Following a grandmother’s life

Marcel Krueger, a writer, translator and essayist who is based in Ireland and Germany, wrote a touching book that documents the journey he undertook to follow the traces of his late grandmother, Cilly. Born in 1923, she spent her youth at a farm in Eastern Prussia, which is in today’s Warmia-Mazury voivodship, near Olsztyn in Poland. Starting in February 1945, she was imprisoned for four years in a Soviet labour camp in the Urals.

Babushka?

Krueger’s family did not share the views of typical Nazi Germans in that region. As a matter of fact, one of Krueger’s great uncles was killed by guillotine in 1942 for being a spy for the Polish underground. Yet to make matters more complex, another great uncle died as a pilot in the Luftwaffe, while yet another one was killed as a Wehrmacht soldier. While describing the non-conformism of his ancestors, Krueger does not hide the fact that the family farm was using French POWs as forced labourers.

After reading the book, I became very intrigued by word babushka in the title. This is a Russian word, yet Krueger’s grandma was a Polish German. I did not see any evidence that she grew up with the Russian language or culture. Given that, the correct word to use should be a German, or a Polish one. Maybe it was the publisher’s choice to include a Russian term as a more exotic-sounding, I wondered. It was later on when I came to the conclusion that Krueger probably wanted to tame the USSR a bit. Thus, he opted for a word from an intimate (human) dictionary that belongs to the “Other World”, as Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski once described. 

Will to live

Thousands of volumes of stories have already been published on the Second World War. Yet the experience of the East Prussian peasants has received much less attention.  We should not cheat ourselves here – the Germans were much more motivated to carefully examine their totalitarian past than inhabitants of former Soviet Union, who did not work en masse neither on the violence,   nor on trauma.

However, Babushka`s journey is not as much a testimony to the events of the 1940s as it is a document showing the experience of history in 2018. More than anything else, the book shows the sensitivity of a German European. Here we have a young man who reaches out to the trauma of a woman, who is his grandmother. He recreates the story of her life by searching for her traces, looking through the archives, and trying to live through it all.

His grandmother’s fate allows him to experience the history and geography of less accessible places. He meets their residents today. In these meetings, he tries to avoid the optic of a traveller who arrives to a wild country. In fact, his description of Poland is so warm that it makes you want to have a beer in the city of Olsztyn, as he describes it. It was with great pleasure that I read his beautiful passage on the Warsaw Uprising – the event that grandmother Cilly had nothing to do with. It was clearly the contact with Polish museums and Norman Davies’s book Rising 44: The Battle for Warsaw that made an incredible impression on the author. Krueger also tried to make sure that in his journey he would not see in the residents of the lands today the same threats that his grandmother had experienced.

Thus, he travelled to the sources of her pain, stress and fear. He placed Cilly’s memories on the globe, while remembering her as a human being, a woman, and a family member. He was most impressed with his grandmother’s will to live, even though from his memories we get a picture of a difficult and dominating woman. She was proud of her survival, knowing that others did not manage to master this difficult task. Despite that, she was constantly generating tension, fearing that everything could be taken away and believing that it was necessary to be prepared for the worst.

Not an easy thing

A Ukrainian writer, named Tania Maliarchuk, wrote a short story about a different woman. Someone who did not succeed in the confrontation with her grandmother’s will to live. The grandmother in this story was a Holodomor survivor. Her traumatic experience turned out to be too difficult when put together with the sensitivity of a child. Thus, the girl had no choice but to escape from her grandmother, knowing that she could neither help her nor win with her. Indeed, Eastern Europeans have more difficulties managing their post-traumatic stress disorder. That is why we like to make our past sound more heroic than it actually was or else escape from it.

The Friedland transit camp near Göttingen, where Cilly was sent after the liberation, is today an initial reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees. It is also a museum and a youth centre. Its functioning makes me think that if more Europeans (including Poles) looked closer at the experiences of their ancestors, xenophobia and anti-refugee rhetoric may not be so easily accepted across the continent. But looking at the world and oneself in this way is surely not an easy task.

Dorota Masłowska, a Polish writer with a characteristic sharp tone, reviewed a different travel book. It was authored by Daniel Kalder and titled A lost cosmonaut. Masłowska, while describing it, wrote: “it is a kind of an intriguing travel diary of a Scotsman who, with an ostentatious Euro-indolence describes his adventures in the most bizarre casemates of the former Soviet Union”. I thought about this book after reading Babushka’s journey and then I realized that Krueger has managed to write his travel story in a much better way. All in all, his work not only has a literary value, but also an esthetical one.

Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Zofia Bluszcz lives in Eastern Europe. She published in numerous periodicals, including, Czas Literatury, Czas Kultury, Kultura Enter, and Nowa Europa Wschodnia.

Babushka, Book review, Russia