The city of Sumy in northeast Ukraine has made headlines in recent days because of the horrific Palm Sunday attacks where dozens of Ukrainian civilians died during Putin’s continued ‘special operation’ that has devastated countless lives over the last 3 years. So many needlessly broken lives. Why?
Sumy is the main city in a region I’d been hoping to visit someday. Near the ancient monastery town of Putyvl, it’s an area that has seen the horrors of war before. One of my father’s friends, an agronomist, had been stationed in Putyvl during the Nazi invasion back in 1941.
Ernst was also from Schleswig-Holstein, like my dad, and had immigrated to Canada in the early sixties. He’d written his memoirs and in the mid-eighties, asked me, a recent German MA grad, to translate his memoirs into English.
I knew my family had a lot of war memories and I’d been trying to figure them out through various means … travel and oral histories, and 20th century writers like Heinrich Böll, Günther Gras and Thomas Mann so I welcomed this opportunity to get an insider’s view of that war.
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| Fotosergio: Molchansky Monastery |
Ernst shares his efforts to keep his Nazi taskmasters happy and fed while feeding a partisan army hiding in the Sumy/Putyvl marshy woods. He shares how he supposedly manipulated the Soviets & the Nazis, killing indoor plants with too much un-drunk vodka, never being sure who to trust and even faking his own grave in an effort to hide. It was a fascinating account and while on the outside I was a newlywed with her first house and an empty sandbox calling to her, on the inside I was learning about Nazis, partisans, Soviets and war.
I’ve never stopped being fascinated by those years and those places. A grim reality is once again settled over Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine and all that eighty-year-old history still matters. I’m so sad that the ‘bloodlands’ (Timothy Snyder) continue to bleed.
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