the diary on or shortly after 28 December. This first entry concerned the death of her elder sister, Zhenya, which most likely occurred due to severe malnutrition exacerbated by her work at the munitions factory. Zhenya was born in 1909 and had left the family home when she married and had moved to Mokhovaya Street, where she continued to live after her divorce. Zhenya would regularly walk 7 kilometers (4 miles) to the factory where she worked sometimes two shifts a day making mine cases. After work she would donate blood. At this point during the siege of Leningrad, food rationing had been reduced to starvation level, and only small but inadequate supplies were coming into Leningrad across Lake Ladoga along the Road of Life. It is estimated 100,000 people per month were dying from starvation, rations for an adult having been set at 250g (9 oz) of rye bread or half that for children and the elderly. Her weakened body was not strong enough to stand the blood donations and she died in her apartment, from complications resulting from exhaustion and malnutrition, in the arms of her sister Nina who had been worried when she had not turned up for her shift at the factory and had hurried round to Mokhovaya Street to check on her. Deaths Savicheva began to record the deaths of each family member in Tanya's half empty work notebook. Each page had a letter heading; Savicheva chose the page headed by Russian letter ж and recorded the death of her sister with the following statement written probably in blue pencil, in large handwriting which filled the page, "Zhenya died on December 28th at 12 noon, 1941." From here on, most of Tanya's family also died in quick succession. Her grandmother, Yevdokiya Grigorievna, died a month later, two days after Savicheva's twelfth birthday, of