Oddball
04-26-2005, 06:41 PM
Real life horrors from a lost soul
A Sheffield writer has drawn on tales she was told at her father's knee for her latest novel which explores how wartime horrors of long ago live on to affect the present. Danuta Reah talked to Michael Hickling
"For breakfast - grass . For lunch - grass . For dinner - grass ..."
These words survive on a torn-out page from a school exercise book. They were written by Jan Kot and might just as easily have come out of the pages of Dr Zhivago. Jan was writing about his childhood in the early days of the Soviet Union. As the chaos which the Bolsheviks had unleashed swirled about them, Jan, then aged five, his ten-year-old brother Michael and their mother were trying to make their way back by train to the family's home near Minsk.
The engine for the train had no fuel. Red guards regularly ordered the starving passengers to get off to gather wood. Hunting for sticks, the brothers came across a huge mushroom which they took back to their mother. She made some soup but, despite the big eyes they made at her, she would not let them have any until the following day after she had tasted it and found it to be safe.
One reason why the family survived the journey was the helpfulness of a fellow passenger. He was a former admiral in the imperial navy who had lost a leg in the Russians' disastrous defeat to the Japanese at Tshushima in 1905. For the train journey the admiral had taken the precaution of filling his artificial leg with gold roubles.
These fragments of a life, put down by Jan Kot when he was an elderly man, were written with a single purpose, "only to relieve this scream in my mind," he wrote. After what he had been through, he nursed, he confessed, "a constant feeling of sorrow for my beloved country."
The story of his country is full of blood. The territory of Byelorussia (now Belarus) is perhaps the most tragic, or the most unlucky, in Europe. It has been endlessly disputed and fought over by Slavs, Tatars, Lithuanians, Poles and Russians. In 1921 the country was divided: half went to Poland and the rest to the Russian Bolsheviks. They were bent on smashing its culture and independence and executed thousands of people, often in the forests outside Minsk.
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=1472&ArticleID=979452
A Sheffield writer has drawn on tales she was told at her father's knee for her latest novel which explores how wartime horrors of long ago live on to affect the present. Danuta Reah talked to Michael Hickling
"For breakfast - grass . For lunch - grass . For dinner - grass ..."
These words survive on a torn-out page from a school exercise book. They were written by Jan Kot and might just as easily have come out of the pages of Dr Zhivago. Jan was writing about his childhood in the early days of the Soviet Union. As the chaos which the Bolsheviks had unleashed swirled about them, Jan, then aged five, his ten-year-old brother Michael and their mother were trying to make their way back by train to the family's home near Minsk.
The engine for the train had no fuel. Red guards regularly ordered the starving passengers to get off to gather wood. Hunting for sticks, the brothers came across a huge mushroom which they took back to their mother. She made some soup but, despite the big eyes they made at her, she would not let them have any until the following day after she had tasted it and found it to be safe.
One reason why the family survived the journey was the helpfulness of a fellow passenger. He was a former admiral in the imperial navy who had lost a leg in the Russians' disastrous defeat to the Japanese at Tshushima in 1905. For the train journey the admiral had taken the precaution of filling his artificial leg with gold roubles.
These fragments of a life, put down by Jan Kot when he was an elderly man, were written with a single purpose, "only to relieve this scream in my mind," he wrote. After what he had been through, he nursed, he confessed, "a constant feeling of sorrow for my beloved country."
The story of his country is full of blood. The territory of Byelorussia (now Belarus) is perhaps the most tragic, or the most unlucky, in Europe. It has been endlessly disputed and fought over by Slavs, Tatars, Lithuanians, Poles and Russians. In 1921 the country was divided: half went to Poland and the rest to the Russian Bolsheviks. They were bent on smashing its culture and independence and executed thousands of people, often in the forests outside Minsk.
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=1472&ArticleID=979452