Next Diary
Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip
Victory
Day
Next Diary
Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip
Victory
Day
May 13, 2001
Dear Friends and Family,
We're back much sooner than normal. And today our diary just a few hour walk from last Wednesday. I've been reviewing past diaries and realized that, in the beginning I'd write for single events and that made for smaller but more frequent pieces. Maybe that's both easier to do and easier to receive.
May 9th was Victory Day in Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet Union. It's been quite some time since I remember America celebrating Victory in Europe - or VE Day. We've gone on to fight a "police action" in Korea and lose an unpopular war in Viet Nam so VE Day has been blended with all the others on Memorial Day. In Europe it's different. The memory is more vivid because the war was fought here and tens of millions of neighbors died - soldiers and civilians. My Russian teacher said she knew of no family that was untouched by deaths in World War II. Her mother lost all four brothers. Records of two were found but the other two brothers simply disappeared while serving in the Red Army. No marked grave. No known last location. Virtually no record at all. Stories repeated millions of times.
By the way, do you know why the Western Allies celebrate VE Day on May 8th but May 9th is the day over here? The surrender was effective midnight May 8th - Western European time. It was already May 9th in the Soviet Union so Joseph Stalin decided that, for him and his country, VE Day would be celebrated on the Ninth of May.
Back to us. We started our day with a short ride on trolley bus number 16 to the park at Babi Yar. It was early and a pleasant time for walking. But Babi Yar is not a pleasant place. It was here that the German occupiers pushed hundreds of thousands of Jews, and some other minorities, into a ravine to be buried alive by bodies raining down behind them. The degree of local cooperation with this atrocity is a subject of considerable debate and sensitivity but the fact of such a death scene inside the Kiev city boundaries is a reminder for us all. I took several photos of the official state monument which depicts the death process including the futile struggle to hold a child above the maelstrom. Soviet monumental statues, black and oversized, are always tricky to photograph but this one at Babi Yar was almost impossible to capture. And neither the picture nor the monument itself capture the cries from the filled ravine.
On to Victory. Marianne and I rode the subway straight from Babi Yar to Tolstoy Plaza. We walked a block or two and came to the intersection still referred to as Lenin Square. Easy to remember because Lenin's statue still gazes out over the Square. This morning it was filled with preparations for the Victory Day Parade. There is of course some considerable tradition here to use the flags and banners that are "historically accurate" to the time of the Victory over the Nazis in The Great Patriotic War. Lots of Red and plenty of hammer and sickle emblems.
Without fluency in either Russian or Ukranian - or both -we could not get a sense for the politics of the parade. Even the lady with the placard showing the old Soviet boot stamping out NATO and the IMF could have been interpreted as either a serious expression of anti-West feeling or simply an outrageous caricature.
But even without languages, we could tell that the real purpose of the parade was to honor the men and women of the armed forces. There were groups of officers and servicemen who could remind us only of similar participants in Memorial Day or Fourth of July parades on the other side of the Atlantic. For some, this day of celebration was clearly a half-century tradition connecting them with the people and memories of long ago. For veterans of The Great Patriotic War, wearing medals and ribbons undoubtedly brings with it memories of past suffering and death but also of true heroism in defense of their homeland.
Not just now-old men defended this part of the world. We saw plenty of women wearing well-earned awards and ribbons. One pair greeted each other with the enthusiasm of partners in a shared past. They did this under the gaze of children two or three generations younger. In the spirit of the day, kids like this continued to chant "Thank You" to every veteran group that walked by.
Hammers and sickles. Red flags. Soviet boots. Black and somber monuments to atrocity. These are sobering. Kids in yellow tee-shirts saying thanks and old veterans hugging give the Day perspective.
John and Marianne Trotter
ps: Stay tuned for the announcement of our new (and first) website. I finally got around to making a site and now I just have to figure how to get it mounted on a web server somewhere. I am putting all the past Diaries on it. I kind of feel like we are volunteering for one of those "realty" TV shows. You know, the ones where regular people volunteer to install cameras throughout their house so millions of people can observe how plain and ordinary they are. They can make millions but I haven't figured out that part yet. Any suggestions?
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
Next Diary
Originally emailed May 1, 2001. Formatted for website May 13.
This page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.