Happy 145, Canada!

Happy 145th birthday, Canada. How grateful I am for the gift of being Canadian - a gift that my parents gave to me. I was born within the first year of their arrival in this country - back in the fifties.  They were newlyweds - both in their mid 30s - both homeless and grateful for the new opportunities that Canada offered. My little parents - each only about five feet tall - were the proudest Canadians around. They loved everything about this country. The freedom, Trudeau's multi-culturalism, the lakes, the fishing, the mountains, the distances,  and the wonderful friends and neighbours they made along the way.

Canada is my home because my parents chose to move and start their new family here. They never took its gracious compassion to the homeless for granted. I hope Canada continues to be a refuge for the homeless - a place with room for families to grow.

I saw the EuroCup Final on TV this afternoon. My kids didn't care to watch because Germany had been eliminated. On the one hand, I think my dad would be proud of that German gene in his grandkids, but on the other hand, he'd have happily watched Spain beat Italy in Kyiv.  A soccer match is so much better than war.  

I've finally managed to plough through Andreas Kossert's book, Kalte Heimat. This book is a companion to his other book, Damals in Ostpreussen. The books have only whetted my appetite to learn more about this place. I want to go there. In fact, I'm thinking that retracing the steps of my mom's life would be a great retirement project. The towns of my mother's youth have all been renamed - whether in the former Soviet Union or in the former East Prussia. No wonder her new home here in Canada became so important to her. And me - I just wanted to be a plain little Canadian girl. I was so resentful of my parents' hidden past. I wanted grandparents to visit and English spoken at home. But now I'm starting to get it and to appreciate who my parents were, and therefore, to understand more of who I am.

Interesting memoir

The Remains of War: Surviving the Other Concentration Camps of World War II by G. Pauline Kok-Schurgers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was a real page turner. It's a memoir of a nine-year-old Dutch girl's survival during WWII in Sumatra, Indonesia. I had no idea that Dutch civilians lost their freedom over there. But then, I had no idea that the Dutch even had their people in Sumatra. The book is published by iUniverse and is very well written.

For me, even more interesting than the historical setting, is the psychological tension between mother and daughter. What's needed is a follow-up. How did those horrible years affect the children as they became adults?

A memoir doesn't get better than this. Highly recommended. Here's a youtube clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URZfwU...

View all my reviews

Larry Warwaruk's Bone Coulee

Couple of days ago, I spent close to six hours in a hospital waiting room while my daughter had all four of her wisdom teeth pulled out. It was some great, mostly uninterrupted, reading time for me. (Not so great, for my daughter.)

I got to finish up with Larry Warwaruk's novel Bone Coulee. The book's been nominated for a Saskatchewan Fiction Award. He received the same award back in 1998 with Ukrainian Wedding.

I guess I'm prejudiced to like this book because I lived in Saskatchewan during the 1980s (two of my kids were born there) and I love the place. Didn't start out that way, though. I went there prepared to hate it. But my narrow mind was expanded by that glorious sky, vast fields, and the open-hearted people. Saskatchewan's license plates read, "Land of the Living Skies." It really is a magical place.

But Saskatchewan, like other Canadian places, has a dark past which still muddies the present.

After all, the prairies weren't empty when the Europeans arrived.

Warwaruk's book plays with Saskatchewan's assets: the people, the landscape, the history, even the politics. Reading his book made me want to jump into a car and drive out to the prairie to appreciate the quickly disappearing past.

The buffalo, the farming hamlets, and the grain elevators are all gone. Like the quilts in the book, Warwaruk pieces together parts of the past and creates story. And, in spite of dark moments, he offers healing and hope for the future.

My favorite scene happens right in the middle on page 116.

Angela wakes to the sound of a siren. At first she thinks there must be a fire somewhere. She hurries out of bed to join her mother, who's already at the front room window. It's a fire truck. Sid Rigley drives, holding a megaphone out the side window.

"Get out of bed, Esther! Pancake breakfast in the Lion's Den beer gardens."

"He wakes up the town?" Roseanna says.

The siren sounds a second time.

"How about you people?" Sid's voice blares from the megaphone. "Pancake breakfast! Sausage! Eggs! Hash browns! We've even got Kwok Ming at the grill."

Warwaruk's novel captures that small town feeling. It's all there - the First Nations, the East Europeans, the Chinese restaurant. Everyone trying in their own way to survive. Recommended reading for all prairie folk - and those who wish they were.

Collectives

My grandfather was considered a class one, “counter-revolutionary” kulak. In 1930, he was arrested and his family forced to leave his 17 hectare farm so that it could become part of a collective – or – kolkchoz. Good bye, kulak.

(image from /www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/oleg-pavlov/down-on-farm-history-lesson-in-kazan)

By the spring of 1931 – when his exiled children returned, motherless, from Siberia – his windmill was gone and strangers lived in the family house. When I visited the area in 2004, an old local woman told me that she remembered the dismantling of the windmill. The wood was used to build the new collective manager’s office. Farming became a complicated bureaucracy - it was all about the number crunching.

First class kulaks were not invited to work on the collectives. But all the others were pressured into joining. Workers ( proletariats) from the city factories were even sent out into the countryside to apply pressure tactics to 'encourage' them. Collective workers were called kolkchozniks (a Russian, not Ukrainian word). No one was happy.

Food production fell, while demand increased. This was the setting that led to the horrific Holodomor – death by starvation – in 1932/33. Then in 1933 the rules changed so that the workers could actually share in the profit of a collective. Before this, there had been no incentive to work.

As I try to learn more about life on a kolkchoz – I’m now aware that there’s a huge difference between the early collectives, and the later ones. But, the collective way of farming was never as successful as the western world's farms.

My mother and family lived through the confusing early years (1929 – 1933) where that chaos cost many lives and much suffering. Later, by the spring of 1933, the mass deportations and arrests stopped. By then, my mom was out of the country. My grandfather, however, stayed behind and was eventually a victim of the insanity of the Great Terror (1937/8).

Another five years go by, and the Germans invade. The collective workers are eager to switch back to the private farming of the pre-First Five Year Plan. They see the Nazis as an improvement to Stalin. While the Germans do announce in March of 1942 that collective farming will end, and that the land will be re-distributed – this privilege is given only to ethnic Germans. Food that is grown and harvested by the Ukrainian women is confiscated to feed the German soldiers.

One of these soldiers might have been my father – a German from Schleswig-Holstein – who is sent to the Eastern front in 1944. Of course, he had no idea back then, that he would eventually marry a daughter of a kulak. He was married to someone else then, but I’m getting way off track.

Back to the collective farms. The first ones were formed as early as 1919, and became the norm during the dekulakization project after 1929. Today, in 2012, some of them are still around- lasting longer than the Soviet regime. From what I gather, while many collectives went bankrupt after the government stopped paying wages, and providing supplies – others have continued – with slight changes.

It’s all rather confusing. Perhaps things will end up like here in North America with big business taking over. However, I did read that family-sized gardens contribute a lot to the post-Soviet dinner tables. The kulak spirit lives on.

Yes, I'm back in the world of 1931, trying to imagine and re-create my mother's lost childhood.

More WWII victims

Making Bombs for Hitler by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The book begins with "... and the light was so white that it made my eyes ache." This story makes my heart ache. At times I had to put it aside because of its intensity. The author shines a harsh light on more victims of the Nazi regime and makes me squirm with discomfort. Compelling read. Companion novel to Stolen Child. Both books should be read by anyone studying WWII because it wasn't only Jewish children who suffered. That war was beyond awful. Kudos to Marsh Skrypuch for remembering the OST Arbeiter children.

View all my reviews

Exploring East Prussia

If you’ve browsed through my blog, you might know that I’ve been exploring my mom’s life (1919-2011). My first book, The Kulak’s Daughter, was set in a part of the former Soviet Union known as Volhynia. This area is now part of the independent country called Ukraine.

I’ve been working on, and revising, a sequel to that book. It’s also set in a part of the world that exists only in history books and fading memories. This is a place called East Prussia. When my mom left the Soviet Union as a thirteen-year-old orphan, she was adopted by extended family who were farmers in East Prussia near the city of Königsberg. Today, Königsberg is part of Russia and known as Kaliningrad.

It’s a confusing part of the world, and the 1920s/30s/ and 40s were confusing times. I’m a slow learner, but I’m gradually getting an idea of what life was like. The one thing that did stay the same was the people. Teenage emotions, human relationships, and ambitions have remained constant throughout time. So this will be at the core of my writing, even amidst the chaos of eastern Europe in the 20^th century.

If you look at this map (Creative Commons, free download) - you can see that East Prussia is separated from the rest of Germany. Poland divides the two parts of Germany. This is why Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. This Weimar Republic - created after WWI - is the predecessor of the fatal Third Reich.

In this brewing kettle of trouble, my orphaned kulak mother spent her confusing teenaged years.