Pavlovsk Museum

This guide to Pavlovsk in Saint Petersburg follows Anna Zelenova, who became director of the palace museum less than a month before the Germans reached the town in September 1941, and who spent those weeks burying statues, hiding treasures in cellars, and loading crates onto the last trucks out. It covers the two and a half years of occupation that followed, the fire the retreating troops set in January 1944, and the tens of thousands of park trees felled for firewood. Zelenova returned within two weeks of the fire, while engineers were still clearing mines from the rubble, carrying the inventories she had written while packing everything away.