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Mariupol is a fierce zone of russian-Ukrainian conflict, and after a month of tug-of-war, the coastal city has come to ruins. During World War II, Mariupol was also at the forefront of the struggle between Nazi Germany in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, and the surviving citizens were taken into captivity as forced laborers in Germany for hard labor. She's From Mariupol is a non-fiction work by a descendant of a Mariupol laborer who searches for the birth of a mad mother, and in the process reopens the wounds of history.
The author's mother, Evgenia, finally committed suicide after experiencing massacres, starvation, and abuse in the war between the East and the West. Behind the game of thrones, the weak woman became a bloody hostage in a brutal history.
"If you've ever seen what I've seen"
From the age of 4, Natasha lived in fear of losing her mother at any time. She and her parents live in an abandoned factory warehouse in Nuremberg, Germany, furnished only with a camp bed and a table. Mother Evgenia was a beautiful woman, with deep facial features and eyes like two pools of calm lake water.
Contrary to her appearance, Evgenia's temperament is gloomy and insane. She always told Natasha that she was not her biological mother, and often beat her for small things, and when she sat alone, her eyes looked at somewhere that Natasha could not see. When she grew older, Natasha tied a rope to her mother's feet every night, clutching the other end tightly, afraid that her mother would leave or something would happen.
But the mother eventually left. When Natasha was 10, she left home, leaving her husband and two young daughters behind and never returning.
The writing of She from Mariupol (hereinafter referred to as "Her") takes place more than half a century later. In 2013, Natasha inadvertently entered her mother's name on the Russian internet. It was just one of the most common moves she had made in her years of searching for traces of her mother's early life. She knew her mother was from Mariupol, Ukraine, but after decades of searching, Natasha still couldn't find any clues that her mother had lived in Ukraine.
This time, luck has come. An entry about her mother popped up on the Internet, and Natasha grabbed the thread and, with the help of a netizen who was keen to find someone, began a journey of searching for her mother's birth.
The first part of "Her" is a bit like a detective novel, where one clue hooks up with another, and one relative leads to another. Her mother's family was unveiled little by little: Evgenia's parents came from prominent wealthy merchant families, and her father had been exiled to Siberia for 20 years for opposing the rule of the Tsar, and later committed suicide in another political movement. The eldest daughter of the family, Yevgenia's sister Lydia, was also exiled for her activities against the Soviet Union. When the war broke out when their mother went to the penal colony to find her eldest daughter, the mother and daughter never returned to Ukraine. Evgenia was sent to Nazi Germany for forced labor at the age of 23, and her brother had long since left home, leaving the family apart.
Figure | Evgenia, circa 1943-1944
From the time Yevgenia was not yet born to when she was forced to leave her homeland, Ukraine was repeatedly ravaged and devastated between the two great powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for decades. Mariupol, a beautiful seaside city, is full of scorched earth and ruins. Evgenia's baptism was postponed because on the day of her baptism, "bullets in the yard flew like hailstones."
The dilemma of Mariupol and Ukraine remains today. The country, known as the "Gateway to Europe", has once again become an outpost of the Game between East and West because of its special geographical location. A few days ago, the Russian army besieged Mariupol, the city was bombed, and it was said that a complete building could not be found. And the author of "Her", Natasha, who lives in Germany, is busy taking care of relatives and friends who have escaped from Ukraine.
History is not far from the present, and record is a way of resisting forgetting. Her mother had said to Natasha many times, "If you have seen what I have seen...", it was only this time that Natasha partially glimpsed her mother's early life. For example, panicked civilians helped the elderly and their children to flee and send people to the fence; during the war, the mother's home was cut off from water, and everyone had to carefully fetch water from the outside pump. At present, the municipal facilities of Mariupol have been destroyed, and the local residents can only survive on the spring water.
However, this is only the most understated of the countless sufferings caused by war.
"Close your eyes, cover your ears, close your mouth"
For almost half a century, Natasha had no idea that she was the child of forced labor. Although she was surrounded by almost all of her world war-era forced laborers during her childhood, no one, including her parents, spoke of that dark past. In an interview with Chinese media, Natasha mentioned that after her establishment, she had only consciously heard of forced labor in Nazi Germany for the first time. It was about a decade before she realized and deduced that she had been born in a forced labor camp near the end of the war.
All Natasha knows is that in October 1941, the Germans occupied Mariupol and began a massacre of the Slavs. In April 1944, the Red Army recaptured another Ukrainian port city, Odessa, and Germany was on the verge of a total rout, and her parents left Ukraine at the last minute. They knew that there was hellish forced labor ahead, but if they stayed under Soviet rule, there would be no way out of Yevgenia's aristocratic origins, "and they could only choose one of the plagues and cholera".
Evgenia was assigned to a military-industrial enterprise and has since lost her name and become a number on her labor certificate. Ukrainian workers were required to wear the OST (abbreviation for "Eastern Laborer") symbol in white on a blue background, which was at the lowest level in the labor camps.
Figure | "Eastern Laborer" logo
Forced laborers work 12 hours a day and are forced to manufacture weapons to bomb their homeland. They are short of food and clothing, ready to endure the punishment and abuse of the guards, and some labor camps have even worse conditions than concentration camps. Fritz Schäcker, Plenipotentiary for the All-German Labour Force, instructed that even the slightest mistake in their labour should be reported to the police immediately, hanged and shot.
Research data from the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., shows that there are 30,000 such forced labor camps on the land of the former Third Reich. Compared with the world-famous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, the experience of huge forced labor has been little known. Many victims, like Evgenia, are reluctant to mention the experience, suppressing traumatic memories to protect themselves. What prevents them from speaking is a sense of shame and shame. In an interview, Natasha analyzed the psychology of these laborers: many felt ashamed of their misfortunes and saw them as personal failures.
Others, such as Natasha's cousin Igor, have been living in the shadow of a once-pervasive regime. Igor grew up with her parents in Soviet labor camps, and Natasha had hoped that he would be a narrator and witness to the family's history. But the harsh growing environment made Igor learn to close himself off from an early age. "He lived like the three monkeys famously in the aphorism: close his eyes, cover his ears, and close his mouth", not only refusing to mention what happened to himself and his loved ones, but even in 2013, Igor was still reluctant or afraid to say Hitler and Stalin's names.
In the book The Whisperer, a study of private life in the Stalinist Soviet Union, the author Orlando Figgis mentions that there are two words in the Russian language that represent the ----- the first refers to the whisperer who is afraid of eavesdropping, and the second refers to the whistleblower who secretly reports to the authorities. The distinction originated in the Stalin era, when the whole of Soviet society consisted entirely of whisperers, either the first or the second. Countless Igor, becoming the first kind of "whisperer" forever.
Natasha fills her mother's life of exile and servitude with information and imagination, but in the end she cannot really see what her mother has seen. History conspires with its victims to create deep shame and fear, allowing the details of suffering to fade into the silence of the victims. The lack of real details told by the parties may also be a flaw in "Her".
Fantasy is a glimmer of comfort in a hard labor with no end in sight. Natasha remembers that her mother often gave her stories of the City of Glass: everything in the city was made of glass, all the houses, the furniture, the streets, even the shoes worn by the residents' feet were glass. All of them walked around with a snow-white cloth, and they polished the glass, wiped every tiny speck of dust, and whisked away every tiny cloud of mist. Natasha believes that the dazzling city in her mother's mouth is the opposite of the world in which she lives.
This City of Glass is reminiscent of Chernyshevsky's Crystal Palace. In 1859, the Russian writer visited the Crystal Palace, a symbol of science and rationalism, in London, and later wrote it into the novel What to Do. In the dream of the heroine of the novel, people live happily in the Crystal Palace, where the flowers are magnificent and blooming, "an eternal spring and summer for all, eternal joy".
Evgenia longed for a city as clean and beautiful as the Crystal Palace in her desperate life, perhaps unaware that it was the pursuit of the Crystal Palace-style orderly utopia that led to the catastrophe of the twentieth century. Hitler-style rulers, who wanted to build their ideal paradise on earth, eventually dragged countless people into hell.
"People will also be compressed"
Natasha's aunt Lydia is stronger than her mother, Evgenia. She survived exile, became a teacher, and wrote a memoir at the age of 80, making her story an important part of Her.
But the price Lydia paid was also heavy. She said: I have lost a lot of critical spirit, but also lost delicate emotions. The system triumphed. Lydia originally thought that only air and hay could be compressed, but she later discovered that people could also be compressed.
Compression starts with physical space. In the early years, the Lydia sisters lived with their parents in their maternal grandfather's mansion, and after the revolution, in the name of "collectivization", their private property was taken away, and more and more strangers lived in the mansion. People are vying for a few centimeters more space, and some people keep suggesting that Lydia, a "bourgeoisie" like her, "remnants of history" should be shot.
After entering the Nazi labor camp, Evgenia's entire living space was compressed into a wooden bed full of parasites. There was no basic privacy or dignity here, and for a loaf of bread, a piece of soap, women often sold their bodies to Germans, or foreign laborers who were ranked higher in the racial hierarchy.
Social spaces are also nearly zero. In the labor camps, Eastern laborers were at the lowest level, and workers from other countries were not allowed to talk to them, and violators were punished. Friendships could not be fostered between co-workers, and the cramped environment, hunger, and fear only prompted whistleblowing and theft.
In 1945, Nazi Germany was defeated, and millions of Soviet laborers who had served in Germany were repatriated, waiting not for the warm acceptance and comfort of their homeland, but for Stalin's sanctions. They were seen as collaborators and traitors, some were shot, and the rest were sent directly to Soviet labor camps.
Anticipating such a tragic prospect, the Evgenias seized on a policy loophole and left them in Germany, fleeing to Nuremberg and taking refuge in the abandoned warehouse of a well-meaning factory owner. A few months later, Natasha was born.
After five years of fearful hiding in the warehouse, the family was discovered by official agencies and ordered to move into the Vaalka exile camp, which concentrated on supervising the displaced. It's home to 4,000 former forced laborers from 30 countries, most of whom have lived here since the end of World War II, not knowing how to start their lives after being rescued. The Whisperer reveals this phenomenon: People released from labor camps are even afraid of freedom.
In the exile camp, the loud noises of idle people and the insults of the deranged neighbors made Evgenia "cry forever". She was not happy until the camp was disbanded, the family moved into the allocated "refugee building" apartment suite, and the living conditions improved significantly.
In fact, moving into the apartment may have been the starting point for Evgenia's path to total destruction. There were Ukrainians and Russians in the exile camps with whom Evgenia could share memories of her hometown, but there was not even one such person in the refugee building. Surrounded by people speaking all kinds of unintelligible languages, Evgenia became a complete aphasia in this enclave.
"Of all the things that are lost, there is only one thing that can be touched, approached and grasped, and that is language." In the post-war exile, Paul Zelland, the most prominent German-speaking poet of the 20th century, saw language as its last habitat. Paul Zellan and Evgenia were born in the same year in Chernowice, which belonged to Austria-Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and now Ukraine. Celan's mother was shot dead in a concentration camp near the South Bug River in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian and Russian armies were now fighting fiercely. Celan, who was taught to learn German by his mother as a child, wrote a commemorative poem: Mom, the water of the Nambug River, but remember the waves that hurt you?
The mother's language is the same as the murderer's, which means that this last habitat is also stained with blood. Like Evgenia, the poet Celan, who survived forced labor, became an outsider to the world and eventually committed suicide in 1970.
Evgenia faced a similar dilemma. She lived in Germany and spoke fluent German, but Germany had hurt her most deeply, and she always refused to speak German to her children; her mother tongue was Russian, but the Soviet Union killed her father and exiled her sister; she had always missed her hometown of Mariupol intensely, but could not return to Ukraine under the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union.
Figure | Cover of "She's from Mariupol"
Evgenia once had a Russian girlfriend, Maria, who was married to a German and had a privileged life. In maria's carpeted, oil-painting room, Natasha had heard her mother play the piano. On the way home, her mother took Natasha's hand tightly and told her that she was playing Chopin's "Raindrops" Prelude. Evgenia's mother was a brilliant piano teacher, which should have been her parenting.
Later, however, Mary's husband forbade his wife and Evgenia to visit each other. He wanted to think about his social reputation and didn't want his wife to interact with the people in the refugee building.
Memories of hometown, language, friendship, art... After everything that could sustain the spirit was compressed into pieces, death became Evgenia's only way out. On October 10, 1956, at the age of 36, she left home and plunged into the black river. Like Paul Zelan, Evgenia survived the darkest years but was unable to withstand the tearing of her soul. When she met her mother in the morgue, Natasha wondered how happy she should be, never to feel the pain of life again.
More than half a century later, the war between the East and the West was rekindled in Mariupol. Hopefully, Evegenia's story will not be more.
- END -
Written by | Rowland