These past few days I have been thinking of my grandmother. No, I never knew her. She died before I was born, in Riga, possibly in the local forest where Jews were shot into an open pit by Nazis, often with the willing help of Latvian collaborators. Or possibly not. Perhaps she died of some dreadful illness in the Riga ghetto. I will never know.
What I do know was that my mother had to leave her in Prague as the Nazis took the city. My mother successfully reached Edinburgh on a domestic visa and then came to London, not knowing what would happen to family in Prague. She spent the war years in London frantically trying to find someone, a protector, anyone who could offer her mother a visa to come here as a dressmaker, an ironer, a domestic servant, anything. She did not succeed.
Much later I discovered letters from her mother in which she pleads for help to come to Britain, to do anything, anything at all, and in those letters, despite the anguish, there is also a touch of eternal optimism, some sense that “one day we will be together again”, something drawn deep from within the soul, a knowledge, an awareness that the bonds of family can never be broken, even by the vilest dictator, even at the point of death itself.
And so, these past days I have been thinking of my grandmother. The reason, of course, is because we are seeing today, in 21st century Europe, those same bonds, of family, of country, of self-determination and national independence, being threatened once again by a dictator; not this time by Hitler, but by someone equally megalomaniac, driven by reactionary imaginings that the chains – because that’s what they were – of a past Soviet imperialism are worth strangling an independent country for and forcing it to fight to the point of death.
I have been thinking of my grandmother because I am watching these courageous older women, urging their daughters to leave Ukraine with their young children, urging them, with as great a courage as the men who take up arms, because they know they, themselves, will remain there in their own villages and cities suddenly grown cold and old with the unexpected terror of war.
Women like the Ukrainian journalist who took her four year old child on the train to Poland or Moldova, who could not think about the emotion of leaving behind the mother she might never see again. Because that was just too painful to contemplate. She would think about that late in the night and would not sleep. Among those crowding the stations with dazed children clutching a favourite toy to take with them to “somewhere safe”, were young tearful women already on the waiting trains, with the imprint on the window of their husband’s farewell.
I am so grateful that my mother survived and could describe her adventures in London, so cheerfully that my younger self could not read between the lines. It was only after her death, when I discovered the exchange of letters between her mother and herself, that I really began to think about what it is to leave. What is the nature of home, a concept we all take for granted once we close the front door, take off our shoes, sigh and put the kettle on to make a cup of tea.
The brave Ukrainians, who were doing just that only weeks ago, are now facing what my mother and her mother and so many others had to do all those years ago. The one who leaves and the one who is left behind, each vainly hoping and pretending that one day they will open their own front door again and hold their long-lost loved ones close. That nothing terrible lasts forever and nothing will irrevocably change. That they will carry their name and their identity back home.
These past few days I have been thinking of my grandmother. Her name was Irma Kien.
