Family story
Two graves
The grave of the painter’s daughter, who worked to save Leningrad’s heritage through the siege, was found and cared for by local historians in St. Petersburg. His own grave has not been found.
Tatyana Wiesel (1904 to 1976), the painter’s younger daughter, was a graphic and theater artist, a mountaineer and a defender of Leningrad. Through the siege she worked on saving the city’s architectural and artistic heritage, and after her father’s death in 1943 she kept the family papers safe in an apartment where everything that could burn was being burned for warmth.
In 2013 the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti wrote about her. Soon afterward local historians in St. Petersburg, with financial support from Grigory Yavlinsky, located her grave and put it in order. The family learned of it only after the fact. They also promised to look for Emil Wiesel’s grave.
The Volkovo cemetery
The family had made its own attempt earlier. An archive certificate gave the place: the Volkovo cemetery, in the Lutheran section. Several hours on the ground turned up nothing.
That is the usual story for burials of the siege years: they were quick, the records were poor, and fences and markers did not survive the decades that followed. The search is not over.
Sources
- Archive certificate on the burial place of Emil Wiesel
- Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, article on Tatyana Wiesel, 2013
- First published on the family blog: 171679