I have war on my mind.
In 1943, my grandmother was living in New York City with her two young daughters, my mother and aunt. I think of her, waiting to hear news from home. My aunt remembers how when she would get a letter from Russia — a rare occurrence— she would sit the kids down, read the letter aloud, and cry and cry. Because the news was always terrible.
In this episode, I connect my grandmother’s experience of World War 2 from a distance with my experience as a far away spectator of the war in Gaza. This is not the first episode. I have seven other episodes, coming soon, about Russian folklore and love and revolution and peasant life and communism and a great interview with Jules Rabin about his Jewish- Russian/Lithuanian family and an interview with my mother about her grandfather. But right now, at this moment in time, I just need to talk about war.
During the day it’s never far off. I listen to news and podcasts as I work. I talk about it with my husband over coffee. I check my instagram and twitter excessively throughout the day. Are the people in Gaza that I follow still alive? Were they bombed at night, were their children murdered, were they stripped naked and hauled off by the IDF to be tortured and imprisoned? Are they starving, are their kids starving, are they sick, do they have any water at all? Every time I think it can’t possibly get any worse, it does. Watching their stories and faces flit across the screen, I am reminded of the holographic Princess Lea from the first Star Wars pleading: “Help me. You are our only hope. Help me, help me.” And wish, like crazy, that I could be like Luke Skywalker, and learn a magical power from an ancient geezer that enables me, against all odds, to defeat the Empire— but, NO. I go to protests and vigils and meetings, write posts and it all seems pathetically ineffectual against the monstrous war machine.
At night it haunts my dreams, I wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat, heart pounding. Imagining what it would feel like to have bombs dropping around me, to hear the screams of the buried alive, to smell the smoke and burnt flesh and dead. How can it be, that I live here in this beautiful snow covered peaceful countryside, while across the globe millions of people are living in what can only be described as hell on earth? How can it be?
This brings me to my grandmother. From 1942-46 she was living in an apartment in New York City with her two young daughters, my mother and aunt. And her family— her parents, her sisters Tanya, Anya, Shura, Katya, and Sonya, and her brothers Vasya and Grisha, and all of their families,— they were all living in a war zone. Because Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, just 6 months after my grandparents fled.
The Nazis named this invasion “Operation Barbarossa”. It was the largest invasion ever. The numbers are so huge they are incomprehensible. 27 million Soviets killed. 7.5 million civilians killed, 2 million of them Soviet Jews. 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed by the Nazis. Armies of millions. Millions starved to death. Perhaps most people know the basic outlines of this war: I knew next to nothing until I started researching my grandmother’s life. From what I have read— admittedly, just skimming the surface— this is what has stood out for me.
First: The Germans reason for invasion was like most wars: they wanted land and resources. They called it “lebensraum” living space. The gentle sounding phrase— isn’t that nice? a little extra living room for the German people! — masked their genocidal intent. The Slavs were considered subhuman and the idea was to empty the Soviet Union of them through imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and murder— and then steal their land and resources. They deliberately used starvation as a weapon of war, feeding their massive army with food stolen from Soviet peasants.
Second: The invasion was justified to their population as a war against an existential threat: both on an ideological front (communism or “Judeo-Bolshevism”) and on a racial front: the Slavs, like the Jews, were considered subhuman animals.
Third: The Germans called it a war of annihilation, and had a more brutal stance towards the Soviets than towards the non Jewish populations of other countries they invaded like France, Holland, Norway. German soldiers were instructed to ignore all rules of war and to collectively punish civilian populations for acts of resistance , resulting in massive, massive, death and destruction in the Soviet Union.
In my grandmothers oblast (region) of Tver, then called Kalinin, over 1000 villages were destroyed. 10 or more cities were destroyed. In the city of Rzhev (130 miles away from my grandmother’s village) one of the most brutal battles of the war was fought. Out of a population of 56,000, only 150 people remained. 25,000 fled, the remaining 20,000 were killed. 95% of the houses in Rzhev were completely destroyed.
My grandmother’s village, Udomlya, was not destroyed. The German army was turned back when they were 100 miles away.
In the second half of this episode, I read tweets and posts from Gaza. Here are the names of the accounts I reference:
Ahmed Kouta @princekouta / Ahmed El-Madhoun @madhoun95 / Abdalhadi Alijla @alijla2021 / Refaat al Areer @itranslate123 / Dr. Mustafa Elmasri @Gaza_Psych / Ahmed Shameya @ahmedshameya99 / Nour Naim @NourNaim88 / Hind Khoudary @Hind_Gaza / Motaz Azaiza @azaizamotaz9 /Eman Basher @SometimesPooh / Sarah @SarahSalibi Thank you to these incredible doctors, journalists, poets, mothers, human beings for taking the time to share, in English, their experience of this war. Music: 1) “Welcome Dear Guests” Russian traditional by Kostroma from their album “Over the Seas” . 2) “Black Raven” Russian traditional by Kostroma. To support Kostroma:
https://kedry-gift-store.myshopify.com/ facebook:https://www.facebook.com/KostromaVocal
3) “Mourning for Muhammed” Circassian traditional by Jrpjej from their album “After The War Comes Funeral: Circassian Songs of Resistance and Sorrow 1763-1864” To support Jrpjej:
https://oredrecordings.bandcamp.com instagram: @jrpjej
