Leaving Lyssenko: Displaced Memories

The years my mother spent at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, were “very good.” The young girl who’d spent her first half decade herded from labor camp to prison camp to concentration camp had finally found a “home.” Those formative years at Lyssenko were not rife with killings and rapes and bombs and grenades and constant fear of which enemy would strike next and at what gate.

The notion of leaving a displaced persons for a new life in a faraway land sounds like a dream for most people. To my mother it was an end to the first era of her life that didn’t involve constant suffering and instability. And it meant saying goodbye to people she came to know as family in the wake of losing so many blood relatives. It was horrifying. It meant recalling all the previous tragedies and again losing friends by separation.

“And then people started to immigrate to different countries, and they started to place us. Two of my father's friends went to England. And they had lost their families, too, during the war. Whether they were killed or what happened to them, I don’t know. They sent us pictures from England. They were handsome men and when they got to England, they had sent us rubber boots, which were beautiful, and chocolate candy. I can't find any here like that. It was like a candy bar, but it had crispy part inside of it. That was delicious.”

I’d brought home, from my first trip to England in 1991, what I thought my mother had described but she insisted it wasn’t the same. That time in her early childhood offered her very first taste of joy and nothing since could be sweetening to comparison. It was as if anything from those years was magical, almost otherworldly, and could never be duplicated again. I can only imagine the shifting emotion from a life of desolation and destruction to one that offered her very first creature comforts. They were so simple, yet perfect, those articles of clothing or pieces of chocolate. I think my mother begrudges herself any of life’s comforts, partly because of the guilt, but also because she can never again feel such immense satisfaction that comes with the very first experience.

For my mother, all of these places are defined by whatever iconic item she received in a care package or the descriptions in letters written by those who had relocated. She has never left the United States, save for Canada and the Caribbean, since childhood, and to her those places where other families from Lyssenko ended up remain frozen in memory and unchanging by time.

It makes sense that she would hold on to any image or idea from those years, as they were her first happy memories. All my wanderlust is lost on her, and I feel like a criminal, stealing her childhood snapshots of places she’d never visited by informing her of sweeping social change.

“A lot of our best friends, my best friends, my mother's best friends, went to Australia, some went to Brazil, some went to Argentina. But my father wanted to go to America, because from what he knew from the history lessons in school, it was the best country to go to. And because I was the only child, it was easier for us to choose to go to a different country, and my parents were still young and healthy, so we didn’t have problems. But America was the hardest country to get to because we were in British zone, but we used to get coffee, and we used to (barter and) trade it with the Germans because they didn’t have the good coffee. It was chicory, but they liked it, so we never had drank it ourselves. We always used to trade it for clothes or something. At that time, it was very, very good for us, because we could get beautiful clothes for the coffee, and again berries, we used to go pick berries and trade those. And I sang and we had a church, and I sang in a church choir. We had Christmas parties. It was wonderful. We used to go Christmas caroling. It was a wonderful life, you know.”

My mother’s explanation that her parents were selected to come to the U.S. because of their savvy in trading with the Germans in the British zone is lost in her happy memories. She clings to those early years, which are forever idyllic for their simple pleasures. There is an innocence that overrides any ignorance that may stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge how culture has changed with time.

My mother and her parents ended up in New Hampshire, not far from Dartmouth, but still in a community that hadn’t been opened to the wider world. Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, didn’t offer English as Second Language and there was no public assistance available to her family. They had to toil to pay back every penny to the farmer who had sponsored their trip here via Church World Services. They lived without hot water for years, working at multiple manual labor and service jobs around the clock for a pittance of a wage, and saving to have fewer comforts and concessions than those that were available at Lyssenko or through bartering with the Germans. They traveled frequently throughout the Northeast to visit with friends from Lyssenko and to maintain a dispersed community in the absence of the ghettos that allow most immigrants to retain their culture.

“Some of my friends did come to America. One of them lives in Connecticut now. And the others, mostly all of them, live in New Jersey. I went to eleven weddings and I was a bridesmaid. [laughter] But the camp was actually the happiest part of my life at that time, because we didn’t have any cares. And we had food. We had clothes. It didn’t bother us that we slept on cots in just a corner of a room. We were all just happy. People used to go fishing, and they would get fish and we would have parties and stuff like that. My mother's best friend, the ones that went to Australia afterwards, her husband somehow had good luck of catching a lot of fish. One time when it was my birthday, he says ‘this is going be for Luba's birthday’ and he caught so much fish and since we didn’t have a big stove with hot plates, a lot of women, like five or six, were frying that fish. They had a big, big party for me at that time.”

My mother believes it was her 10^th birthday, but the date isn’t a detail that matters.

“That was the best birthday party I ever had and it was the first one I ever remember. And that was very good. There were a lot of people at the table. I don’t know, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, I don’t know. A lot of people. And of course, there was vodka but we kids didn’t drink. [laughter] We didn’t have to.”

It is unsurprising that mother’s happy memories are vivid and retold in great detail. She is not one to repress any memory and the abundance of traumatic ones had to be offset somehow, if only to cope.

In the epilogue of The Brothers Karamazov Book XII, Chapter 14, Alyosha offers life-affirming hope for the next generation when speaking to a group of schoolboys at the funeral of their peer Ilyusha. Memory Eternal (transliterated from Old Church Slavonic as Vechnaya Pamyat) a chant sung at the end of Eastern Orthodox funerals and memorial services is heard in the background. Alyosha epitomizes the ideal human being (or, as my father would have said, a human becoming as humanism is a lifelong pursuit) in a Dostoyevskian universe rife with the conflicts and constraints of faith. Identified at the start of the novel by the narrator as its hero, Alyosha is an exemplar by being open-minded and forgiving. The character is named for Dostoevsky's son who died of an epileptic fit at age 3. 

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.  People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.  If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. "

A Disputed End and a Happy Beginning

“I don’t remember when the war ended,” says my mother. She’s not acknowledging (like most of us) that she forget what she learned in high school history class. For her, the day the Nazis surrendered marks one of many heightened emotions from a traumatic and tortured early childhood. It’s what immediately followed that matters.

But even those who make a career out of documenting such events are at odds over the date.

Nearly seven decades later, historians still dispute precisely when World War II ended in Europe, a tender topic that remains tricky turf for The Associated Press, the breaking news military of journalism where I spent nearly a decade as an editor in the ‘90s and noughts.

Some claim the war ended at the armistice of Aug.14, 1945; others contend it ceased with the formal surrender of Japan on Sept. 2, 1945.

Brooklyn-born Edward Kennedy cut his teeth at newspapers for seven years before he was hired by the AP to work in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., and then assigned overseas. He was in Valencia and Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War, then in Rome to report on Mussolini’s Italy. His storied career includes dispatches from France, Hungary, (what was then known as) Rumania, (the former) Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Algiers.

It wasn’t until May 7, 1945, that he became a historical figure himself when he witnessed the surrender of Nazi Germany in Reims, France. The announcement was embargoed by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, but Kennedy couldn’t get a response from the censors and decided himself to act as the newsman that he was and release the news.

Kennedy’s dedication to his job got him fired, even though he exonerated his reputation by proving that the U.S. military had permitted the Germans to release news of the surrender while maintaining the embargo on the media.

But it wasn’t until last year that the AP apologized to Kennedy, who had been dead for nearly half a century.

“It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way,” said AP president and CEO Tom Curley. Kennedy, he said, “did everything just right.”

Churchill and Truman had secretly agreed to keep mum until the following day, when the Soviet Union would accept the capitulation of German forces in Berlin. The Big Three wanted to stick it to Stalin and announce the end of the war together on May 8, or "Victory in Europe Day.”

The New York Times ran Kennedy’s byline on the May 8 front page, announcing that THE WAR IN EUROPE IS ENDED!

Thankfully there still were newspapers in the 20^th century and Kennedy went on to work as managing editor of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press, and then as associate editor and publisher of the Monterey (Calif.) Peninsula Herald (now the Monterey County Herald) until his death in November 1963.

For my mother, the exact date bears little significance, but the action is life changing – or life beginning.

“After the war ended, we were free to go anywhere,” said my mother. “During the war there was nothing. We didn’t have anything.”

My mother’s story trails back to life before the farm and then she circles back to her journey and arrival at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover or Hannover, Germany. Alexandra Tesluk Gibson, who was born at Lyssenko and is the author of memoir The Ashes of Innocence, has been back to the former camp. My mother, who hasn’t left the U.S, save for short trips to Canada, since 1950, immediately remembered exactly where she lived when I showed her the photos of the barracks that Alexandra had posted. My mother vividly recalled that she and her parents used the second door from the left of the giant building and that a close friend and her family used the first door, which connected from the inside to hers. There were four resident entrances, and the two to the right also connected inside, says my mother.

Even before seeing the photos of the building’s modern day exterior, my mother said: “these were very, very large barracks. In each room -- they were big -- we had four families and each one of us had like a corner. And by that time we were given foods. Certain foods. Rationed foods. And we were also given packages of clothes afterwards, they were sent from America and from England.”

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, my mother shared with me dozens of photos, mostly from Lyssenko.

The authentic laughter re-emerges when my mother recalls “I remember this one package that was sent, and it said it was for a child my age, and I wanted that one even though I think it was a little bit too small for me. (giggles) But it was a beautiful coat, so I wanted the biggest one in the package. (giggles) I still remember that coat. It had some kind of checkered pattern on it and it was red or maroon. But it was quite small on me. I guess I later traded it with someone, but I wore it a couple times.” (giggles)

The photos from Hanover reveal the first signs of living for my mother.

“We had a good time, you know, we were allowed to go to school and we were in a British zone and we were in a Ukrainian camp, but we were not allowed to speak Russian. We had to speak Ukrainian. And that's why now my Ukrainian, Russian and Byelorussian sort of sometimes blends together.”

“The life there was very good. I had friends, I went to school and I even went to a carnival, and went to movies.”