Leningrad. Winter 1941. In the center of this hell, in the zoo, lived a female hippopotamus named “Beauty.”
She required 40 kg of food and 300 liters of water per day to live. For a city dying of starvation, maintaining a two-ton animal was an unjustifiable luxury.
The water pipelines had been destroyed during air raids, causing her pool to dry up. A hippo’s skin dries out without water, cracks, and begins to bleed. The animal, covered in sores, quietly groaned in the corner of the empty pool, dying from pain and hunger.
Her salvation came in the form of a woman named Evdokia Dashina. Every day, she walked to the Neva River (the river upon which St. Petersburg is built) with a small sled and brought back 40 buckets of ice-cold water, which was then warmed on a potbelly stove.
Evdokia spent hours bathing the animal’s hide with warm water and rubbing camphor oil into the cracks to stop the bleeding.
There was nothing to feed her with. Dashina took sawdust, added a little grass, oilcake (press cake), and potato peels, which she then boiled into a homogeneous mash. This gruel was used to stuff the beast’s stomach to trick its hunger.
When the night raids began, amidst the roar of artillery and the wail of sirens, Evdokia would descend to the bottom of the empty pool, hug Beauty around the neck, and lie down next to her on the cold concrete. Only in these embraces would the beast, driven mad by fear, calm down.
Beauty survived the blockade. She passed away in 1951 from old age.
