Grandma died in ’93, my father in ’95. And then, in 2010, something happened—the sort of thing that normally happens in films or books, not in real life. I was in Norway. A translation of my novel Maidenhair had been released there, and I was invited on a tour of speaking engagements across several cities. My Norwegian translator Marit Bjerkeng and I were strolling around Tromsø, a town in the country’s far north, and we popped into the small local museum. Two diminutive rooms housed an exhibition about Soviet POWs in Norway during the war years. The retreating Germans evacuated their camps from Finland to the Tromsø region. And all of a sudden I remembered that word from my childhood—Kandalaksha. That was where the notification had come from! Kandalaksha was somewhere in Karelia. And I thought, what if my Uncle Borya had been captured there, and was then transferred to Norway in 1944 together with the other prisoners? Marit helped me make an enquiry to the Norwegian archives. A copy of the registration card of POW Boris Shishkin was found immediately and sent to me by email.
POW’S PERSONAL CARD. ISSUED AUGUST 29, 1941. STALAG 309. All their camps were called Stalag—a contraction of Stammlager. This number designated a network of camps in Finland. Every POW was given a metal ID tag, and his number was 1249. SHISHKIN, BORIS. BORN DECEMBER 30, 1920, IN THE VILLAGE OF NOVO-YURIEVO. NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN. PRIVATE, MILITARY UNIT NUMBER. CIVILIAN PROFESSION: RADIO-MECHANIC. TAKEN CAPTIVE AUGUST 27. IN GOOD HEALTH. FINGERPRINT. SURNAME AND ADDRESS OF KIN IN POW’S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. MOTHER: LYUBOV SHISHKINA—my grandmother.
Reading this, I came into a sharp realization of what it was to be resurrected from the dead. This person, my twenty-year-old uncle, now thirty-three years my junior—this boy had suddenly come back to life! And it hurt so much that neither my grandmother nor my father had lived to see this day.
I went straight off to the Internet, and you can find everything there, including information on this Stammlager 309. Photographs, investigations, documents. Stories of people who were imprisoned there and survived. There were even photographs of firing-squad executions taken on the sly by a German soldier. POWs were predominantly employed in construction—they built railways. I read about POW telephonists—and realized: of course, that was him! He must have been given work within his profession!
On the reverse of the card was a note: ES BESTEHT DIE VERMUTUNG, DASS DER KRIEGSGEFANGENE JUDE IST, LAUT AUSSAGEN EINES VERTRAUTEN MANNES. WURDE AM 25.7.1942 DER SICHERHEITSPOLIZEI ÜBERGEBEN. Which means he was shot.
In the course of my Internet research on Stalag 309 I came across a photograph of executed POWs in a big pit. Perhaps one of them was my father’s brother.
How can I convey this feeling? My uncle Borya has just been resurrected—and he’s been killed again. It’s a good thing after all, I remember thinking, that Dad and Grandma didn’t live to see this!
That he was killed as a Jew is, of course, astonishing. He was of Tambov peasant stock, going back generations. Evidently someone had got square with him: the slightest denunciation might get you shot.
I set about tracking down that photograph from my childhood. Our family archive was destroyed ten years ago when my brother’s house near Moscow burnt down. I got in contact with my father’s last wife, Zinaida Vasilievna, but after moving house numerous times she had nothing left. It’s extraordinary: I see it right before my eyes, that prewar snap of the youth in headphones, but it exists nowhere except within me.
Every document, every photograph, everything that should be kept in the family from generation to generation—it has all perished. But it all still survives in what remains of that machine of death. Why? How on earth can this be?
I was also struck that a Russian translation had been written onto the card in someone’s hand. Who did the translation? What for? When? There was a Russian stamp, too: PERSONAL REGISTRATION CARD AMENDED. REFERENCE NUMBER 452. 1941. And a handwritten word: Notified. Meaning that Boris’s mother, my grandmother, had been sent the paper she was to cry over for so many years.
It turned out that all these archives were transferred to Russia after the war and are held to this day in Podolsk, near Moscow. My grandmother and my father lived so many years in ignorance of their Boris’s fate, and it was their own country, for whose sake Boris had died, that held the truth back from them. Only after Perestroika were the archives opened temporarily, and Western historians made copies of them. I received Uncle Borya’s card from the Norwegian archives within a single week, yet Grandma and Dad received no news of him from their own state in a whole lifetime.
Information concerning POWs was kept secret because in reality the state was waging war against its own people. My relatives, my loved ones lived out their entire lives in a prison nation which used them for its wars and despised them.
When Perestroika began, my father made an enquiry to the KGB about the fate of his father. All the victims of Stalin’s repressions were being rehabilitated. He showed me an official letter confirming the rehabilitation of his father, my grandfather. Charges were being dismissed for lack of corpus delicti. Dad had been tanking up since morning and would only bellow, “Bastards! Bastards!”
After the war he drank his whole life through. And all his submariner friends, too. They probably couldn’t do otherwise. It was the disease of their generation. Aged eighteen, he spent months on end immured in a submarine, haunted by the constant fear of drowning in an iron coffin. An experience like that can shackle you for the rest of your life.
Under Gorbachev, when the really hungry years began, my veteran father received food parcels containing produce from Germany. In his eyes this represented a personal humiliation. He and his friends had seen themselves as victors their whole lives, and now he was forced to feed from the hand of the vanquished foe. He regarded the collapse of the USSR as defeat in a war he had waged together with the rest of the country. My father hated Gorbachev.
I didn’t like Gorbachev either, but precisely for the reason that he did everything in his power to prevent the collapse of the USSR and the entire Soviet system. My father and I viewed the history being made around us from opposite vantage points. There was an unbridgeable gulf between us. We had long since ceased to be close to one another. And this, of course, had little to do with politics.
The final straw leading to our estrangement came at my wedding. Inviting him, I remember, was a conciliatory gesture on my part. Dad got drunk, started a punch-up, and I had to restrain him with the help of a friend and pack him off home in a taxi. It was hard for me to forgive him such things.
It’s so important to be proud of one’s father. But I was ashamed of mine.
I started communicating with him again only shortly before his death. He spent his last years simply destroying himself with vodka. Denied his drink, he’d start smashing up everything in the house. Zinaida Vasilievna stopped fighting for him—she herself would buy him his bottles so he’d get sozzled and quickly pass out. He drank so much it seemed strange his body was still holding up. All his submariner friends had long since drunk themselves into the grave. My father must’ve been in a hurry to rejoin his war buddies. Out of their whole boat he was the last man standing.
At the funeral feast Zinaida Vasilievna told of how my father died:
“He’s fallen off the bed and he yells, ‘Zina! Zina, I can’t see anything! Turn the light on! The light! I need more light!’ It is light, Pasha, I say, it’s sunny outside!”
It was odd that my bibulous veteran-submariner father should have uttered the same dying cry as Goethe.
For as long as I can remember, my father always said that, upon his death, he must be laid in the coffin wearing his sailor’s uniform. And at the morgue a grey-haired swabby was wheeled out to us in an open coffin. Lately his whole body had been quaking and shaking, but now, arms folded on his chest, he had an air of serenity, as if mollified by the thought that he wasn’t being cremated just any-old-how, but in his striped sailor’s jersey.