Victory Day

 We don’t celebrate Victory Day here in Canada. Instead we have a Victoria Day holiday on the third Monday of May honouring Queen Victoria (British monarch) and officially opening our warm weather season. It’s a weekend where cottagers open their summer homes and gardeners begin plotting their flower beds. 

My first experience of Victory Day was in Kyiv, back in 2004. We accidently stumbled upon some rehearsals for the big parade that was to be staged … not on May 8th, when Nazi Germany officially capitulated, but on May 9th, which was due to the time zone difference.  That parade rehearsal, complete with tanks, artillery fire, and military music was a jarring reminder that we’d entered a country where war was a visceral memory. 

Zhytomyr, Ukraine, 

In May, 1945, peace deals may have been signed, but for millions of people the worst was yet to come. Homelessness, hunger, separation from loved ones, disease, long term disability… these would be the consequences of those six years of war.  

Today’s war zones … spreading like wild fires in a world gone mad …. will breed more instability and more distress.  Victory Day wounds take a long time to heal, and now those wounds are being re-opened.

My dad, captured by Soviet forces on May 11, 1945 spent five years in a coal mine near Moscow. His children died of hunger and his first wife, assuming he was dead, entered a new relationship. My mom, captured by Soviet forces at the end of February, 1945, no doubt spent Victory Day traveling on foot or by train to the Urals (I explore this in Crow Stone). Her two sisters never made it out of East Prussia before the war ended. I’m exploring their experiences as I write a new novel set in East Prussia as it transitioned into Russian Kaliningrad in the aftermath of Victory Day, 1945.

‘May Victories?’  Nazi Germany’s capitulation eighty years ago, was an end and a beginning. Putin’s bizarre re-imagining of Nazi terror in his war against Ukraine exposes him as a manipulative liar as this short clip from Berlin by President Steinmeier underlines.  Eighty years later, fear festers anew.