I try to stay on top of interesting new books published in Germany, but I usually fall hopelessly behind. When I learned that Natascha Wodin won First Prize at the Leipziger Buchmesse for her book Sie kam aus Mariupol I immediate;y began searching for it. Here was an author I had never read, and the topic sounded fascinating. Fortunately, I have access to the library at Bowdoin College, which has an excellent and up-to-date collection of German titles.
Sie kam aus Mariupol is the true story of Natascha Wodin's search for her mother - a mother she barely knew or remembered. When she was 10 years old, and her sister 4, Wodin's mother - Jewgenia Iwaschtschenko - left their home one evening and walked into the Regnitz River where she drowned. She left no suicide note. The author knew virtually nothing about her mother or her mother's family. She only knew that she was born in Mariupol in the Ukraine, and was sent by the Nazis to Germany as a slave laborer during war. As the book opens, we see the author - nearing 70 years, slightly depressed - isolated in a house on a lake, ruminating about her mother, and about the family she never had. On a whim she posts an inquiry on Russian social media and miraculously begins a journey that will lead the reader through the horrors of the 20th century.
The first miracle is that her message in a digital bottle is found by an angel - a human angel named Konstantin - who selflessly takes it upon himself to act as a combination guide and detective as he helps the author navigate her way through a labyrinth of Web sites and archives. In no time Konstantin hits pay dirt: Wodin learns about her mother's family and where they lived. She had always assumed that her mother had come from the peasant or lower class, since she would hardly speak and was afraid of authority - afraid of everything, actually. But Jewgenia was born into a well-to-do family, with one of the biggest houses in Mariupol - a place of light and music. Her brother was a famous opera singer, her sister a fierce and determined free spirit who, as a university student was briefly involved in a subversive student organization and was sent into Siberian exile. Konstantin managed to retrieve the transcript of Lidia's interrogation and "confession" by the secret police. And then a second miracle happened: Lidia had a son - the author's cousin - who is alive and well, living in a Siberian city. Through lengthy phone conversations with her cousin, Wodin learns details about the family and how Lidia survived the war together with her - and Jewgenia's - mother. In cleaning out Lidia's apartment (she died in 2001) the cousin finds Lidia's journals - notes she had taken as preparation for a memoir that was never written. The journals end up in the author's hand.
In the second part of Sie kam aus Maripol Wodin reconstructs the life of her aunt through the journals. It is an amazing story of survival - first through the brutal Bolshevik Revolution as the family loses the beautiful home and all their possessions. Then the Holodomor -the famine engineered by Stalin that resulted in the deaths of seven million Ukrainians. Finally Lidia recounts her years in the Siberian labor camp where she became a teacher for the juvenile detainees and met her husband. Missing, however, from Lidia's story are any details about Jewgenia: the sisters never saw or heard from each other after Lidia was sent to Siberia.
The third part of the book concerns Jewgenia's terrible ordeal as an Ostarbeiterin - a Ukrainian slave laborer - in Nazi Germany. Wodin's mother never spoke about this nightmarish period in her life, so the author tries to reconstruct these years based on the fragments of information contained in an American dossier. We don't know whether Jewgenia volunteered to go to Germany or was forced along with millions of others. Early in the war, the Nazis ran effective advertising campaigns promising good food and luxurious accommodation ("Germany calls you! Go to Beautiful Germany! 100,000 Ukrainians are already working in free Germany. What about you?") But reports began to trickle back from Germany concerning the hellish conditions, so the SS was forced to round up citizens from their homes, places of worship, workplace and ship them in boxcars to German farms and factories. What is known is that Jewgenia and her husband ended up in a Flick aircraft manufacturing plant outside of Leipzig where the plan was to extract the maximum amount of labor with least amount of food or care. Thousands died from exhaustion, unsafe work conditions, poisonous chemicals, etc. This was all part of the Nazi grand scheme, as Heinrich Himmler openly professed in his Posen Speeches:
„Ein Grundsatz muss für den SS-Mann absolut gelten: ehrlich, anständig, treu und kameradschaftlich haben wir zu Angehörigen unseres eigenen Blutes zu sein und sonst zu niemandem. Wie es den Russen geht, wie es den Tschechen geht, ist mir total gleichgültig. Das, was in den Völkern an gutem Blut unserer Art vorhanden ist, werden wir uns holen, indem wir ihnen, wenn notwendig, die Kinder rauben und sie bei uns großziehen. Ob die anderen Völker in Wohlstand leben oder ob sie verrecken vor Hunger, das interessiert mich nur soweit, als wir sie als Sklaven für unsere Kultur brauchen, anders interessiert mich das nicht. Ob bei dem Bau eines Panzergrabens 10.000 russische Weiber an Entkräftung umfallen oder nicht, interessiert mich nur insoweit, als der Panzergraben für Deutschland fertig wird.“
(One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.)
Somehow, amidst the violence of the slave camps, the backbreaking labor, and the constant aerial bombardment from the British and American planes, the author is conceived and is born shortly after the war ends.
The fourth and final section of the book covers the first ten years of the author's life and is somehow the most disturbing. Jewgenia, her husband and the baby are allowed to remain in Germany as "Displaced Persons" (DPs). Return to the Ukraine is out of the question, for as Ostarbeiter they would be viewed as traitors to the Soviet Union. Most of those who did return were sent off to labor camps for 15-25 years. But as DPs the family was also isolated in Germany - despised as "Russians" (no distinction made with Ukrainians). Wodin describes how she was tormented and bullied by her German classmates. The family situation deteriorates as Jewgenia descends into madness. Why did she drown herself? Was her heart broken because she could no longer return to the loving home of her early youth in Mariupol? Was her spirit broken by all that she had lived through and seen under the two greatest scourges of the century - Stalin and Hitler? In the end there are no clear answers - Jewgenia remains an enigma. But Wodin's search has yielded great insight into her family and what they - along with millions - suffered. And we, the readers, are richer for this. I do hope Sie kam aus Mariupol will find an English or American translator and publisher.
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