04/06/2020

Bumpy landing on the south coast

Catherine, Sussex

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Sheila’s unfortunate news got me thinking.  About the sudden shock of dislocation, be it disc - or entire person.  The incapacitating sword-thrust of physical injury, or the bang on the door in the middle of the night, impatient shouts and the revving of truck engines outside, a scuffle and then silence, after the sound of the engines have faded into the distance.

Entire swathes of people have been throughout history, and continue to be, swept aside, expelled from their homes, to become prisoners, stateless displaced persons or simply rootless and damaged.  It will probably never stop.  I first became acutely aware of the reality of this when I researched my own maternal family: my mother had not been able to speak of it.  My godmother, my mother’s best friend, wrote in 1951 of WWII:  ‘During the night of 13 June [1941] I looked out of the window and saw people being driven past in lorries.  It was devastating.’

Several members of my family were taken away to forced labour camps, in the far back of beyond, in unimaginable conditions.  Some died, some survived, forever changed.

Men of fighting age were more useful to the invaders, and kept.  The Soviets and Nazis between them carved them up: depending on the men’s date of birth, they were taken by one side and put to fighting the other as military fronts advanced and retreated.  Obey or be shot. My mother’s brother was taken by the Soviets to ‘training’ in the Soviet Union, and died fighting his ‘Nazi’ countrymen back on his own soil.  A cousin found himself in a Soviet pow camp, where he just managed to survive.  Others had to fight on, some farther afield, in other countries, with luck returning home once the war ended.  Some did, some did not.  .

Some also formed the resistance and lived and fought for years, hiding in the countryside.

Despite honeyed promises by both invading forces of ‘liberation’ from occupation by the other, many citizens saw what was coming and escaped while they could, mostly by sea, before the beaches were mined.  In 1944, my godmother ended up, via Finland, in Sweden.  She wrote later: ‘I’ve heard nothing of H*****.  There have been a few escapes from ******* by boat, and one mysterious escape, but nothing more.’  But even physical escape did not mean an end to psychological trauma.  She spoke of regrets surrounding her departure.  ‘I think I ought to have gone into the countryside and taken Mother with me, even if it had been against her will.  I feel I’m a selfish coward!  I left ******* before certain things were clear.  I wasn’t sure of my political views, which half a year later had matured.  But by then it was too late, and now I have nightmares.’  

Anyone could find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, be it within one’s own country or from another.  In the safety of Sweden, she expressed doubts as to the safety of contacting anyone back home.   ’It might prove unfavourable to them.  I have a feeling that they knocked on my mother’s door already, as E**** [her brother-in-law] was punished already in the first year of occupation; he was driven into the countryside as a worker’s exploiter, and during the Germans’ time  he found two Russian armed prisoners who had escaped from ******: he had to turn them in.  I was an interpreter once when the Germans were in our village helping harvest the wheat.  That alone is enough to get one imprisoned.  All sorts of memories come to mind.’

Earlier, after WWI, my infant mother and still-young mother, father and brother had been trapped in a ravaged Russia by the war and Revolution.  They finally got out, but the price was that my grandmother never saw her Russian mother again.  History almost repeated itself when WWII marooned my mother in England.  It took decades of heartbreaking appeals, impotent on one side and unheeded on the other, to get my grandmother, now old and useless to the State, out to join her.