Tanya Savicheva Tatyana Nikolayevna Savicheva ( ) , commonly referred to as Tanya Savicheva ( January 23 , 1930 – July 1 , 1944 ) was a Soviet child diarist who endured the Siege of Leningrad during World War II . Early life . Born on January 23 , 1930 , she was the youngest child in the family of baker Nikolay Rodionovich Savichev and seamstress Mariya Ignatievna Savicheva . Her father died when Tanya was six , leaving Mariya Savicheva with five children : three girls — Tanya , Zhenya ( Eugenia ) and Nina — and two boys — Mikhail and Leka ( Leonid ) . The family planned to spend the summer of 1941 in the countryside , but the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 disrupted their plans . All of them , except Mikhail ( Misha ) , who had already left , decided to stay in Leningrad . Each of them worked to support the army : Mariya Ignatievna sewed uniform s , Leka worked as a planner at the Admiralty Plant , Zhenya worked at the munitions factory , Nina worked at the construction of city defences , and Uncle Vasya and Uncle Lesha served in the anti - aircraft defence . Tanya , then 11 years old , dug trenches and put out firebombs . One day Nina went to work and never came back ; she was sent to Lake Ladoga and then urgently evacuated . The family was unaware of this and thought she had died . Origins of the diary . After a few days in memory of Nina , Mariya Ignatievna gave to Tanya a small notebook that belonged to her sister and that would later become Tanya ' s diary . Tanya had a real diary once , a thick notebook where she recorded everything important in her life . She burned it when nothing was left to heat the stove in winter , but she spared her sister ' s notebook . The first record in it appeared on December 28 . Each day Zhenya got up when it was still dark outside . She walked seven kilometers to the plant , where she worked for two shifts every day making mine cases . After the work she would donate blood . Her weakened body could not endure . She died at the plant where she worked . Then grandmother Evdokiya Grigorievna died . Then Tanya ' s brother Leka . Then , one after another , Uncle Vasya and Uncle Lesha died . Her mother was the last . That time Tanya probably browsed through the pages and added her final remark . In August 1942 , Tanya was one of the 140 children who were rescued from Leningrad and brought to the village of Krasny Bor . All of them survived , except Tanya . Anastasiya Karpova , a teacher in the Krasny Bor orphanage , wrote to Tanya ' s brother Mikhail , who happened to be outside of Leningrad in 1941 : " Tanya is now alive , but she doesn ' t look healthy . A doctor , who visited her recently , says she is very ill . She needs rest , special care , nutrition , better climate and , most of all , tender motherly care . " In May 1944 , Tanya was sent to a hospital in Shatki , where she died a month later , on July 1 , of intestinal tuberculosis . During the Nuremberg Trials , one of the documents presented by the Allied prosecutors allegedly was the small notebook that once belonged to Tanya , although this fact is debatable . The argument against it is that if the diary had been really presented at the Nuremberg Trials , it would have never left the court archives . Nina Savicheva and Mikhail Savichev returned to Leningrad after World War II . The diary of Tanya Savicheva is now displayed at the Museum of Leningrad History and a copy is displayed at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery . Legacy . Tanya and her diary have become an iconic image of the victims of the siege of Leningrad in the postwar Soviet Union . In May 1972 , a memorial was constructed in her honor in Shatki , which was later expanded to a memorial complex . 2127 Tanya , a minor planet discovered in 1971 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh , is named in her honor .