Kitabı oku: «Our Others», sayfa 3

P.S.

“Hello! Olesya?”

“Yes, Jasim, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“Happy New Year!”

“Thank you, to you too. But are you really calling me from Ukraine? I read in the European press that all the Meskhetian Turks were taken off to Turkey.”

“Not at all, Olesya. Who wants to go there? Maybe they did take someone, but we’re here. We’re here.”

© Olesya Yaremchuk

THE ISLAND OF GAMMALSVENSKBY

Maria sits down on a bench and lets out a deep sigh. “Come sit, Olesya dear. My legs hurt.”

A walker that Maria uses to move around the yard stands by the bench. If she walks further—for instance, to the church, or the Kirche, as they say here—she hobbles with a cane. Or her neighbor Jon Börje walks her. Before us, right beyond the fence, I can see the Dnipro River: a low whitewashed house, a plowed vegetable garden, then past them endless water. It’s as if we’re on an island. This is one of those spots in the world that’s hard to reach but worth the visit: A road full of potholes, the bus that runs once in never. The village of Zmiyivka is hidden away a hundred kilometers from the city of Kherson, tucked into a corner of the oblast bearing the same name.

Maria Malmas is Swedish. Her ancestors moved here in 1782 from the island of Dagö, now Hiiumaa, which once belonged to Sweden and now belongs to Estonia. The Russian Empire occupied the eastern portion of the Baltics, formalizing its ownership of several islands in 1721 with the Treaty of Nystad. Simultaneously, it took possession of the lands of present-day southern Ukraine, which it had won back from the Turks. That’s when Catherine the Great ordered the resettlement of the Swedes, who were perpetually arguing with their Russian landowners. Actually, the Swedes made this request themselves in an official appeal. They were sent to the south of Ukraine, to cultivate the land. More than one thousand people set off on the difficult journey almost three thousand kilometers long. Fewer than five hundred of them made it across the Ukrainian steppes to their destination. The Swedes founded a settlement and called it Gammalsvenskby—that is, Staroshvedske, or the “Old Swedish Village” in Ukrainian.

Noll: Zero

Today Zmiyivka, which united the four smaller villages of Gammalsvenskby, Schlangendorf, Mülhhausendorf, and Klosterdorf, is home to Germans, Boikos, Poles, Moldovans, and Finns. A total of fourteen nationalities currently live in this area on a ninety-six-square-kilometer expanse of land.

“When my ancestors arrived, there was nothing here,” says Maria Malmas while I wonder whether I would’ve recognized her as Swedish had I not learned about this beforehand. Probably not: This gray-haired woman in a typical factory-made sweater could’ve easily been Ukrainian.

“They dug out mud huts in the ground and lived in them. Later Potemkin, the Russian general, brought them sheep and cows. That’s how they made do. It wasn’t until later that my grandparents owned horses, oxen, and a threshing machine.”

Before long a church and a library were built in the village. Then in 1804 Gammalsvenskby got some neighbors: Germans arrived from Württemberg and founded the village of Schlangendorf right next door. Both the Swedes and Germans for the most part made a living by growing wheat and tending the land. After the rocky island soil of Dagö, the local soil seemed like a blessing to them.

“My mother Emma was eleven years old but already worked,” Maria continues. “The Swedes took care of their own households; none of them had hired help. Each family had six, eight, sometimes ten children. You’d go and help some family, and then they’d help you. If someone didn’t have seeds for planting, others would chip in a sack apiece so they’d have something to plant. They lived amicably.”

The revolution in the Russian Empire and the years of famine under Bolshevik rule disquieted Sweden, which cared about its emigrants. In 1921 the state officially requested that Moscow allow the residents of Gammalsvenskby to return to their historical homeland. The Kremlin began bargaining, and the Ukrainian Swedes themselves weren’t all that eager to move: Their homes were here, as were the fields they worked. That’s when emissaries from Stockholm traveled to Gammalsvenskby to persuade the Swedes to leave the unstable region.

At a village meeting held in June 1928, the Swedes composed their first collective appeal to emigrate to the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR. The document was signed by 492 residents. Three representatives submitted it to the administration of the republic in Kharkiv. The Swedes identified the inadequacy of the Soviet Union’s nationality policy as the main justification for emigrating: “We remind you that Staroshvedske is the only Swedish colony in the USSR. Lately, we have grown troubled by the fact that our children can’t obtain the education we desire for them in their native language. At first glance, the Soviet administration appears to have granted ethnic minorities the same rights as it has to all other citizens. But it must be conceded that this isn’t the case. We have not received teaching materials in our own language. We haven’t been assigned a teacher qualified to work in the upper grades of the Swedish school. We acknowledge that the overall attitude of the Ukrainian Republic to its ethnic minorities isn’t bad, yet we ourselves must find a solution to this situation. Hence, on behalf of 240 Swedish families, we request your permission to leave Ukraine and return to our native Sweden. We anticipate being issued free passports and a fair appraisal of our houses.”

The negotiations about resettlement lasted a year, and in June 1929 Moscow allowed the Swedes to move. Their visa fees, travel expenses, and food were provided by the Swedish Red Cross. The resettlers passed through customs at the Port of Kherson. They were accompanied by Ukrainian-Swedish and German-Swedish families from their village, who hoped to also be able to leave. But they were turned back: They didn’t have the necessary passports and visas.

Singing psalms, the Swedes boarded the Turkish steamboat Firuzan on July 22, headed for the Romanian port of Constanta.

Ett: One

Relatives and neighbors watched as the vessel unmoored and set sail. Some of the travelers collapsed unconscious. One man died of a heart attack. On their long journey through Central Europe, the settlers were escorted by a Swedish delegation of twelve: Red Cross workers, two doctors, four nurses, and journalists from leading Swedish newspapers.

The resettlers were promised monetary allowances, were given coffee en route, and upon their arrival in Stockholm were welcomed with a meal in a restaurant. Even Prince Carl was among the guests. That’s how they were greeted on Gotland, an island in southern Sweden geographically closest to Dagö and with a comparable climate.

Nonetheless, the Ukrainian Swedes didn’t grow to feel at home in the new place. They arrived on Gotland in the middle of an economic crisis, where they were perceived as immigrants, as strangers. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s propaganda persuading them to return didn’t abate. “You ask if you’ll own pigs and chickens. Of course, you’ll own them if you buy them for yourselves,” noted an announcement of the working committee on matters of the Swedish settlement. “Only cultivated land has been transferred into collective ownership, not houses or gardens. You also inquire about tractors. There are currently twenty tractors in the village. There are even craftsmen who can repair them in the event that they break.”

Not even four months had passed since the Ukrainian Swedes’ arrival on Gotland when, in November 1929, a group of resettlers led by Petter Knutas and Voldemar Utas requested permission from the USSR to return to Ukraine. They diplomatically identified the reason behind their decision as unfavorable climate conditions. The colonists admitted that they’d previously written a similar letter in September, but their request had been denied. They agreed to join the neighboring German village council and, to play it safe, added: “We have nothing against collectivization and promise to support all measures of the Soviet government.”

The Swedes moved back. Unfortunately, their move became a gift for the Soviet propagandists: They used this case as a demonstrative lesson for the German colonists, who were also enthusiastically seeking to leave.

In the winter of 1931, the newspaper Radianske Selo announced that “the Swedes returned to Ukraine in order to establish a Chervonoshvedska [Red Swedish] commune.” A week later the village of Staroshvedske had been appropriately renamed, from Old Swedish to Red Swedish.

“My mother, when she returned to what was now Chervonoshvedske, entered school,” Maria Malmas shares. “And then came Stalin’s regime, and both of my grandfathers were taken off to Kherson. There they were told to sign documents that they were kulaks. But they weren’t kulaks because they managed their households on their own!”

In January 1930 Naddniprianska Pravda, the leading newspaper of the Kherson District, announced the transition to mass collectivization and the liquidation of kulaks as a social class. In accordance with a resolution of the Communist Party’s district committee, 100 percent of households were to be collectivized by March 1. “We have less than two months left. Not an hour, not a minute should be ill spent. Our time is up,” the villagers were warned.

The property of Maria Malmas’ grandfathers did get taken away, and in 1932 famine beset the region. The Swedes once more requested permission to leave for Gotland, but this time they didn’t obtain it. Not a trace was left of the goodwill that the Moscow of the 1920s had demonstrated toward the Swedes. The initiators of the new resettlement were expelled from the Communist Party and deported to labor camps.

Två: Two

“And then in 1941 war arrived here,” Maria narrates as the wind blows harder and harder from the river toward her home, forcing us to bundle up more tightly in our clothing. “It was sometime in the fall. Our army was still on the far side of the Dnipro; meanwhile, the Germans were already here.”

The German Wehrmacht occupied the village of Chervonoshvedske, and it changed its name once more, to Altschwedendorf. The Germans destroyed all things Soviet, tore down monuments, and renamed streets. Simultaneously, the Nazis rolled out a program of popularizing Hitler: They distributed posters with his portrait to the Swedes while handing them Volksdeutsche certificates as representatives of the “Nordic race.”

The SS took under their protection the German colonists of Zmiyivka, who were supposed to become the foundation of the future “German home in the East.” As Andrej Kotljarchuk writes in his book In Stalin’s Forge: The Swedish Colonists of Ukraine in the Totalitarian Experiments of the Twentieth Century, all the ethnic Germans in Ukraine were entered in a special register, Volksliste Ukraine. The father of Gustav, Maria’s neighbor and friend, was on that list too. Today Gustav is hard of hearing and speaks little, but smiles at me sincerely nonetheless.

The Nazis decreed that the German colony was to be cleansed in accordance with their racial and ideological criteria. From September to November 1941, under the direction of Paul Zapp and Heinrich Seetzen, thousands of peaceful residents in the area of Staroshvedske were killed. The only Jewish family in the village, that of the tailor Yankel, was also shot. The aforementioned Petter Utas was arrested along with other communists. Soviet activists were accused of collaborating with the NKVD, the secret police, and shot outside the village. The Nazis forbade burying the dead: For a whole week their corpses lay on roadsides.

“As the Germans were coming, my mother noticed that the phrase ‘Gott mit uns,’ ‘God with us,’ was inscribed on the soldiers’ belts,” Emil Nurberg, a local, remembers. “At the time she said that maybe the Germans were a good people if they believed in God. Who knew they’d turn out to be such devils?”

In October 1943 the residents of the Swedish colony were evacuated to Germany as part of an SS special operation to relocate Black Sea Germans.

“The Germans were herding everyone out of the village; they were taking everyone. I was six years old at the time,” notes Maria Malmas. “They drove a horse cart up to our gate and said, ‘Pack up.’ But my mother had five children! I’m from 1937, then came Ania, Alla, Elza, and Vania. Vania was all of six weeks old. My mother didn’t want to go, but a German soldier said to her, ‘I know what to do with you. Do you think I don’t mind wasting a bullet?’ And he put his pistol to her head.”

Her grandmother was yelling, “Emma, snap out of it, let’s go, let’s go.” At a run she tossed pillows, a duvet, a sack with a little flour, and some sugar onto the horse cart. That’s how they loaded everyone up, but because there was no room left for Maria, the oldest, she and her grandma walked on foot, holding hands.

“Someone was constantly crying in that brychka: One kid was hungry, another one thirsty. But these were small children!” shares Maria. “We headed to western Ukraine, to Kovel. We waited there for a long time: It had begun snowing already, and it was cold. Whenever we would stop, my mother would feed us: A little water, a little sugar, and you’d have a Swedish petzel, a burnt sugar lollipop. The children would beg, ‘Petze, petze!’ She’d make a fire and do it on some scrap of iron. It’s hard to describe: You just have to see it.”

Next the family was put on a train to Poland and from there to Germany. A “racial purity checkup” awaited them upon their arrival. Its results determined how the new arrivals would be divided: some to the labor camps, some to the valley of the Polish river Warta where a new colony was supposed to be established, some to other settlements.

“We lived in the village of Walbeck,” Maria recalls. “It was already there that Vania began to walk. We were given a hovel of a home. My mother worked for a bauer planting carrots, and my grandma worked in the steppe. Later I started school, and Grandma, who already knew German, would help me. And I began to speak German! After all, there had been Germans in our Zmiyivka too.”

They seemed to settle in in the German land of Sachsen-Anhalt. But once the war ended, the Swedish family was sent back.

Tre: Three

“They told us that it was time to go home. Once again we boarded a train, and we ended up in the north.”

“In the north of Ukraine?” I ask.

“Oh, no, in Vorkuta!” the elderly woman replies. “We’d ‘given up our Family,’ as they said—our motherland—and had been in Germany. We were traitors. We thought they were taking us to Ukraine, but they took us to the north. In Germany we had walked around in simple slip-on shoes, but we arrived up there and it was almost minus fifty degrees. It was freezing. They packed us into these long barracks.”

The Kherson Swedes, like the Volksdeutsche, were sent the GULAG in Komi in the far north of Russia. The NKVD officers were given an assignment: “to transform those with questionable loyalty into conscious builders of a socialist society.”

The Swedes were sentenced to ten years.

Andrej Kotljarchuk captures Emma Malmas’—Maria’s mother’s—memories of these events: “When we arrived in Komi, it was minus fifty degrees. We were all lightly dressed; the children didn’t have any winter clothing. I realized that my children were supposed to die here. We all lived in mud dugouts, like the other prisoners. The earnings from a typical day’s work would buy you only one kilo of bread. Children and the elderly received coupons for three hundred grams of bread a day, but it wasn’t even real. When I gave it to my children for the first time, my son spit it out with the words, ‘Mama, what is this?’”

Over the course of the first winter in Komi, Emma Malmas lost two children. Elza died three weeks after their arrival. Her death certificate simply notes “Asthenia,” namely, abnormal physical weakness or lack of energy. Six-year-old Anna died in April 1946 as a result of tuberculosis. The other children—Maria, Alla, and Ivan, or Vania—were lucky enough to survive.

Emma worked at the logging camp, like all the Swedish women, since the men had been taken off to the war. When people from the Swedish crew were being chosen for the construction of a plywood factory, an engineer walked up to them. This meeting is described in Emma’s words in the book In Stalin’s Forge:

His name was Anderson. He was tall and elegantly dressed. He heard that we were talking in Swedish and said to us, “Hello! You’re what—Swedes?!”

“Yes, we’re Swedes.”

“But why are you here?”

“We don’t know. Sweden wasn’t in the war.”

“You know, this isn’t fair. This is some sort of mistake.”

Maria, Emma’s daughter, recalls, “That Swede was literate. He said, ‘I’ll write to Moscow.’ The police came, reregistered us, and said that we were free.”

Fyra: Four

The family returned to Staroshvedske in 1947. It was there that the second famine began.

“Do you know what a sunflower press cake is, dear Olesya? That’s when sunflowers grow, and then you beat them into a paste, and then these shells are left over and you press them. That’s what we had. Whoever had some would come and share. I had a friend, and she had a father. And whoever had a father, their situation was always better. She would share with me. No one ever gave me a hard time for being Swedish. We all attended school together. There was no quarreling or fighting among us—never! Later we all went off to work together, in the cotton fields. I was eleven or twelve years old.”

The children would be given aprons with pockets full of seeds. They’d walk around the fields and sow seeds, scattering them into little holes.

“And the foreman would stand to the side and watch us so that, God forbid, a child not throw a seed in their mouth!” Maria continues indignantly. “And our mothers would walk behind us and drag the soil with rakes.”

In 1951 Stalin resettled Boikos from western Ukraine to Zmiyivka: The Soviet Union did everything in its power to assimilate nationalities and ethnic minority groups. The newly arrived Boikos hailed from the villages of Berehy Dolishni, Lodyna, and Nanova, which now belong to Poland.

“When the Ukrainians arrived, they too attended school with us,” Maria explains. “I’d talk to them in Ukrainian. At school and in the street, it was Ukrainian, but the minute I crossed the threshold of our home, it was Old Swedish. My mother had a strong accent; you could hear she wasn’t Ukrainian. It was only when my own children were attending school already that she learned the alphabet and taught herself to read.”

The language spoken by the Swedes in Zmiyivka is Old Swedish, which has since been forgotten in their historic motherland. This phenomenon intrigued the king of Sweden, who visited here in 2008. Prior to the arrival of Carl XVI—or, more precisely, Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus—the road was asphalted and the water supply system was repaired. The locals joked at the time, “He should come again. Maybe they’ll install gas lines too!”

“I chatted with him. He wore this very simple suit,” Maria describes, showing me a photograph depicting a stately man and a tall woman in a lilac dress, Queen Silvia. “People from the entire oblast gathered here, expecting that he’d come in regal attire. But he came as an ordinary man. There were still many of us Swedes back then, so we sang songs for him.”

Just ten years ago there were close to a hundred Swedes here, but today only thirteen remain. Despite this, Sweden supports Zmiyivka rather actively: plastic windows in the preschool, neat rooms and toys for the children, renovations and new furniture at the school and nursing home, equipment for the hospital and library, new technology for the language lab, even icons for the Orthodox church—all of it funded by the Swedish government.

Maria Malmas even spent time in Sweden herself on one occasion. Together with her brother, she visited her aunt Alvina in 1975, who had remained there after the resettlement of 1929.

“Aunt Alvina sent us letters of invitation so that we could get visas: Only Vania and I were allowed. The man processing visas in Moscow didn’t know that Swedes lived in Ukraine. He said, ‘You don’t say! But where did you Swedes come from?’ It was fascinating! Aunt Alvina met us in Stockholm, and then we traveled to Gotland, where two of my sisters live. I saw them pregnant then: in short tops, their bellies naked, in some sort of leggings. I was in shock. God, we would cover up our bellies with aprons here—so that no one would see them, so that jealous eyes not harm the baby!” she laughs.

Maria has two children and four grandchildren, who live in Nova Kakhovka, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. Her son offers us food in the kitchen and pours freshly cooked rooster broth. He lets us try Swedish coffee. Their neighbor Jon Börje, who walks Maria to Kirche, brought the coffee from Sweden. There are, incidentally, three churches in the village: Greek Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox. The last one holds services in the building of a Swedish Lutheran Kirche built back in 1786.

Jon Börje himself was born and lived in Malmö in southern Sweden, but a few years ago he decided he needed a change and moved to Ukraine. To my question of why, he replies that he simply enjoys living here. He takes care of his fields and house, and attends mass. He’s very fond of Maria and always sees to things whenever she needs assistance.

The woman doesn’t object. “Everything in my life is fine, dear Olesya, everything is fine,” says eighty-one-year-old Maria Malmas. “It’s just that these legs of mine hurt constantly. They walked to Germany, after all.”