Names

I'm currently working on edits (again!) for my book. One thing I'm wondering about right now is the spelling of the city of Zhitomir.

Here's what I learned. Zhitomir is the Russian and/or Yiddish spelling. Shitomir is the German spelling and Zytomierz is the Polish spelling. Zhytomyr is the current Ukrainian spelling. Poor city, it's been through a lot.

I suppose, I should perhaps keep the spelling consistent with the time period of the novel, which means I'll spell it the Russian way. It might not be the politically correct thing to do now that it's a vibrant Ukrainian city once again, but it'll be historically accurate.

Even here in Canada there's issues with the names of places. Several northern communities were once named after European explorers. I'm thinking of Frobisher Bay which was renamed Iqualuit in 1987.

The photo here is of 2004 Zhytomyr. It's a beautiful place. (Those are chestnut tree blossoms.) I'll have to share some more about it later.

More on Zhitomir

Follow this link for some more spellings (it's spelled with a j - jitomir) and some great historical photos.  I'm reading a book by Wendy Lower right now. It centers on Zhitomir during the Nazi occupation and is called Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. The Jewish community was almost totally destroyed there in the late summer and fall of 1941. 

It's hard to imagine so much death in one place. After going through Stalin's Great Terror in the thirties, (which took my grandfather in 1937), the Nazis descended to do their killings. There's a good chance my dad passed through the place, too. No wonder I felt ghosts brushing my shoulder every time I turned a corner in that bloody place.

My dad - a German born on the North Sea, close to Hamburg - spent several years as a Military Police for the Nazis on the Eastern Front - or the Wild East - as Hitler liked to call it. My dad had joined the German Air Force back in 1936. He was eighteen. His ex-wife told me the uniform was a real babe-magnet.  He crashed over Prague in 1941 and then after a year in hospital he was sent to Ukraine.  But he only talked about the air force years, never about the Eastern Front years or about the five years in a Soviet POW camp.

This time of year is full of ghosts. And I feel overwhelmed by the cruelty of life.  But it's Thanksgiving and I'm grateful for the peace in which my family lives.

Remembering Dogs

It's been a year since my good old dog, Tip, passed away and I think I'll rearrange things here and give him a smaller presence on this blog. His forget-me-nots in the garden (by the fence which he so loved to mess up) will bloom in the spring. I want to say that his departure from my life helped me understand what my character, Olga, was going through when she had to leave her dog behind after the family was exiled to Yaya, Siberia. My mom remembers her family dog, Mopsi, and how he chased their wagon when they returned from exile. It's these kind of details that go straight to my sentimental heart.

It was interesting ... I read an earlier draft of my book to my daughter's grade six class, soon after my trip to Ukraine back in 2004. One of the boys asked whether I found Olga's dog while I was over there. (More than seventy years had passed!) But I didn't tell him this, I just said, no, I never found her dog, but I found other dogs - orphans - all over the streets of Zhitomir. They often hung out near the back doors of restaurants, hoping for table scraps. Back in 2004, there was no humane society - no place for orphaned dogs.

One dog was often at the gas station where we regularly filled up. Filling up there was a big procedure. We'd have to get out of the van and wait around for half an hour. I think it was a propane-fueled van. This dog was so docile - so eager to please. He'd have made somebody a great pet.

In the small villages, outside of Zhitomir, many houses had a dog tied to a short chains near the door. A chained dog is not a friendly dog. I wouldn't want to be a mail carrier out there.

So now I look forward to spring and Tip's perennials. While in Ukraine, we followed a trail of perennials. They were the clues to the past lives of my grandparents and other family members.

The story behind Broken Stone

Let me share a bit about my upcoming release Broken Stone by Rebelight Publishing. It’s a middle grade novel, set like Red Stone, in the early 1930s. Broken Stone continues the exploration of my mom’s childhood.  The first book, Red Stone, (previously published as The Kulak’s Daughter) happens primarily in two places: Federofka, a tiny village 35 kilometers northwest Zhitomir (about an hour west of Kiev) and in Yaya, Siberia, in the Kemerovo Oblast (about half-way between Tomsk and Irkutsk). Red Stone, told from the viewpoint of an eleven-year-old girl, explores the impact of collectivization on a kulak family.

The sequel, Broken Stone, begins in the Soviet Union (again in the Zhitomir area) and moves to East Prussia. The children travel to the Baltic port city of Königsberg and then head to a small farming town called Kreuzburg (about twenty kilometers south of Königsberg) where they settle in with relatives.

One of the things that has made my research so compelling is that the homes of my mom’s childhood have basically been wiped off the map. Federofka, her birth town, is now Kaliniwka. Königsberg became Kaliningrad, and Kreuzburg is Slavskoye.  After 1945, East Prussia—a  former province of Germany—was divided between the Soviet Union and Poland. And so the Kaliningrad area, along with Slavskoye, is part of the current Russian Federation.

Thus, my mom’s past, before immigrating to Canada in 1953, was completely dismantled. Her father’s windmill was literally taken apart and used to build the new collective manager’s office. Her mother was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave in the frozen ground of Siberia, while her father, a victim of the 1937 Great Terror, was dumped into a mass grave along with thousands of other ex-kulaks. Only a few photographs and some archived secret police files give clues to a crushed past.

Mothers and daughters have, perhaps, one of most complex of human relationships. Ours was no different. By exploring my mom’s past, I’m basically trying to figure out what made her tick (and how that affects me). She could never tell a story of her life in a straight forward chronological order. It came out in bits and pieces, at the most unexpected times. My retelling of her childhood years under Stalin and then Hitler, is an effort to create narrative out of the jumble of emotion that underlines memory.

Broken Stone is about a broken family and a young girl trying to grow up with a foot in two strongly opposing political regimes. She’s torn between her father, still left behind in the Soviet Union, and her own future in fascist Germany. It’s a quiet story. The plot points belong to a girl in transition from childhood to adulthood, from communism to Nazism, from dependent to self-sufficient, from sad to hopeful. It’s also an attempt by me to give my own family some roots. I hope you like it. 

June 3rd Lilacs

I can’t let this day in June slip by, without remembering the grandfather I never had. It wasn’t until I went to Ukraine in 2004 and searched through former KGB files in the small city of Zhitomir (Zhytomyr) that I “discovered” my grandfather. What I learned I brought back to my mother, who at eighty-six still did not know what had happened to him.

The file on my grandfather is rich with detail. In June, 1937, spring unfolded with its blooming maybells and lilacs like it always does. My grandfather shared a rented room at 66 Andriivska Street in the Polish section of town near the Teteriv River.  Of course, being a farmer, he would no doubt have preferred being on the land rather than in a crowded city. However, his farm in Federofka had been expropriated back in 1929 to make way for a collective. Since then, it appears he struggled to make a living with his horse—a sort of taxi service

When I visited the area I walked near the place of his final arrest, but the house itself was gone, turned into a vegetable plot.  Speaking of plots, 1937 and 1938 were the years that Stalin’s paranoia reached a frightening crescendo and my grandfather became one of its victims. During the ‘kulak operation’ 387, 000 former kulaks were executed.

According to the Zhitomir file, my grandfather was arrested by Officer Kawrasky of the NKVD. A detailed list was made of his possessions which included: a Bible, a letter from a friend, eight addresses written on paper and his work permit.

All summer long, when my grandfather was not rotting in the sweltering heat of the overcrowded jail,  he was being interrogated by a Troika (three person court).   In the NKVD file  I was able to read (through a translator) of my grandfather’s crimes. He tried to get a German passport in Kiev, not once but several times. (They said this was when he passed on information). He received money from East Prussia, not once but several times. (This was payment for his spying activities.) Of course, as a former kulak, my grandfather was already guilty.  Such were the times.  My grandfather was charged with counter-revolutionary activity—Article 58. Stalin was growing fearful of the rising Nazi party and suspicious of all foreigners inside his own country.

My lilacs are still blooming and now on June 3 I think of how beautiful seasons do not mirror suffering, injustice, violence or crime.  Beauty must not be mistaken for goodness. The two are not the same. 

On Mom's Trail

(This is a copy of an article I prepared for SGGEE (Society for German Genealogy  in Eastern Europe) It can be found in its most recent journal, available to members only. (Vol. 24 No.1  2022 March). 

creative commons

It’s long been an ambition of mine to physically retrace my Volhynian-born mother’s footsteps. With Don Miller’s guidance, I started at the beginning, in Federowka, 35 kilometers northwest of Zhitomir. That’s where the storks dropped off Else Ristau back in 1919. On that roots tour, in 2004, I visited Zhitomir’s secret police files and perused documents which convicted my grandfather—former windmill owner, Eduard Ristau—as a class one kulak, guilty of counter-terrorism.  I viewed the ditch where they dumped his body in the fall of 1937 during the Great Terror and even looked for happier times in nearby Pulin, where Mom was allowed a sip of her father’s dark and bitter beer. Most dear to me were the granite remnants of the Ristau windmill discovered with the help of Helene Nickel, an older woman in Federowka. I tucked a piece of its red granite base into my mom’s pocket when she was buried later in 2011.   

Kulak orphans in Kreuzburg

That 2004 trip became an important turning point for my sense of self.  Growing up here in Canada, without much of a history—my mom having only a confused and limited point of view of what she’d been through—had left me feeling untethered, detached and without a true identity. With the help of SGGEE, and much reading, I now have a rich inheritance and a much stronger appreciation of my place in this chaotic world affected by war, social unrest, and now, even a pandemic.  How rich we are when we discover our past. 

My mom survived her Siberian exile as the child of a kulak and in 1932 ended up with Ristau relatives in Kreuzburg, East Prussia (now Slavskoye, twenty kilometers south of the present city of Kaliningrad). In the fall of 2019, I cycled through these East Prussia parts of my mom’s life. 

The former Ostpreussen (East Prussia) no longer exists as a political entity. Germany’s easternmost province is now divided amongst Russia, Poland and Lithuania and while Lithuania and Poland have prospered in the thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the tiny Kaliningrad Oblast continues to be a rather forlorn part of eastern Europe—a place for Putin to test his missiles within shooting range of the rest of Europe. 

The guided adventure began in Riga, Latvia and we alternatively biked and drove down to Klaipeda, Lithuania. Klaipeda, once the German city Memel, sits right on the Baltic. There we admired a statue of Ännchen von Tharau. (Germans might be familiar with the famous folksong about her.)  Back in the 1930s, her statue had incensed Hitler when he realized she had her back to him while he orated a victory speech from a balcony overlooking the public square. 

From Klaipeda, we took a ferry across to the Curonian Spit—a scenic ninety-eight-kilometer long strip of ecologically-fragile land, a Unesco World Heritage area, divided between Lithuania and Russia. On the Spit, we encountered huge drifting sand dunes, wild boar, and migrating birds. It was during my 2004 trip to Ukraine with Don Miller that I learned to appreciate birds . . . especially the storks and the cuckoos. Our East Europeans ancestors were closely connected to nature and this is reflected in their culture—including their songs, poems and memories.

Our small group (there were six of us) stayed overnight in Nida (Nidden), a resort town made famous by Thomas Mann who spent several summers there, and established a writing colony, after receiving the Nobel Prize for his novel Buddenbrooks in 1929. Later, the Nazis confiscated his place and turned it into a convalescent home for recovering Air Force officers. My father, himself at one point an injured Luftwaffe officer, was never amongst the privileged elite . . . a good thing, I’d say.

From Nida, we continued to the Russian half of the Spit. While there was only a modest entry point, it felt intimating entering Russia on a bike. The border guards took their job seriously with fearsome-looking guns and barking dogs. I was grateful for our multi-lingual guide who got us safely across and I’m sure he was grateful, too.

The difference between Lithuania and Russia on that Curonian Spit was felt as soon as we used the park washrooms. I preferred the natural setting of the bush (even with the stinging nettle or possibility of wild boar), to the filth of the offered outhouses. And yes, we did spot wild boar, along the road as we cycled. 

In spite of the dirty washrooms, this part of Russia had an inviting rustic charm. We stopped in Rybachy (formerly Rositten), which had been a renowned German migratory bird research station and is still used by Russian naturalists. Climbing the sand dunes was an amazing—and exhausting—off-road adventure. Because of the delicate nature of the dunes, we needed to stay on marked paths. Entire villages have been buried by the drifting sand dunes over past centuries. Good luck finding clues to ancestors in those villages. 

Our first night in the Kaliningrad Oblast was in the former spa town of Cranz (now Zelonogradsk). This area along the Baltic is also known as the Amber Coast—and yes, I hunted for amber—unsuccessfully. Later I bought some at one of the ubiquitous kiosks selling very affordable amber jewelry. 

Aside from natural beauty, the German influence is still strongly reflected in the architecture of Zelonogradsk. While Russian corruption or confusion has left some of the modern beachfront hotels indefinitely unfinished, old German villas offer a laid-back ambience of a past era. Trains in the 1930s had regular-scheduled, heavily-used routes for the East Prussians to enjoy the Baltic Sea breezes. 

It’s nearby along this same coast, by the Palmicken amber mines (now Yantarny) that Nazis forced thousands of Jews into the icy Baltic back in January, 1945. So much history, so much loss, along these scenic shores. Unlike visiting Ukraine, where a woman tried to spit in my German face, I found more awareness here of the positive aspects of German influence. 

On to Kaliningrad, the capital city of the Kaliningrad Oblast. Known as Königsberg since 1255, and the birthplace of Immanuel Kant, the city was decimated during the final months of the Second World War. My mom had shared tales of using the city tram and of window shopping in the once prosperous city. My personal obsession here was to eat Königsberger Klopse in a local restaurant. 

There’s little in Kaliningrad to remind a German tourist of the past. This was Stalin’s intent and he’s succeeded. However, The Dom next to Kant’s memorial, has recently been rebuilt. Even the Russians. . . transported here to replace the exiled Germans . . .  admit that Königsberg was once beautiful and embrace its complicated history. I felt overwhelmed with a sense of loss.  The brutalist House of the Soviets, (behind me in the photo), was built in the seventies to replace the war-damaged Königsberg Castle. It’s never been used or even finished. Back home, when I shared my trip with an older German woman who’d survived the devastation of East Prussia, she reminisced about how the chestnut trees began to bloom in January, 1945 because of the heat from the fighting. Now the downtown core was mostly concrete and traffic.

I’d prearranged a side trip while staying in Kaliningrad to visit the former Kreuzburg, my mom’s hometown during the 1930s. Now called Slavskoye, it’s about 20 kilometers south of the city.  We drove, rather than biked, to this town and upon retrospect, that was a bad choice. The traffic jam, leaving Kaliningrad city, was terrible. Did everyone have a dacha out in the countryside? Our Belorussian driver, Igor, slowly inched past the modern sports stadium built for the 2018 World Cup.  He didn’t hesitate to use his horn or even boulevards as necessary. Finally, we were out. 

Unlike the city which was rebuilt with the ugly Soviet-style concrete monoliths, rural areas of this oblast are marked by derelict ruins leftover from the German years. I was especially charmed by more of the majestic linden and chestnut trees lining the roads. Like the birds, trees and perennials tell stories of past generations. This was the East Prussia I had visualized. All that was missing were the Trakehner horses for which East Prussia was once famous. 

Similar to making family connections in Federowka back in Ukraine, I felt myself nervously anticipating what I’d find here in this hometown—this neglected time-warp of Europe—wedged between the past and the future. The Germans had all been forcibly expelled after the war and the area had been repopulated with unmoored people from the rest of the Soviet Union. A lot of the good, arable land still lies dormant—beautiful but wild. 

I was delighted to walk down the broken cobblestone main road of the former Kreuzburg and thrilled to later find the house where my mom found shelter with East Prussian relatives. Yes, the house my uncle had built in the 1930s was still standing. Earlier, I’d discussed its location with my one surviving cousin now living in BC.  “At the end of the road, in the ‘Schul-siedlung’ (school neighbourhood) with a well in the front,” she’d told me. We asked for help along the way and found it, just like she said. 

Second World War bullet holes still marred the house exterior, but on the whole, the house was lovingly looked after by an old man resettled from Kazakhstan who was proud to walk us through his beautiful garden. Time restraints, on account of the previous traffic jam, forced me to decline his offer for tea inside. His curious neighbour, her yard boasting a tree of ripe apples, was also curious about us. Wonderful people and I would never begrudge them my family’s former world.

Not far from the house stood the school my mom attended. The outside, still bullet-pocked and neglected, appeared to be used as an apartment with several residences. According to reports I’d read, by February, 1945, the Wehrmacht had sought shelter in the school while fighting off the Red Army. The village has an extensive graveyard for the fallen Soviets who died far away from their own homes here on what was once German soil.  Meanwhile, my mom’s younger brother, who disappeared during the last months of the war and ended in a Soviet camp, was never to have a marked grave. Such is war.

Our bike trip continued the next day and we cycled out of Russia into Poland. At one point, we cycled parallel to what was left of the Autobahn Hitler had started building for his Volkswagon. The Berlinka would have connected Königsberg to Berlin. Somewhere nearby would have been Stablach, a military establishment with a munitions’ factory. My mom worked there, and lived in its barracks throughout the war, cycling the eight kilometers back to Kreuzburg for visits. 

It didn’t us take long to reach the Polish border crossing at Mamonowa (the former Heiligenbeil) where we waited for hours as vehicles around us were taken apart. Dogs sniffed through everything. When it was finally our turn, our Canadian passports were greeted with a smile and a quick wave through.

In the winter months of early 1945, there was a different kind of slowdown on these roads. Back then, the snowy woods and pathways would have been jammed with military vehicles going one way, and mothers and children pulling all they could, the other way. Civilians tried to reach the ships waiting in harbours along the Baltic. They crossed over the icy, slushy Frisches Haff (Vistula Lagoon) from small towns like Frauenberg (now Frombork) to reach Pillau so they could board ships like the Wilhelm Gustlaff or the equally doomed, Goya or Steuben.  These ships offered them an escape from the Soviet tank armies, but not necessarily the Soviet Navy. More than fifteen thousand, mostly women and children, drowned in the icy Baltic in those early months of 1945.

It was misty, the day when I looked over the Vistula Lagoon . . . a brackish strait of water that in 1945 froze because of the extreme cold. It offered a welcome shortcut to the ships. I imagined the broken wagons stuck in ice as the low flying Soviet bombers strafed the desperate civilians. A poignant moment for me.  

My mom and her sisters, however, never made it as far as the Vistula Lagoon. They were stopped by Red Army soldiers somewhere in the woods along the trails that I cycled. For my mom, it meant transport back into the Soviet Union of her childhood. It meant more than two years of forced labour in an open pit mine in the Urals. For her sisters, it meant working on a Soviet kolkhoz near Drobrovolsk (Pillkallen or Schloßberg) until 1949. As I cycled through the scenic beech tree woods, I had much time to ponder their loss of freedom, lots of time to imagine the bodies of the hastily buried under snow in the ditches along the way. Lots of time—especially when the cycling trail was uphill!

Cycling is a great way to appreciate a landscape and because I grew up with the echo of Ostpreussen in my ears, it felt a bit like going home. While we can’t travel now, we can research to make a future trip more meaningful. After all, genealogy and travel go together like good cousins.

Why Spelling Matters

One thing I’ve been noticing as I follow the Ukraine war is the varied spelling of the beautiful Black Sea city of Odesa. I’ve seen it spelled Odessa and Oddessa. Which is the correct spelling? Turns out that Odessa is the Russian spelling and Odesa, with one s, is the Ukrainian spelling. 

My grandfather was killed in Zhytomyr, in northwest Ukraine. It's another place that has had various spellings. The Germans wrote Shitomir (see Karl Stump’s extensive maps). I referred to it as Zhitomir which I later learned was the Russian spelling and now, the correct Ukrainian spelling is, Zhytomyr. 

Stumpp's maps later helped the Nazis with their killing projects. The man himself was never charged in connection with the mass killings made possible with the help of his detailed maps.

Back to the issues of spelling. As I edit my book set in Soviet and Nazi times dealing with conflicted areas, spelling pops up again and again.  Perhaps it’s the same issue we have with our British vs. American spellings of words with the o or ou or l or ll spellings. Thankfully, we’re not at war with either the British or  the Americans and spelling is just spelling.

Karl Stumpp: Mapped German
settlements in Russia and Ukraine

It’s not the Russian language that’s wrong. What is wrong is that the Russian government feels threatened by the Ukrainian language. Many Ukrainians, especially in the eastern part of the country, are fluent in Russian while few Russians ever learn Ukrainian. 

Before the invasion, I'd been working on a children’s picture book with a friend living near the Volga in Samara. We were going to make the book bilingual, Russian and English. Making it trilingual was not going to happen. After all, my Russian friend had asked, who would read a Ukrainian picture book in Russia? That project, by the way, is now on indefinite hold. 

While language is a mere tool of communication, it's also quite political and easily weaponized. Indigenous languages in Canada were usurped by the English which has become an almost universal language. Holding tight to our identity by insisting on proper spelling is a way to regain self-respect. And only by having self-respect can we expect respect in return. 

I grew up ashamed of my often butchered name. Gabby. You're a Gabby? Or is that Gaby? With one b? Or Gabi? With an i?  Besides, how come you’re so quiet, if you’re gabby? For a few years, I insisted on Gabriele. How many ways can that be mis-pronounced? And how many times did others misspell it? Banks, schools, government IDs.  Gabrielle. Gabriel. Gabriella. Finally, I settled on Gabe. It’s a compromise for all the English-only speakers out there. 

Never mind my middle name. Ulrike. How many Ulrikes (3 syllables) do you know?  I was named after a set of twins and I’ve always been grateful that Gabriele (pronounced in German with 4 syllables) was at least born before poor Ulrike. 

So yeah, I get it. Odesa. One s. Okay?

The Widow's House

I'd never have connected to my mom's Soviet-era roots if it hadn't been for Don Miller. When I first began the search for a village called Federofka, it was Don Miller who guided me to that sad place. (A comparison can be made to some of our First Nation reserves over here.)

Don Miller leads the Samaritan Ministries In Ukraine. He's been incredibly active not only in researching the history of the German Baptists in the Volhynia, but also in helping the broken spirits over there. 

He's helping them by providing them with the tools to help themselves. But some are so old (widows like my mom) that they can no longer help themselves. Here in Canada, we have an amazing health care system and families who are still intact. Many families over there were broken by the gulag, by war, and by alcoholism. With the Soviet state gone, there's little for the survivors of the Stalin era. When I was there in '04 the poor old women were selling flowers or a couple of chicken eggs on the street, or else sweeping the streets - trying to get some coins to supplement their paltry state pensions. 

Don Miller has built (literally, I might add) a house for the widows. It's near Zhitomir - in Pulin - and has beautiful rooms and a community center. What we take for granted: heat, plumbing, food - will now be available to these lonely old women who have seen and lost so much. 

I'm in awe of D.M.'s passion, dedication and perseverence in this project. 

Come and See

Saw the re-mastered movie, Come and See, last week at Cinematheque a small, boutique-style theatre that showcases independent and international films here in our Exchange Distract.  It came out originally in 1985. 

Come and See is set in the forests of Belarus, in 1943, and focuses on the partisan movement. Some might consider the film a horror show, but it was in fact a war movie. It depicted animal cruelty, rape and violent death on the eastern front during the Second World War. According to the closing moments of the film, 628 Belarus villages were burned to the ground by the Nazis. Similar burnings happened in Ukraine. It’s no wonder a Ukrainian woman once spit in my face when I talked with survivors of such atrocities. I heard of how women and children were separated from the men, herded into barns and set ablaze. 

I searched the internet for some stats on Ukrainian losses and found this: “... the world never heard about the Ukrainian village of Kortelisy which the Germans burned to the ground on September 23, 1942 and killed all its 2,892 population of men, women and children. There were about 459 villages in Ukraine completely destroyed with all or part of their population by the German Army with 97 in Volhynia Province, 32 in Zhitomir province, 21 in Chernihiv province, 17 in Kiev province and elsewhere. There were at least 27 Ukrainian villages in which every man, woman and child was killed and the village completely destroyed by the Germans. (Ukrainska RSR u Velykyi Vitchyznianiy Viyni, vol.3, p. 150). http://www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/page-20.html

public domain, Stanislaviv, October, 1941

My father was sent to the eastern front in October, 1944. He never talked much about it — focusing his war memories on his earlier time in the Luftwaffe, until he crashed. I think his new position in the Military Police was to discipline the failing moral of the Wehrmacht. I know that he drove a motorcycle with a sidecar … like a Nazi in the movie. I felt quite uncomfortable watching those scenes, along with the others where the Nazis drink, loot, shoot, rape and sing. The father I grew up with liked to go fishing and hunting. He liked to build things and read books. He built model Junker airplanes with my brother.  So excuse my obsession with that old war.  It forms part of my identity.

my dad, 1944

Last week our parliament honoured a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian, Yaroslav Hunka, who had supported the Nazis in Ukraine. Canada cringes with the political fallout and Poland demands his extradition. It would be fascinating to hear Hunka’s story. Why are we so eager to seek revenge on something that can never be revenged? Hunka would have been 20 years old at the end of the war. He would have grown up under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, experienced the Holodomor. He might have seen the Nazis as liberators from the Soviets. He might have had to choose between two evils. Until we hear his story, we might hold off on judging him. 

The film, Come and See, depicted the horrors of Nazi atrocities with gut-wrenching visuals. If 18-year-old Hunka played a role in those events he does not deserve honour. But neither does he deserve my judgement. I can only be curious. What's his story? 

Transition

Hello there!

First Saturday in November. November has got to be the most melancholy of months - the month squished between the gold of October and the snow of December. Any day now can bring the beginning of winter. Transition is always hard.

I think the weather in Ukraine is quite
similar to ours here on the Canadian
prairies. Not as harsh, of course. (We
prairie people like to think of ourselves
as tough.) But what do we know of winter
here with our centrally heated houses,
cars in driveways, warm clothes
and food-a-plenty?

Here's a photo of Helena Nickel. I met her in the
little village of Kaliniwka (about 35 kilometers north of
Zhitomir). This place was once called
Federofka (also spelled Federowka or Federoufka).
Exploring the past in the former USSR is
challenging - not just because of the politics,
Russian and Ukrainian languages, and the
Cyrillic alphabet, but because of the name
changes).

This is the village where my mother was born
in 1919 and my grandfather in 1875. It was
once a vibrant place. In 1911 it had 615 people
and 65 houses. When I visited in 2004,
it was an almost empty place with rampant
alcoholism (homemade vodka),
recent suicides, and extreme poverty.
There are few men and the women work
so hard just trying to survive.
With the fall of communism, there is no
collective farm and no employment. I can't
imagine the hardship of winter
in Kaliniwka.

Communism is over, but the transition
has hit the villages and the old people
very hard.

Talk to you soon. (I want to tell you more
about what I learned from Helena).
gabe

Word of the day:
Transition - a passage from one state, stage,
or place to another: change
from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary

Halloween Setting

It's a great time of year - the in between time - and the weather outside is totally perfect for wandering imaginations. To set the mood, one must listen to Hawksley Workman's song, Autumn's Here. Then add: grey sky, some fog, and a wind whipping dead leaves around. I love it!

Here's a link to a tour of Winnipeg's haunted spots. Yes, we have our ghosts here. Do I believe in ghosts? I've met a few, so I guess that makes me a believer. I brushed shoulders with my grandfather in Zhitomir while I was there. Okay, it might have been the wind, I admit, bumping into me while I turned that corner to the archives building. Wind is just one of nature's most amazing things - it's invisible, yet so powerful. Without wind, everything would stay the same.

Have yourself an imaginative Halloween!

pain

Pain: a sensation of hurting or strong discomfort. (from Webster's). Yes, it's been a week of pain, but not mine - my daughter's and my mom's - I'm just in the middle, unable to help. My daughter's chipped front tooth from a playground fall almost a decade ago came back to hurt with a vengence, just at exam time. An infected emergency root canal then blew her face up so she resembled Miss Piggy  - and she couldn't sleep. As much as I wanted to take her pain - I couldn't.

Then there's my mom, who lives in this cloud of pain, and again I can do nothing but listen. And as she said, in one of her more philosophical moments, pain is like the wind ... nobody can see it, just its effects. So today, as a strong wind blows in from the west, I imagine pain - somewhere there's pain, and all I can do is hear it howl.

Actually, there are painkillers, and they do work - but the pain always comes back unless something gets fixed somewhere. My daughter's infection is now under control with antibiotics, but for my mom - her pain - and her fear - have become one and the older she gets, the more she's that vulnerable little girl who just didn't understand why there had to be so much wind - so much pain - in her world.

I suggested to her, during one visit, that she had to take the pain and bury it. She looked at me like I was nuts. So I told her to remember some happy moment from childhood. This she could do. She remembered a time when she was ten or eleven and her dad took her into Zhitomir, and he let her have a sip of his dark beer and that she wasn't to tell anyone. Pleasures are good, but forbidden pleasures are even better. 

Pain as wind - I like that metaphor. And Stalin was the mean wolf who blew down the kulak's homes. He huffed and he puffed all this anger out at the kulaks. So what was his pain?

What made him into such a cruel leader? I read somewhere that after his first wife died he lost his humanity. Still, it's hard to imagine pain in a monster.

Connections

Hi!
Sudden insight: circles are lines that get
get connected! This is a WOW discovery
for me - something that, no doubt, every
good math student learns. (I'm a bit slow.)

Here I am meandering down the trail of life
and then I get to connect somehow with another
moment and then that line becomes a circle.

What is she talking about? Or are you already
clicking away from me? I must focus. What I'm
trying to share is how I got the spark -
the connection - for my novel,
The Kulak's Daughter.

We were sitting (sort of) around the dinner
table at Christmas. My three kids were hyper
and my mom was being her usual foreign, stiff,
old self. I was in the middle trying to keep
everyone happy.

Instead of harassing me about keeping my
kids more under control, my mom proceeded to
tell a story about how she misbehaved one Christmas
back when Christmas was banned. It wasn't
the banned Christmas that brought the spark - the
connection. I'd heard her ramble many times
about life back in the old country.

It was the idea of my mom being bad.
It was then that I saw the circle of life.

So this upcoming novel of mine might be set
back in the horrors of the former
Soviet Union - but it's really about childhood. It's
really about connecting the present with the past
and (hopefully) with the future.
Man, I better stop talking.

Here, as promised is a photograph of my
grandfather's signature. I got this from a former
KGB file in Zhitomir, Ukraine. It was forbidden
to take photos of these once top secret files.
But my grandfather was murdered and his body
thrown in a ditch along with thousands of
other kulak bodies. I deserve this photo of his
signature at the bottom of a forced confession.
(It's dated August, 1937)

And you know, if it wasn't for the internet, I'd
never have connected with this part of the past.
But that's another story.


Word of the Day:
connect: to become joined
from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary


Talk to you soon (and I hope we're connecting!)
gabe

Graveyards

Hi, thanks for being here.

Graveyards have got to be one of
the most fascinating kind of gardens
around. I'd like to meander the
world just going from graveyard
to graveyard ...
Call me morbid, or just call me intrigued
with the past.

After landing in Kiev, back in May, 2004,
our six member tour group zoomed off
only to crunch to a stop at a graveyard.
We had a flat tire! And so we spent an
hour wandering through this colorful
graveyard.

Flowers, photos, empty food dishes,
stuffed animals, empty bottles, hungry
dogs (are there any other kind?) and
sleeping drifters made the cemetery
a busy place. What a contrast to the
graves of my two maternal
grandparents.

One of the last places I visited before
coming back home was a weed-infested
ditch in Zhitomir filled with industrial
piping. This was my grandfather's
resting place. The dandelions were
bright and profuse. They're a hardy
plant.

Then there's my grandmother. She died
in the dead of a Siberian winter. What
kind of grave marks her life? Maybe
someday I'll have the opportunity to
search for it.

That's why I write, I guess, to remember
the stories of those who are unremembered.
Call me morbid.

Next time, I promise to write a much brighter
blog entry.
-gabe

Word of the day: morbid
- abnormally susceptible to or characterized by
gloomy or unwholesome feelings
(Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary)

Names of people changed, too!

Today when I was checking on addresses (that I'd come across when I'd perused the former communist archives in Zhitomir), I realized that names, too, had changed over in the old country. In the archives I'd found several letters. In one, my mother's Aunt Olga wrote to the officials back in 1958 (after Krushev's de-Stalinization) asking for information about her missing husband - my grandfather's brother, Gustav. Her last name had morphed from Ristau to Ristovaya.

So as much as I'd love to send my upcoming book to extended family, I realize I don't know names, places, or the alphabet and language. But having gotten this far, I still hope that somehow I'll make a connection.

I got side-tracked and checked out some travel costs for visiting the wilds of Siberia. Wow. Very expensive. I was lucky just to get to Ukraine.

Reading "Inside the Stalin Archives" (but outside)

Meandering right along. Reading "Inside the Stalin Archives" by Jonathan Brent right now. He might be a Yale academic but he writes using all his senses. The smells, sounds, tastes, sights and textures of Moscow are so vivid. No ivory tower dryness here. 

When I visited the Comuunist Party archives in Zhitomir back in '04 I was struck with how cold, drab and neglected things were. The atmosphere was very well suited to the ghosts of the past.

As I blog, the sun is shining, the birds are twittering, and the grass is growing. Must get out there and indulge. Summer in Winnipeg has arrived! And if I'm not quick, it'll be gone.

Serendipity

I've been digging through my photos
of Ukraine trying to find the best ones.
I went over there in May, 2004. It was
the most amazing trip and now that I
have this blog, I'm going to share some
of my experiences.

Here's a photo of me and Uri
(my interpreter) in the
former KGB files of Zhitomir.

I was able to look through
documents about my grandfather.
My dear old mom was finally
able to learn what had happened to her
father from whom she was separated in
1931 as a 12 year old.

Some of these OGPU (the secret police
of the day) documents were on faded
pink paper and classified 'top secret'.
All, of course, were written in Russian.
The file on my grandfather was quite thick.
It's mind-numbing to think that there
are highrises full of such documents
throughout the former Soviet Union.
They were meticulous book-keepers.
I'll share some of the details of
these documents in a later post.

Discovering my grandfather and the child
my mother once was over in that faraway
place has been a most serendipitous
journey.

Word of the day: serendipity -
The faculty of finding valuable or
agreeable things not sought for.
(from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary).