Remembering the Holodomor during COVID19

In Canada, the fourth Friday and Saturday of November are Holodomor Remembrance Days. I remember my grandfather, Eduard Ristau, who survived the Holodomor in rural Ukraine. He would have spent 1932 and 1933 in hiding—trying to avoid arrest—after his farm had been confiscated for collectivization. Mathilde, his wife and my grandmother, died in distant Siberia a year earlier. My mom, Else, and his other kids had been safely sent to East Prussia just in time. But my grandpa couldn’t get his documents in order. And so he lived through Stalin’s starvation agenda enforced by the OGPU (Soviet secret police).

During those long months of starvation, my grandfather received letters and money from his East Prussian extended family. In 2004, I read those letters in the Zhytomyr secret police files. It was so precious to me to make this connection with him and I am forever grateful that he let his kids get out of the country in time. My mom and her siblings, already half-starved after their time in Siberia, would probably never have survived the Holodomor. 

While visiting various villages in the former Volhynia area, one old woman told me of how she would cower in the fields with the mice as the OGPU came around confiscating grain and the seeds for the next year’s crops. 

 Wikipedia

Our local Human Rights Museum educates visitors about the Holodomor and reminds us of the suffering caused by deliberate starvation by the Soviet government. 

Today, during  COVID, I am grateful to be living in Canada—a country that is trying hard to help each of us stay alive, fed, safe and warm. It’s mind-boggling to me that anti-maskers would see masks as anti-freedom.

And yes, you can miss what you’ve never had. I’ve always missed my grandparents and it took me half a century to learn their story. Opa Ristau—homeless and starving in the empty barns of rural Ukraine—I remember you today on Holodomor Remembrance Day.

FYI:   28,000 people died daily at the height of the famine. Today—with a pandemic raging—I’m finally beginning to grasp what that number means. Another sad fact: 30% of those deaths were under the age of ten. 

 

Finding Bremer Stadtmusikanten in Riga

Instead of singing along on Saturday mornings with Popeye, the sailor man, I sang German folksongs under the enthusiastic leadership of Freddy, our German school teacher.  That’s where I first learned about the famous Bremer musicians—a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster. Based on a Grimms' fairytale, the four aging animals, worn out and rejected by their owners, become traveling musicians finding happiness through adventure and comradeship.

Last fall, I was delighted to meet those musical animals again in Riga, Latvia. It turns out that Bremen and Riga are sister cities. Bremen presented Riga with a replica of their historic bronze statue back in 1990 to celebrate Latvia's independence from the Soviet Union. 

from Wikimedia

The Riga statue was re-imagined by Christa Baumgärtel and has the animals surrounded on either side by wide metal bars. This frame represents the broken iron curtain through which the animals now peek to create their music. 

Here’s an image of the original 1953 statue in Bremen by artist Gerhard Marcks.

Politics aside, rubbing noses with any of the four animals is supposed to bring good luck.  These famous animal bards are also depicted by sculptures in places as diverse as Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Fujikawaguchiko, Japan. 

Back to Saturday morning cartoons . . . if I’d been a kid in Russia back in 1969, I could have experienced the Bremen town musicians on TV since it was a popular Soviet cartoon. 

It was fun to find a connection to childhood on my Baltic adventure.

'Their' Country

I have a guilty pleasure (besides the Abba one) of following the young royals. It’s hard not to with this smart phone of mine that constantly puts them in the headlines. I find little Princess Charlotte to be absolutely adorable but will keep my opinions about the older royals in her life to myself. Anyway. One recent article shared that Prince Harry laid a wreath in LA rather than in the UK. Now let me digress.

I am a Canadian and yes, I am infinitely grateful that my parents chose this country as their new home after the ugly Second World War. Yes, I know the Nazis were beyond evil. Yes, I know that my father, by fighting for them, could also be called evil. 

But, he was my dad and somehow, I have had to come to terms with what he did and with the uniform he wore. The education system I shuffled through did nothing to address this predicament—and I have decades of shame and struggle behind me—one that thousands of immigrants continue to experience. 

Buffy St. Marie’s song, The Universal Soldier, supports me in this struggle and so does the memorial that Prince Harry visited. It reads “In Memory of the men who offered their lives in defense of their country.”  May our country never be the aggressor, may it never be the evil one. May my son never be called to be a Universal Soldier.

My publisher, Ronsdale Press, will be doing a panel discussion, via Zoom, about the war on Tuesday, November 17th.  "Second Generation WWII: A German Perspective."  Panelists include, Michelle Barker, author of the award-winning books including My Long List of Impossible Things, The House of One Thousand Eyes, and A Year of Borrowed Men, along with, Heige Boehm, debut author of Secrets in the Shadows. Email ronsdalepress@gmail.com for a Zoom invitation. 

Red poppies, red stones.

While wandering through the Schleswig-Holstein cemeteries, I found a few memorials dedicated to the Second World War. One was remembering those lost at sea during Operation Hannibal. 

Operation Hannibal was the 1945 desperate naval attempt to save civilians, stuck in East Prussia, from the Soviet advance. My mom wanted to board one of the ships . .. the Wilhelm Gustloff, (read Ruta Sepetys's amazing novel) or the Steuben, or maybe the Goya . . . waiting in the Pillau harbor. Mom never made it across the Vistula Lagoon and instead ended up in a Ural coal mine. 

Later, while biking back, I found poppies growing on the side of the road. Poppies—a Flanders field icon—and a poignant reminder of the paradox of life. Fragile and yet so tenacious. This was fall and the poppies were re-blooming. Maybe just for me? Those poppies belong to my dad's past love. But that's another story.

Red poppies, red stones. These are the travel souvenirs that I treasure. 

About Cemeteries

I enjoyed hearing a podcast about cemeteries as travel destinations the other evening while out dog walking. 

Last year I visited a few graveyards in northern Germany looking for neglected relatives. Since the living ones I’d been visiting weren’t too interested in the old stuff, I toured on my own.

The graves of my dad’s parents, buried in Schleswig-Holstein, have disappeared through neglect. Seems like nobody’s wanted to remember them and graves in Germany have a limited shelf-life of up to thirty years. So even though I had this nostalgic notion of finding my long-lost grandparents, I only found a few random Schröders in the Wesselburen graveyard. Maybe some of them have a family connection, but I’m not enough of a genealogy sleuth to find out. 

Instead, I enjoyed the company of the old cat who guided me amongst the graves. I noticed he had a decent little house for inclement weather.  The cemetery itself was quite beautiful and I enjoyed spending time in it. It’s much more park-like than the ones I’m used to here in Canada which are wide open with only cut flowers adorning the graves

As I ambled along the paths, imagining past lives, the orange cat followed. But the weather—suitably grey and misty—soon turned to rain. So I got back on my bicycle and the graveyard cat retreated to his shelter.

Happy hauntings. May the dead rest in peace.

A friendly travel advisory

The other day—a beautiful, windless October morning—I was hiking off trail with my faithful canine, when I had to go! Try telling that to a dog who considers any place suitable for when he has to go. Dogs have us well trained, catering to their lack of discretion with pretty little bags of every colour. But for me? Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no porta-potty in sight? Sorry, dear dog, we gotta get back to the car. NOW.  

My first thought, as we bee-lined through the farmer’s field, was of homeless people. How do they do it? Seriously, toilets are one of the basic necessities of life. When I delivered mail, I got out of the coffee drinking habit mostly because I couldn’t be guaranteed a rest stop when I needed one. 

As I hurried the sniffing dog along, I remembered a similar situation during last year’s bike trip. After we’d crossed the border from Lithuania into Russia on the Curonian Spit, there was a sudden decline in the availability and the cleanliness of the washroom facilities. We were cycling past a lot of empty fields and decided that the wilderness was a better place to go. 

Romus, our tour guide, warned us to watch out for the stinging nettle. Yes, the field was full of the waist-high weed. I’d grown up hearing about stinging nettle, called brennessel, in German. My mom and her sisters survived on it during the hunger years in eastern Germany, using it for soups and teas. 

A quick reference check, and I learn that stinging nettle, once dried, does indeed count as one of nature’s powerhouses. An anti-oxidant, it can lower blood pressure, treat arthritis, provide necessary nutrients, and even cause abortions—something the local women might have sought out in 1945 after the Red Army frenzy of rapes. 

But you shouldn't let fresh stinging nettle touch your skin . . . unless you want an itchy rash for the rest of the day.  The leaves are not to be used as a replacement for the double-layered softness of bathroom tissue.  Just a friendly travel advisory. 

Music in the Rec Room

As a kid, growing up in the sunny suburbs of St. James, the family rec room was a place for cast-offs. While my dad’s hunting trophies hung on the walls—dead deer heads, trophy fish and rifles—it was also where my mom put stuff no longer good enough for the living room. Because it usually seemed cold and had bad lighting, nobody spent much time down there—except me. 

It was where I catalogued old 78s and listened to them over and over. While my school friends listened to the Beatles or Beach Boys, I listened to Dad’s music collection comprised of hits from the thirties, forties and fifties. I loved the music and while upstairs the TV ruled with either hockey or football, I filled the basement with Dad's old music. 

Growing up in a church where dancing was considered sin, I could only invent dances to the fox trot, waltz and tango melodies, in private. I breathed in the romance of another time. 

One of my favourites was Ich Weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder Geschehen by Zarah Leanders. I imagined the German soldiers—my dad—fighting a hopeless war and yet hoping that a miracle would happen to save them from their inevitable end. No, I wasn't cheering for the Nazis, I think I was just trying to relive the tragedy of it all. 

Zarah Leanders, photo from 
Wikipedia

Another favourite singer was Lale Andersen, singing the original Lili Marlene. (Later released by Marlene Dietrich who'd left Germany for the States.) How many times did I listen to that song and visualize the lamplight and the endless waiting?  I imagined my dad’s heart broken over and over again by his first wife whose name it was taboo to mention. I imagined Dad dancing the tango, to Roter Mohn, sung by the Chilean nightingale—Rosita Serrano. Hey Jude or Good Vibrations could not compete with my favourite music down in the rec room. 

Then one day, most of those records got broken. (I'd leaned back and put the weight of my hand on the fragile pile I’d been sorting). Now through the magic of technology, streaming has brought back the music and while out walking the dog, I'm down in that basement rec room all over again. Trying to imagine how it all went so wrong.