The current situation in Ukraine has become the focus of the world. For a more comprehensive understanding of Ukraine's historical story, we recommend the book She's from Mariupol.
She's from Mariupol is written by the German-language writer and German-Russian translator Natasha Wodin. Wodin, the daughter of soviet forced laborers, was born in 1945 in Germany's post-war "exile camps" and was adopted by a Catholic girl after her mother committed suicide.
One day when Wodin was ten years old, his mother went out and never returned, only to learn that her mother had sunk herself in the Regnits River and had not been able to leave a single word; her father was an alcoholic and buried his russian books all day long. It was only after that that Wodin realized that he knew nothing about her, the only thing he knew was that she was from Mariupol and was expelled from Ukraine as a forced laborer in 1943 for Germany.
With few clues, Natasha Woddin stitches together the broken pieces of porcelain little by little, and she discovers that the family's past is a great mystery, a historical allegory about the suffering of Eastern Europe...
Revolutions, hunger, world wars, civil wars, gulags ... Natasha Wodding inherited a mission that historians seem unable to continue: to bring the history of forced labor and prisoners of war to the public eye.
The author completely restores a mother's personal history, family history, twentieth century turbulent history, 12,000,000 Eastern laborers, not a historical footnote outside the Holocaust of the Jews in World War II, showing a panoramic view of the tragedy of European civilization and revealing the unknown fate of Ukrainians.
Although this is a non-fiction work, it is more magical, more dramatic, and more thrilling than a fictional work. Through the affectionate retracement of the mother's family, monuments have been erected for thousands of People of Eastern Europe.
For example, J rg Magenau of the German radio station Culture Station commented: Human life is so small and so rich, and it disappears so quietly in the shredder of history.
She's from Mariupol is a family quest by author Natasha Woding, and in the context of conflict, the book takes on a deeper meaning, emphasizing the meaning of writing.
Book Excerpts
Typing your mother's name into a Russian Internet search engine is a meaningless pastime. Over the past few decades, I have repeatedly tried to find the footprints she left behind. I have written letters to the Red Cross and other search organizations, to the relevant archives and research institutes, even to unknown people in Ukraine and Moscow, and I have even rummaged through various faded lists of victims and registration cards, but never in vain, without finding the slightest trace of a single clue. I can't find any vague proof that she lived in Ukraine, that she did exist before I was born.
During World War II, she was twenty-three years old, along with my father, transported from Mariupol to Germany for compulsory labor. All I know is that the two of them were assigned to an munitions factory under Frick Conzén in Leipzig. For eleven years after the war, she lived in a small city in West Germany, not far from homeless expat colonies. "Homeless foreigner", that's how it was called former forced labor. Except for my sister and me, there is probably no one else in the world who knows her. And even my sister and I didn't really know her. One day in October 1956, when she left home without a word, we were just children. I was ten years old and my sister had just turned four. She never came back. In my memory, she was nothing more than a vague image, and I felt more about her than I remembered.
For decades, I had long since given up looking for her. She was born more than ninety years ago and lived only thirty-six years. In just thirty-six years, she endured hardships, the Civil War, the Great Purge and the famine in the Soviet Union, followed by the cruel years of World War II and so-called National Socialism. Decades later, finding the footprints of a young woman in the vast sea of forgotten victims of war is nothing short of fantasy. Apart from her name, I know very little about her.
One summer night in 2013, I inadvertently typed her name into the Russian internet, and a search engine quickly came up with a result. My consternation lasted only a few seconds. The difficulty in finding someone was that my mother's surname was a very common Ukrainian surname, and there were thousands of Ukrainian women with the same surname as her. Although the person shown on the screen has the same father's surname as my mother, and her full name is Yevgenia Yakovlevna Ivashenko, because there are so many people with the same surname as my grandfather, My discovery does not seem to make any sense.
I opened the link and read: Ivashenko Yevgenia Yakovlevna, born in Mariupol in 1920. I stared intently at the display, and it seemed to be staring at me too. Even though I knew very little about my mother, I knew she was indeed born in Mariupol in 1920. In Mariupol, such a small city, was it possible that in the same year two girls with the same name and surname were born into the world, and their father was named Yakov?
Russian is my mother tongue, I have never completely lost it in my life, and I have spoken Russian almost every day since I moved to German-reunified Berlin. Still, I'm not sure if my mother's name is displayed on the screen, or if it's just a mirage on the Russian internet. Russian on the Internet is almost a foreign language to me, a rapidly evolving new language with a constant mix of new vocabulary of American loanwords that are almost illegible even when converted to cyrillic phonetic transcriptions. Moreover, the name of the web page I am currently browsing is in English, called "Assyrian Greeks". I know that Mariupol is located by the Sea of Assyria, but where did the "Assyrian Greeks" come from? I've never heard of any connection between Ukraine and Greece. If I were British, I would be able to say it very appropriately: these are all Greek!
At the time, I knew nothing about Mariupol. In the search for my mother, I never thought about getting to know the city and her birthplace. Mariupol was known as Zhdanov for more than forty years, and it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that the old name was revived. In my mind, no light of reality has ever shone into the city. All along, in my perception and imagination of the world, it was my home. External realities threaten the existence of this inner home, so I try to escape as much as possible.
My first impression of Mariupol was that in my childhood there was no difference between any country within the USSR, and that all the inhabitants of the fifteen member states were all Russians. This impression is deeply rooted. Speaking of Ukraine, my parents would mention that Russia originated in medieval Ukraine, in Kievan Rus', known as the "cradle of Russia." Ukraine is the mother of all the cities of Russia. But they spoke as if Ukraine had originated in Russia, and their father claimed that Russia was the largest country in the world, a powerful empire that stretched from Alaska to Poland and occupied one-sixth of the earth's surface. Compared to Russia, Germany is nothing more than a point of ink on a map.
For me, Ukraine is no different from Russia, and whenever I imagine my mother's early life in Mariupol, I always see her in the snow in Russia. She was wearing the old gray coat with velvet collar and sleeves, the only coat I'd ever seen her wear, through the gray and snow-covered streets, into an unfathomable space where there was a blizzard forever. Heavy snow in Siberia covered all of Russia and Mariupol, an eternally cold, mysterious country led by communists.
My childhood imagination of my mother's birthplace has been sealed in my inner darkroom for decades. Even though I had known that Russia and Ukraine were two countries, and that Ukraine had nothing to do with Siberia, this did not touch my mind of Mariupol — although I was not once able to confirm whether my mother was really from the city, or that I associated her with Mariupol only because I liked the name Mariupol so much. Sometimes I can't even be sure if there really is a city with the name, or if it's simply a fabrication of my invention, like so many other things about where I came from.
One day, I was flipping through the sports section of a newspaper, trying to flip back, and Caught a glimpse of a word—Mariupol. I then looked down at a German team going to Ukraine to play against the Maliupol Ilyichwitz football team. There is also a football team in Mariupol! This incident alone woke me up, and the Mariupol in my mind was like a rotten mushroom, shattered to the ground in an instant. I had no interest in football at all, but it was football that gave me the first chance to face the real Mariupol. I learned that Mariupol is an extremely mild city, the shallowest and warmest port city on the Assyrian coast in the world. It has long and wide sandy beaches, grape-growing hills and endless sunflower fields. German footballers cried bitterly in the summer heat of nearly forty degrees.
I feel that reality is even less real than I thought. For the first time since my mother's death, she became someone else outside of my imagination. Suddenly, I saw her not in the snow, but walking down the streets of Mariupol in a light light-colored summer dress, exposing her arms and legs and sandals on her feet. A young girl who grew up not in the coldest and darkest place in the world, but on the warm southern seashore near the Crimean Peninsula, under a clear blue sky comparable to that of the Italian Adriatic Sea. For me, there is nothing more unimaginable than associating my mother with the South, and she is not related to the sun and the sea. I had to transfer all my imagination of her life to another temperature, another climate. What was once a stranger becomes a new stranger.
……
On the page I opened, I also learned surprising information about Mariupol. At the time of her mother's birth, the town was also heavily influenced by Greek culture. In the 18th century, Catherine II gave the town to the Greek Christians of the former Crimean Khanate. It was not until after the middle of the 19th century that other races were allowed to settle in Mariupol. To this day, a small number of Greeks still live in the city. My mother's last name made me ghostly into a Forum of Greek-Ukrainians. I had a vague suspicion in my heart. I have only a modicum of memory of what my mother had told me about her life in Ukraine, so faint that I could hardly recall it, but in my memory I firmly believed that her mother was Italian. Of course, after such a long time, I can't figure out whether this is a memory or a little precipitation that I accidentally left in my brain. Perhaps, I think most likely, as early as childhood I made up an Italian grandmother and made her the protagonist of my fictional thrilling story. My Italian grandmother may also have come from my desperate desire to stand out against my Russian-Ukrainian origins. And now, I ask myself, am I simply misremembering that my grandmother was not Italian, but Greek? However, is this something that comes to mind in the light of the real situation in Mariupol that I have now learned? Is it because Italy was the place I longed for as a teenager, so that with the passage of time, the Greeks I remember have unconsciously become Italians?
Author: [de] Natasha Wauding
Publisher: Nova Press
Translator: [De] Qi Qinwen
Edited by Han Haha
Information provided by Nova Press