Tag: wwii

A Couple More Words About “The Last Green Valley”

I was full of emotions and in a hurry to press “publish,” but now I want to go back to that post.

After I published it, I received an email from a friend in which she related to me how difficult it was for her to accept the uncomfortable truth about the actions of the Soviet Army troops during the March to Berlin when she read this book. This was not the case for me: in recent years, I read enough fiction and documentary on that topic. However, the point of view of an ethnic German who hates Hitler and the Nazis but still joins their convoy to escape the worse evil was complete news, exposing many facts I was not aware of before.

The most interesting is that all these facts are just mentioned, they are not in the center of the story the author tells us. Instead, they are just the background for a truly amazing story of survival, but somehow, and possibly precisely because of that, they are even more convincing.

Another important thing that resonated with me was the evolution of people’s minds after the Germans were defeated. Whenever I think about what will come out of Russia as a result of the current war and what could be a “fix to the world.” Each time I discuss this topic with Boris, he points out that the German government after WWII was dissolved, and the country was functioning under the Allies’ supervision, and that’s what laid the foundation for the eradication of nazism. What I found interesting in this book was how people adapted their beliefs depending on which occupation zone they ended up in. Not everybody strived out of the Russia-occupied zone as Emil Martel did; many people opted to stay with the “known evil” and didn’t want to move to the West even later when they had safer opportunities.

A Book I Am Excited About

I am finishing the Berlin Dairy by Willian Shirer. What an amazing book! I can’t believe I knew nothing about it until I saw a recommendation from a friend. William Shirer was a CBS broadcaster who worked in Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1941. He wrote several books about the history of WWII and the history of Nazism, and now I want to read them all! 

I think that it is a combination of two factors that make this book so amazing: first, he was an outstanding journalist with an extraordinary analytical mind who knew both how to get access to information and how to interpret it. And second – that it is an actual diary, so the readers follow events in “real-time.” When he wrote something in his journal, he did not know what would happen next or the implications of the events he had just recorded. It’s something like: I can’t believe Molotov and Ribbentrop are meeting! How can they negotiate when Russia is the most fierce critic of Nazism. How is it possible that they could reach any agreement?! They did?! 

It turned out there were lots of historical facts I didn’t know. Take the Winter War – I thought I knew everything as much as I could, visiting Finland several times a year. Still, I had no idea that it started with the air raid shelling Helsinki – I thought that all the war events happened at the frontline. 

This book has way too many parallels with the current war in Ukraine, like when the author explains how Germans have “no morals.” A German is lamenting about “bad Finns who fight against Russians, and why they are doing such a horrible thing as resisting? When Shirer says that Finns are fighting for their independence and asks won’t the Germans do the same if they were invaded, the response it: but that’s different! Russians are our friends!

Or when he cites a conversation with a German waitress about the British air raids: why are they bombarding us? – Well, because you are bombarding London! – But we only shell military objects, and they through bombs on our civilian objects? – Why do you think that Germans only bombard military objects? – That’s what our newspapers say!

Sounds familiar, right?! Way too familiar!

I almost finished this book, and I have three other books in queue, but I am urged to drop them all and read all the rest of the books by Willian Shirer(which will definitely take a while!)

Igor’s Article: Ukraine World War II Legacy

I really liked it. And since I know that people do not like to click on the links – here is the full text.

To Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians, few historical events loom as large as World War II. One would be hard-pressed to find an Eastern Slav who doesn’t have some relative who fought in the war, died in a war or lost something to the war. Many Eastern European cities still have lasting scars.

I grew up in St. Petersburg, a city that survived the nearly 900-day Siege of Leningrad, where over a million people perished from bombings, disease and starvation. A ring of mass graves around the city’s former outskirts serves as a lasting reminder of the sheer scale of the toll. My grandmother on my mom’s side was only 6 when the Siege happened, and she lived through the first year before she was evacuated. 

Grandma Nina never sugarcoated the realities of the war.

“One winter day, I was playing in the yard when a young couple approached me,” she told me. I couldn’t have been older than 9. “They said, ‘Little girl, would you like some candy?’ But I knew better. There was no candy during the Siege. So I ran into my building as quickly as my little legs would carry me. And it’s a good thing I did — otherwise, I would’ve gotten eaten.”

Grandma Nina wasn’t my only connection to the war. Three of my great-grandfathers served in the military, in some capacity or another. My Belarusian grandfather and his sister (also named Nina) lived through the Nazi occupation of what is now Belarus. Even the relatives who barely saw any fighting have war-related memories. 

When I was a kid, there was a lot of emphasis on the toll the war took, how we must remember this toll because we must never allow anything like that again. But I feel like something shifted in the last 20 years, as members of my great-grandparents’ generation, and even older members of my grandparents’ generation, died of natural causes in growing numbers. 

There was less talk about pain and suffering, and more emphasis on the glorious Red Army heroically overcoming odds and triumphing over Nazis. Talking about some of the harsh realities of the war suddenly became controversial.

When I was growing up, calling someone a Nazi was about the worst thing one could do to another person. Our teachers told us to use the word carefully because “words have meanings.” But whatever restraint there was seems to have completely evaporated.

In 2014, when Russia encouraged separatists in the Donbass region and the war broke out, Russians and Ukrainians accused each other of being Nazis. It wasn’t that unusual to see social media posts and news segments where World War II veterans encouraged their grandchildren to fight against Nazi invaders. Aside from the language and national signifiers, they sounded practically identical.

Now, as the long-simmering conflict erupted into a full-fledged war, the Nazi labels flew with renewed vigor. The Russian government quickly positioned the “special operation” as “denazification” of Ukraine, and as the attacks intensified, Ukrainians were quick to call Russians Nazis. 

Of course, what’s different this time is the sheer scale and devastation of the attacks. When I saw photos of people huddled in Kyiv and Kharkiv subways to escape the bombings, I immediately thought of people hiding from Nazi bombings of Moscow. When I read about Mariupol getting encircled by the Russian army, its besieged residents huddled in the cold, it’s hard not to think about Grandma Nina talking about burning everything there was to burn in the house just to stay warm. When I see families fleeing west, I think of Grandpa Gena talking about how he was only 5 years old when his family tried, and failed, to outrun the Nazi advance.

“When the war started, my dad went off to serve, so it was just me, my mom, my older brother, Nikolay, and my younger sister Nina,” he told me. “I remember when we were trying to flee, my mom carried Nina in her arms, while I ran with her.”

I was taught to be careful about using the word “Nazi,” and I’m not going to stop now. But when one gets that kind of association … I know it makes at least some Russians pause. A couple of days ago, I saw a photo of a flier somebody put up in St. Petersburg. “A city that survived the Siege is against the war!” But so far there is also plenty of support, including from some of the people who were kids during World War II.

This war will end someday. Kyiv, which was shelled during World War II, will rise again, just like it did last time. And the scars of war will linger. 

Maybe this time, the generations to come will not so easily lose sight of the toll the war takes. 

Maybe this time, Russians won’t need a personal connection to understand the horror the war inflicts.

Resistance Museum Without Pictures

This post will have no pictures. I didn’t take any pictures in this museum, mostly because we were short on time. We wanted to visit this museum very much – we’ve read a lot about the Dutch Resistance. Even when we were visiting other museums in Amsterdam, such as Stedelijk, there were multiple mentions of how people, artists, and curators, in particular, felt compelled to aid the Resistance, and how vital the Resistance was for cultural and national preservation.

The location of the Resistance Museum is not a very central one, so it required some planning, especially because the conference had started already, but we made it. By that time, after being in Amsterdam for a couple of days, we’ve already realized how useful their museum audioguides are. They are way more convenient than the ones we have in the States, at least here in Chicago.

When we visited Brussels several years ago, we ended up being very disappointed in the Magritte Museum – there were not that many of his paintings there (then-recent Art Institute exhibit had more!) and we could not read any of his letters and diaries, which were on display in abundance. We were a little bit concerned that something like this will happen in the Resistance Museum, but the audioguides helped a lot!

That’s another reason I didn’t take any pictures inside this museum – obviously, all explanations are in Dutch, and the exhibit is mostly useless without them. I’ve learned a lot about how life in the Netherlands was unfolding during WWII. It turned out I didn’t know a lot, including brutal hunger towards the end of the war.

That won’t be the first time that I am realizing how little did I know about WWII before I came to the US. My knowledge about the events of WWII was very obscure. The way World War II history was taught at school would give you the impression that even though there was something else going on, the most significant part of it was the Great Patriotic War. When I first rented a set of DVDs about WWII in our local library was the first time I’ve realized that WWII was a WORLD war and that so many countries have participated. It was a shock for me that the USSR was mentioned on less than half of these DVDs.

Since that time the more I travel the world, the more I learn about different countries’ history, this realization becomes deeper. In this sense, the Resistance Museum was a great history lesson, and also an outstanding ethical experience. The museum is organized in such a way, that the visitors are presented with the questions the war-time Dutch citizen had to answer: should I cooperate or disobey? Should I fly or stay? Should I hide or should I protest? I could not even imagine one could build the whole museum based on these ethical choices.

And one more thought. I agree with my friend, who was saying that the visit to this museum and her subsequent research made her realize that the Soviet Union was the only country under German occupation which did not have a resistance movement. The “partisans” were organized and controlled by the communist party, or the communist party would acquire a leadership over a spontaneously organized group. Also, the focus of the “partisans” activity was on blowing bridges and military echelons, not on saving people, as it was with the Resistance in other countries. Sadly, I have to admit, that by the time the war broke out, the idea of resisting any authorities was wiped entirely off people’s minds and was not considered even a remote possibility.