Happy Halloween?

It’s been 5 years since I visited Russia's Kaliningrad region and finally I’m getting around to framing a few of those memories. Both Tainted Amber and Crow Stone are 

Top left: Baltic Coast at former Rauschen,
now Svetlogorsk 
Bottom left: linden-lined road in rural Kaliningrad
Right: house in former Kreuzburg, now Slavskoye

set in the Kaliningrad Oblast.  Grateful that I got to visit the area before the pandemic and the Ukraine invasion. 

I follow a few Instagrammers who live in the Kaliningrad Oblast and they often post beautiful images of the former East Prussia. The Oblast is like a time warp … German ruins, battle memorials ... amidst Russian tourism.  

It’s stunning to realize that the average Russian seems oblivious to the current war, seems oblivious to the political crisis that their leader has created. How do Kaliningraders … wedged between EU countries and Ukraine ... even manage?  Perhaps they’re not as oblivious as they seem … perhaps they’re terrified to speak their fears.

The stylish, picture-perfect world of modern Russia shown on social media juxtaposed against the ruins of the last world war is bizarre. Terrible battles are happening so close by. The cries from Ukraine and from their own political prisoners must haunt those beautiful  ruins.  

While the remaining Third Reich structures crumble into rustic art, the horror of war, of revenge and misuse of power haunts our grim present.  Happy Halloween?

Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams by Shari Green

Set in Leipzig, during the fall of 1989, Shari Green's beautiful YA story is told in verse. The novel shares 16-year-old Helena’s point of view during the tumultuous dying months of the DDR. While her closest friend escapes to the freedom of the west, Helena knows that Leipzig is her home and that she’ll never choose to leave. Rather than run away, she would rather risk prison by following her idealistic father’s lead to protest for her freedom. An aspiring conductor, Helena falls in love with another music student who like her friend, also wants to escape to the west. Helena must make some gut-wrenching decisions when the Stasi threatens her family. I can't help but compare her choices to what's happening in Ukraine. Stay for your country or leave for your family. Not easy.

     

Nikolai church Leipzig
Wikipedia

The musicality of the author’s words, the rhythm, timing, cadence … all flow so effortlessly into the plot of a love story set in the weeks leading up to the peaceful collapse of the DDR. I was struck by the beauty and depth of this novel … like a musical score. Infused with rich historical detail, this is a poignant story where even a church, Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche, comes alive as a character representing  the power of prayer, hope and of song. 

A couple of my favourite lines, “… dreams are slippery things when I’m losing my grip, it does my heart good to know someone else believes I should hold on.” (page 83/4). 

“I am the conductor and it’s up to me to shape the discontent parts of my life.”  (page 197)

Another beautiful line, of many, near the end, “Around me, energy flits like fireflies, glinting on the faces of passersby.” (page 226)

Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams is shortlisted for the 2024 Governor General’s Award. 

Wild Children

My mom had it tough as the Second World War wound down on the eastern front. I explore the failed winter exodus from East Prussia in Crow Stone … my YA release from Ronsdale Press, from back in 2022. Of the three sisters, fictionalized in the novel with the names of Katya, Sofie and Marthe, only Katya (inspired by my mom) is taken into the Soviet Union as a forced labourer. She went through some difficult times in the open pit mines of the Urals near Chelyabinsk. 

But what happened to her two younger sisters? I understood little about their experiences. Things were just too terrible to remember, they’d tell me. Let the past be forgotten, they’d say.  I knew rape and starvation were common under the Soviet occupation. I knew they weren’t allowed to leave the former East Prussia, renamed Kaliningrad, until 1948. I knew that others in my immigrant church community had similar experiences … but no one would talk about it.

So now I’m reading The Wolf Children of the Eastern Front, Alone and Forgotten, by Sonya Winterberg with Kerstin Lieff. It’s a heart-wrenching testimony of the horrors that lost children experienced in those stark years after the war. Unlike the dates in history books … the end of war doesn’t end the suffering. 

As a curious side note, the introduction to this book is by John Kay, the lead singer of the Canadian rock band called Steppenwolf. Born in Tilsit, East Prussia (now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad) in 1944, he narrowly escaped a similar fate that 20,000 young East Prussian children experienced. John Kay (born Joachim Fritz Krauledat) ended up in Canada in 1958 and went on to create memorable hits like “Born to be Wild.”  

Many children scavenged like wild animals in the desolate, bombed-out East Prussian countryside. My two aunts, fostering a lost toddler, and my teenaged cousins no doubt would have crossed paths with the orphans as they foraged for food trying to avoid Soviet revenge near the Lithuanian border. 

Kirsten Boie's novel about post-war friendship

Just finished the middle grade novel, Heul doch nicht, du lebst ja noch, by Kirsten Boie published by Friedrich Oetinger Verlag from Hamburg in 2022. Fast paced, engaging characters with unique points of view. 

First off, I opened this novel because of location. It’s set in Hamburg, the biggest city in the most northern state of Germany, Schleswig Holstein.  I'd grown up listening to Hans Albers’ music about the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s notorious red light distract. It’s the area that my father came from and I visited back in the seventies, wanting to know more about his background which I considered risqué and possibly immoral (compared to my evangelical upbringing). 

As a child, I was fascinated with my dad’s low German dialect … different than the Mennonite dialect spoken here in southern Manitoba … and yet similar. I knew that the windy, flat plains of northern Germany are close to Friesland where Mennonites originated.  

A second reason I wanted to read this book is because of the time. It’s not just set in Hamburg, it’s set in the ruins of Hamburg … in June, 1945 … after the war. Massive bombing by the Brits (or Tommies in book), reduce Hamburg to rubble. (Eerily similar to too many places in our world today.)  How does healing begin?

I also appreciated the 3 different points of view … kids between 10 and 14.  First there’s the Jewish boy Jacob, ‘a mischling’  who had called himself Friedrich to keep his identity hidden. His mother was a blonde Jew, like him, and his father an ‘aryan’.  Jacob viewpoint confuses the reader because he’s unaware that the war’s over … that it’s safe for him come out of hiding. Then there’s Hermann, with an angry father who lost both legs while fighting. Hermann has to help his father use the bathroom several times a day robbing Hermann of any hope for his own future. Then there’s Traute, whose family hosts a refugee family from East Prussia ... not unlike my mother's East Prussian refugee family.

All three kids want friends and somehow connect in the bombed ruins of post-war Hamburg. The author, Kirsten Boie, does an amazing job of showing the German point of view after the war. Even with my rusty German, I was able to gobble this book up. Highly readable and, unfortunately, still so relevant to our current violent world.

Loved this quote at the start of the novel ...
the past is not dead ... it hasn't even passed.

Orange

This past Monday was Truth and Reconciliation Day. This is the first year it's been recognized as an official holiday in Manitoba.  It’s more popularly known as ‘orange shirt day’ in memory of a little Indigenous girl who was so proud of her orange shirt for the start of school and yet forced to give it up when she went to a church-administered residential school. The last such school closed in 1996. Reconciliation can't be limited to one day ... it's a process.

Germany has worked on this process through Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  The long words of the German language may look intimidating… but this compound word means ‘making sense of the past.’  Germany accepts responsibility for the crimes of its Nazi past and promotes healing through awareness and education. The past can't be changed but future atrocities might be prevented.  Is it enough? Of course not. But what are the alternatives? That's why we need to keep telling our stories, writing our books, sharing our secrets.

Secrets of a lurid past continue to haunt former Soviet zones who have not reconciled with their histories. In Russia, gulag museums once highlighting Soviet atrocities are now closed and history textbooks for their youth are being re-written to better fit Putin's agenda.

In Canada, orange helps us remember. Orange for the children. Orange for reconciliation. Orange for the future.  Every Child Matters!