Sumy and Memories of Second World War

The city of Sumy in northeast Ukraine has made headlines in recent days because of the horrific Palm Sunday attacks where dozens of Ukrainian civilians died during Putin’s continued ‘special operation’ that has devastated countless lives over the last 3 years. So many needlessly broken lives. Why?

Sumy is the main city in a region I’d been hoping to visit someday. Near the ancient monastery town of Putyvl, it’s an area that has seen the horrors of war before. One of my father’s friends, an agronomist, had been stationed in Putyvl during the Nazi invasion back in 1941. 

Ernst was also from Schleswig-Holstein, like my dad, and had immigrated to Canada in the early sixties.  He’d written his memoirs and in the mid-eighties, asked me, a recent German MA grad, to translate his memoirs into English. 

I knew my family had a lot of war memories and I’d been trying to figure them out through various means … travel and oral histories, and 20th century writers like Heinrich Böll, Günther Gras and Thomas Mann so I welcomed this opportunity to get an insider’s view of that war.

Fotosergio:  Molchansky Monastery

Ernst shares his efforts to keep his Nazi taskmasters happy and fed while feeding a partisan army hiding in the Sumy/Putyvl marshy woods. He shares how he supposedly manipulated the Soviets & the Nazis, killing indoor plants with too much un-drunk vodka, never being sure who to trust and even faking his own grave in an effort to hide.  It was a fascinating account and while on the outside I was a newlywed with her first house and an empty sandbox calling to her, on the inside I was learning about Nazis, partisans, Soviets and war. 

I’ve never stopped being fascinated by those years and those places. A grim reality is once again settled over  Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine and all that eighty-year-old history still matters. I’m so sad that the ‘bloodlands’ (Timothy Snyder) continue to bleed.

From Königsberg to Kaliningrad

Eighty years ago, on April 9, 1945, General Otto Lasch surrendered Königsberg to the Red Army. Where is Königsberg today? Its buildings in ruins, including the once famous Königsberg Castle, its people dispersed … washed away by war and now by time, like a sandcastle. You’ll only find it on historical maps. After 700 years as a Prussian city, with its most famous citizen being Emmanuel Kant, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 … a name that also applies to the Russian oblast, an enclave surrounded by Lithuania to the North, Poland to the south and the Baltic on the west.  Along with the city, the entire province once known as East Prussia, is renamed and divided amongst the victors.  And like East Prussia before, Russian Kaliningrad remains separate from its mother land. Always in its own detached world.

By April, in 1945, many German civilians would have managed to escape the Soviet onslaught, or have died trying as they fled for  Baltic ports.  My mom had been captured during her flight earlier that winter and by April she was on her way to the Urals as a POW. Meanwhile, her two sisters and cousins were stranded … also not reaching port cities like Pillau … perhaps saved from drowning on ships like the doomed Wilhelm Gustloff. My aunts remained behind in the ruins of East Prussia.

I’m grateful to have visited Kaliningrad back in 2019. The Russian settlers who have made Königsberg their home have learned to love the city and appreciate the history and ruins of that brutal war. With the Germans are gone, the victors have had eighty years to claim Kaliningrad as their own. 

But Königsberg remains a symbol of home to the scattered survivors and now their descendants. My recent ‘cousin’ reunion down in Mexico this past winter reminded me of how memories fade away … like castles in the sand … unless we make the effort to put them into narratives. 

public domain Königsberg Castle

The Mud of Transition

Lessons for writing from nature:  calendars are nice …. BUT like chapter outlines, merely a guideline.  Spring is fickle … BUT no matter what, the days are brighter, the snow is disappearing, the puddles growing. The plot is definitely heading towards warmth, towards the light. BUT like a good book, it’s all about the journey. This muddy middle will pass.  Splish, splash towards new growth ... towards spring.

Muddling through a draft of a new novel feels a bit like slugging through some prairie slush.