Confabulated Memories

Story Fossils at Lake Winnipeg

Memory is a curious thing. Without it, events happen and get lost and forgotten. At a recent memorial service on the weekend, I felt connected with others in attendance because we shared memories of the deceased. And it was through the sharing that we validated not only the life of our friend but our own experiences.

Meanwhile, I’ve lived for almost four decades with a man whose various stages of brain damage have led to a confabulated past that leaves my own head spinning. I find myself isolated and alone when I realize that this man I’ve shared a home with, doesn’t share my memories. But confabulating the past doesn’t just hurt families. It seems to be all the rage now in Russian politics.

And isn’t confabulation what we fiction writers do all the time? We invent things. When we don’t know all the facts, we make stuff up. I know that with my own historical fiction I try to build on facts but create a character to personalize them. I invent lives to fit into the events. Sort of like building dinosaurs out of old bones. 

Recently, I was re-visiting a book, first published in 1947, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolavesky. (These 2 co-authors are worthy of more research!)  It’s the best source of detailed locations of the Soviet-era corrective camps I’ve come across. I wanted to find some modern images of the camps on the internet. 

Fence at Perm
Photo: Gerald Praschl, CC

The general vicinity where my mom worked in an open-pit coal mine in the Urals, back in 1947, is now touted as a place for nature-lovers to get away. It has all the modern conveniences that a gulag labourer couldn't even imagine... indoor hot tubs, showers, quaint log cabins with feather duvets and TV.  It’s almost as if what my mom told me when I was growing up ... the bugs, the hunger, the cold ... had never happened. It’s like she might have confabulated the whole thing. 

Putin demonstrates daily that confabulation is thriving in modern-day Russia. The only gulag museum in Russia, housed in Perm, in the Urals, was until 2014 under the management of Memorial, an international human rights NGO. But that truth is too hard to remember and so it's been changed. It’s like a whole country has brain damage and needs to confabulate a storyline to survive.

Perm 36 once a museum remembering the victims of the gulag, now has re-written its own story. For modern Russia, gulags have become a necessary evil that helped Russia achieve greatness. According to the new museum director, it is no longer "politically correct" to view the camps beyond their architectural layout and positive contribution to the Soviet victory. Manipulation of memory. Russia now lives in its own confabulated world. A lonely place to be.

About Setting: The Ural Mountains

Perhaps this tank I photographed in Zhytomyr, Ukraine
was built in Tankograd, aka Chelyabinsk

I haven’t been to the Ural Mountains, but it’s on my wish list. The mountain range forms the border between Europe and Asia. During the Second World War, Stalin moved his major industries more than 1700 kilometers east of Moscow to the mountains, (about the same distance as Winnipeg to the Rockies) in order to protect his war machine factories from the Nazi invasion. Today, we know Tankograd as Chelyabinsk . . . still a major industrial complex.

Not only did the Ural Mountains offer a natural protection from invaders, but the Urals are rich in minerals—especially the coal needed for creating electricity to run the factories. Other minerals mined in the area include gold, diamonds, platinum and copper. 

Canadian Mountains
for a Canadian Goose

But besides war-machine industries, the Ural Mountains are rich in natural beauty . . .a place for adventure tourists. Here’s a quick comparison of the Ural Mountains to the Rocky Mountains.

The Rockies run about 2500 km, north to south. The Urals? About the same, also north to south.

Highest peak in the Urals? Mount Payer at 1472 meters in the far north. Highest peak in the Rockies? Mount Albert at 4400 meters in Colorado.  Highest peak in Europe? Mont Blanc at 4800 meters.

Age difference? The Urals are old! 250-300 million years vs. Rockies at 55-80 million years. That might explain the height difference.

Besides my mom’s unfortunate time as a POW in the Urals, two other events highlight the area for me. One, the Chelyabinsk meteor crash in 2013 and two, the 1959 Dyatlov Pass mystery, which was finally solved and shared in January, 2021. 

For me, the Urals—part of Crow Stone’s setting—must remain a second-hand experience for now. At least I’ve been to the Rockies, to the Alps, and have had a generous dose of cold winters . . . the rest I’ve had to mine from books and my mom’s memories. 

 

Dressing for the Weather

Clothes, like cars, have become so much more than tools to hide our nakedness or keep us warm. Clothes say a lot about a person and we constantly appraise others, and perhaps ourselves, by what they (we) wear. Even without the influence of advertising, we seem to know who’s well put together, who’s got no taste and who just doesn’t care. Kind of crazy. Animals are much better off with their all-season adaptability. 

http://sa-kuva.fi/neo?tem=webneofin

Second-hand or vintage clothes are all the rage and my daughters seem to get a real thrill going thrifting and I’ve tagged along a few times. Yes, there are bargains out there, after all, our western world overflows with stuff.

But back at the end of the Second World War, 'stuff ' was valuable. Especially clothes. You wore what you could get. Sewing machines, tailors, department stores, fabric shops, all that infrastructure to support human fashion had been destroyed. That’s what world wars do. 

Soldiers eagerly tore off insignias that labeled them and became ordinary men again. Warm coats or boots stolen off a corpse were treasured finds. And there were a lot of corpses. As the snow melted and that spring of 1945 revealed the hastily buried, it was an ugly mess. But clothes and boots were salvaged for the living. Size, cleanliness, and definitely style, no longer mattered. It was all about survival. 

Matti Blume

Prisoners of war—those unlucky enough to find themselves in the clutches of the Soviets—were at the end of the line when it came proper winter gear. My mom, trudging eastward to the coal mines of the Urals, dressed for survival. She knew what Russian winters were like. 

Officially, prisoner of war garb was called Telogreika. These quilted jackets were stuffed with cotton that would be grown in the Soviet Union in places like Kazakhstan. I know that my mom wore such a jacket because of a memory she shared of a woman being close to a bonfire and the cotton catching fire.  

The Telogreika was warm but not too water-proof. No, they did not supply the prisoners with proper raingear. When I worked as a mail carrier, I couldn’t convince my mom that I had the proper gear for the Manitoba weather and that, in fact, I preferred facing the elements of nature to the artificial lights of an indoor job. 

Dressing for the weather is a luxury that I, growing up in Canada, take for granted. Modern-day “Telogreika” jackets are ubiquitous and every Canadian probably owns one. Today’s quilted jackets are filled with down or polyester and some are waterproof. Looking at images of the refugees in Ukraine, back in March, I noticed that puffer jackets are ubiquitous over there, too.

How we take the comforts of our closets for granted . . . until we’re on the road, fighting for our lives. It's been a fickle spring and I'm never sure what to wear. Peace time problem. 

Prisoners of History

RIAN_archive_129359_
German_prisoners-of-war_1944
in_Moscow.jpg

Like most of the world, I’ve been following the Ukraine War with great interest. This past week, there were headlines about the first Russian prisoner of war, charged with war crimes. A 21-year-old Russian has been found guilty of shooting a 62-year-old man on a bicycle. He was ordered to shoot and he did. The widow of the civilian feels sorry for the young soldier, now sentenced to life in prison, but can’t forgive him. Of course not. Forgiveness and healing take time. Will we ever forgive Putin for starting this mess?  

Besides perpetrators of specific war crimes, there are regular prisoners of war. The Ukrainian survivors of the valiant Mariupol siege are now prisoners of war. Supposedly up to 1700 Ukrainian soldiers are in Russian hands. Not an enviable fate. Being formally registered by the Red Cross so that humane treatment can be guaranteed under the Geneva Convention, doesn’t seem all that reassuring.

Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-187-0203-06A,_
Russland,_1941
Russische_Kriegsgefangene.jpg

During the Second World War, because the USSR had not signed onto the 1929 Geneva Convention, the Nazis did not feel obligated to follow it.  Soviet soldiers captured by Nazis were thus doomed to death by starvation or complications from disease. (And they’d thought life in the Soviet Union with Stalin had been tough.) Two out of every 3 Soviet prisoners died without any ammunition wasted on them.

Public Domain, Russian prisoners of war near
Sumy, April, 2022

Revenge was inevitable and when Germany finally capitulated, people like my dad—once a pilot for the Luftwaffe, later a member of the Military Police on the East Front—ended up in terrible camps with equally high mortality rates. And to make-up perhaps, for all those forced Ostarbeiter, people like my mom—who’d never been in the military, or any Nazi groups, a young woman, forced to spend the war years in a munitions’ factory—slaved like a workhorse in open pit mines of the Urals. 

And now with social media and instant news, there's so much more propaganda regarding treatment of war criminals I can barely believe that the news headlines today are about current events. How can this all be happening again? 

In her Own Words: Christmas in the Urals, 1945

Someone recently asked me whether it was my mom's voice or mine that expressed writerly ambitions in Tainted Amber.  

While my mom regularly derided my interest in books as 'brotloße Kunst' or 'breadless art,' I've scavenged bits and pieces of her own words written in her hard-to-decipher handwriting. Just recently, I found, inside what I thought was an empty journal, pages called "Die Fahrt nach Russland, 1945" or 'The Journey to Russia, 1945.'  Such a treasure which served to underline her oral sharings of those dark times. Crow Stone is based on her memories, after doing much background research.

My mom actually had a piece published in Kanada Kurier a German-language newspaper, based here in Winnipeg. (It morphed out of the 1969 closing of  Der Nordwesten.)  I found Mom's yellowed newspaper article amongst her scattered papers, in between recipes and budget plans. Both newspapers were ubiquitous in our house when I was growing up. Now I scrounge to find copies!  Here's a translation of her published piece about Christmas as a prisoner of war. 

The Story of the Coal-shippers’ Christmas

by Else Schroeder 

(translated & edited for flow and clarity from the German by Gabriele Goldstone)

A group of twenty girls, called the coal-shippers, is working at an electric energy plant near Kurgan and Chelyabinsk in the Urals. I am one of them.

The distance to work is about seven kilometers. The temperature is -40 degrees and we travel there in the back of a dilapidated truck. Because it is Christmas Eve, two other girls and myself go back to our camp early to warm up the room we all share and to decorate it to look a little bit festive.

When the rest of the girls return, we eat our evening meal: thin soup and a slice of dry bread – not a very satisfying, elaborate Christmas dinner!

Back in our barrack, it becomes quiet. Here you hear someone sobbing, and there someone wipes away a tear from her cheek. Homesickness and longing for loved ones fills the room. I suggest we sing some Christmas songs, but there is opposition.

“Are you able to sing in this dreary place?”

There’s a knock at the door. A girl from another group is looking for company. I ask her, “Do you want to sing some Christmas songs?” She says yes, and so the two of us sing Silent Night, Holy Night.

Suddenly it’s dark in the room. We can hear footsteps in the hallway and expect an inspection. We had been told not to burn homemade candles. But instead, we receive orders to line up immediately to go back to work.  The electric plant is out of power and needs more coal. The old truck is already waiting for us.

We head back out and fill up two lorries. The truck driver has a nice nap while we slave. Then, when it’s time to return to our camp, the truck won’t start. It’s probably frozen.  Now what?  

“Wait here until someone comes to get you,” is the order. The guard points to a building not too far away—a stall for animals. It’s filled with cows, sheep and even a donkey.  

The night is cold, the sky, clear, starry. After the guard heads back to the main camp in his own vehicle, peace and quiet surrounds us. The animals are lying on their beds of straw, and us girls, tired and worn out from the cold and work, do the same, trying to get some sleep.

Kurgan Area in the Urals. Wikimedia Commons

But one of us has to stand guard, and that one is me, because I have been made their leader. While the others sleep, in my mind, I am participating in the Christmas story. The stars so bright. The animals in the barn. Everything leads me to Bethlehem. I am celebrating Christmas with twenty other girls and still I am all alone. 

Finally, it’s morning.  Another truck fetches us for some breakfast and then it’s back to work again, back to shovelling coal.

That was my Christmas in the year 1945.