She looked into the depths of history and couldn't find a way out
The development of the Russian-Ukrainian war has focused the attention of the world, and Mariupol is the fierce war zone of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and after a month of tug-of-war, this coastal city has become a ruin. 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.
Natasha Woding, the descendant of a Mariupol laborer, was born in 1943 to a beautiful woman, with deep facial features and eyes like two pools of calm lake. But Natasha's mother was always in a very poor state of mind, often crazy and talking nonsense, and even once almost strangled her. From the age of 4, Natasha lived in fear of losing her mother at any time. Finally, when Natasha was 10 years old, her mother left home, leaving her husband and two young daughters behind and never returning.
More than half a century later, Natasha inadvertently entered her mother's name on the Internet. It was just one of the most common moves she had made in her years of searching for traces of her mother's life. She knew her mother was from Mariupol, Ukraine, but after decades of searching, Natasha still hadn't found any clues. 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.
"She's from Mariupol" is a true story of searching for relatives, derived from the author Natasha's personal experience. He recounts his mother's hardships in Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and Germany, and chronicles the disasters of Eastern Europe for generations. Her mother was from Mariupol and was born into an aristocratic family, but in the context of war, she spent her life in turmoil. Far away from her relatives and the motherland, she endured humiliation and secretly lived in the war, and she tasted hardships and blank eyes in her foreign country, and fear accompanied her all her life. Natasha's father was twenty years older than her mother, and by the time they met, her mother was alone, her family dead, exiled, and missing.
After the marriage of her mother and father, she did not get more happiness, she was plundered to Germany to do "forced labor", only a little better than the Jews sent to the gas chambers, endless labor and humiliation, endure inhuman torture, the shadow of death always hung over her, the thought of her family and homeland made her even more vulnerable, even if the war was won, she could not return to her hometown.
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.
Witnessing history, a word that sounds like a gut- and heart-wrenching word, is almost always accompanied by heart-wrenching in reality. History has not created a few moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, which can be appreciated by the whole country, and the only thing that the small people of Shengdou can witness is the opportunity to become the background board of the "big era" with the destruction of their families.
With the rise and fall of a family, Natasha shows the changes of a special period. The book unveils the mysteries of the period between 1920 and 1956 around World War II, when weak, hungry non-Jewish Refugees from the East were transported in large numbers to the German Empire as slaves in all walks of life, whose suffering and misery were a microcosm of that era.
A grain of ash of the times is a mountain pressed on the head of an individual, and Natasha's family is unobtrusively involved in the cracks of great social change. Perhaps it is precisely this that the mother is silent about her origins and experiences, which is a kind of protection for her children, "For decades, I knew nothing about my origins... All I know is that I belong to some kind of waste, the garbage left over from the war. "The author was in his seventies when he wrote this book, and he was not far from knowing the truth of the facts.
"She's from Mariupol"
Producer - Wang Bo Editor-in-Chief - Liu Aiping
Chief Executive Officer │ Wang Mudao Chief Reporter - Leshui
Edited by Fang Hua, Cao Xinyu, Wang Yizhu
Visual Director - Du Fang Video Producer - Li Xiaojiao Design - Liu Yao Li Xinyu
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