Ilya Kaminsky: “We Lived Happily during the War, and when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough.”
On the second day of the war, New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks took a photograph outside of Kharkiv. Except for a bit of the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag on the right edge, the image consists entirely of shades of black and white. The sky is a somber gray, and in the upper left, thick feathery snowflakes drift in front of a distant billboard, two street light standards, a lone traffic light suspended above an empty road, and a few bare trees. With a new layer of snow covering the flat landscape, the scene could easily be mistaken for the outskirts of a small, quiet Minnesota town in January.
Except for the stalled Russian military vehicle, its gun turret vacant, its tank-like tracks still, the rear doors swung away from the empty darkness inside.
And if not for the dead Russian soldier sprawled out on the snow in the foreground.
He lays on his back, the dark treaded sole of his right boot turned toward the photographer, snow filling the creases in his pants and coat, his right arm thrust back, and his face indistinguishable and obscured by his rumpled snow-covered clothes. While I can’t help feeling that this faceless invader got what he deserved, I also wonder if he thought he was doing right, if his family will ever know what’s become of him, and if he was anything like Szilard, a kind, diligent Russian student who enrolled in one of my classes in Pennsylvania and often stopped by my office to chat and practice his English.
Three days after Hicks took this photo, a Russian missile targeting a TV tower just outside of Kyiv killed five civilians and damaged the site of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial. This is where, in 1941-1943, Nazis murdered upwards of 100,000 Jews, Roma, Russian prisoners of war, and Ukrainian civilians, usually by lining them up on a ledge high above the ravine and shooting them with a machine gun, their bodies plummeting into a mass grave. The horrific history of this place is documented by Anatoly Kuznetsov in his memoir Babi Yar, a book I’d first read years ago as an undergrad and now felt driven to reread in light of the Russian assault on Kyiv. And not only do events Kuznetsov relates echo current news reports but his conclusions are naggingly similar. What Ukrainian President Zelensky tweeted after that missile attack, “History repeating,” echoes what Kuznetsov wrote after World War II: “It is imperative that we understand ourselves, that we know where we came from, where we are and what we are — if only to keep us from repeating these tragic events” (298). In the face of Putin’s unprovoked aggression and the suffering and displacement of millions of people, this is one small thing I can do: try to understand ourselves and our past. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Unfortunately, all across the U.S., parents, school board members, and legislators are vilifying and legislating against exactly this sort of self-awareness. In early January of this year the McMinn County school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to eliminate from the curriculum Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir about his father surviving the Holocaust. The story is related in comic-book form — Jews portrayed as mice, Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, and Poles as pigs — which makes both story and history memorable, moving, and accessible to a wide audience. However, school boards argue that they’re protecting children from indoctrination and harmful material that’s not age-appropriate and that Maus and other books — such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, Bless Me Ultima, Slaughterhouse Five, 1984, The Kite Runner, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc. — should be banned because, as a Texas legislator recently argued, they provoke in young people “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.”
Aside from ensuring that students feel nothing but happiness and self-satisfaction, the objective of book-banning and all types of censorship is to prevent children and adults from understanding themselves, where they’ve come from, and what other human beings exactly like them have suffered and/or inflicted on others. Banning books is among the most direct, insidious, and dangerous methods of promoting that sort of ignorance. And with ignorance comes our inability to recognize the parallels between events of 2022 and those of 1939, between the assaults on non-violent protestors in U.S. cities after George Floyd’s murder and on non-violent anti-war protestors in Russian cities, between the way we deal with our Confederate past and the way Germany deals with their Nazi past, between refugees arriving at our southern border and those streaming across European borders, and between the control of information by the Russian government and the restrictions on information and ideas in U.S. schools, colleges, and universities. When those in power legislate ignorance through book banning and censorship or encourage it through coercion and flattery (think Trump’s vacuous fawning, “I love the uneducated”), they’re prodding people to allow themselves to be manipulated and controlled. And when those non-violent methods of control don’t work, violence follows. This, too, suggests something I can do: work against ignorance, my own and that of others.
On the fourteenth day of the war, I sat in the kitchen near the fireplace where blue and yellow flames danced and flickered. I sipped coffee from a red cup, the floor groaning and the ductwork creaking as the furnace drove off the overnight cold. Snowflakes drifted past the kitchen window. In the middle of the frozen yard and below the bare limbs of an ash tree, sparrows, finches, juncos, and a nuthatch pecked at bird seed in a pan hanging from a shepherd’s hook.
Across the street, the neighbor boys, both wearing glasses — Max, taller and pigeon-toed, and Sam, wiry and zipping his green coat — trudged out of the garage and down the driveway. A school bus pulled up out front, and the stop sign, ringed with flashing red lights, unfolded from the side. Beyond the middle-aged man sitting behind the steering wheel, the bi-fold door slid open. I watched the space under the bus where first Sam’s feet and then Max’s appeared in the gutter and stepped up inside. Behind the tinted windows, their silhouettes moved down the aisle; the door closed, the sign stopped flashing and swung back, and the bus pulled away. Here, life goes on in all its mundane normalcy — no artillery, no gunfire, no scurrying into the basement for shelter, no snow-covered bodies in the streets.
I carried my coffee to the living room and sat in the brown armchair opposite the windows facing Max and Sam’s house. On my laptop, I opened the large document where, for several years now, I’ve been adding details to the history of my family, all of whom originated in Germany. In this small way I’ve tried to overcome my own ignorance, a struggle that’s led me down unexpected paths. I’ve wondered about descendants who, after my great grandparents crossed the Atlantic, remained behind and about their fates in the violent events of the twentieth century. I’ve wondered about the families of my grandmothers, both paternal and maternal, who originated in northeast Germany around Demin, where near the end of WWII hundreds of residents committed suicide as the Soviet army approached from the east. And I’ve wondered if any relatives of my parents’ generation were complicit even in small ways in the crimes of the Third Reich.
This looking, sifting, wondering has often sent me sideways off the beaten path to maps of small German towns; to the website of a German veterinarian who lives near where my great grandpa Juergen was raised and whose last name is also Koch; and to Nora Krug’s memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, a collage of drawings, artifacts, and handwritten anecdotes and discoveries. And it’s sent me back for a fourth time to Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, a thin book of narrative poems. The first poem, “We Lived Happily during the War,” ends with lines that are tragically relevant and seem directed at me, at us: “And when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough.”
One month into the war, President Zelensky sent out this plea for support: “Stand against the war starting from March 24, exactly one month after the Russian invasion. From this day and after that, show your standing, come from your offices, your homes, your schools and universities, come in the name of peace, come with Ukrainian symbols to support Ukraine.”
It’s a small thing, and I know it’s not enough, but at least it’s something I can do.
