Tag: Horrors Of War

Grave of the Fireflies

By Amit Sengupta

My father had been killed, that I knew… My brother was dead. And to die or not die no longer had any significance for me. I only pitied my mama. She had instantly turned from a beauty into an old woman, very embittered by her lot. She couldn’t live without my papa.
“Why are you going to the war?” She asked.
“To avenge papa.”
“Papa wouldn’t stand seeing you with a rifle.”
My papa used to do my braids when I was little. Tied the ribbons. He liked beautiful clothes more than mama did….
– The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, Svetlana Alexievich has lived most of her life in Soviet Union, and Belarus – now the neighbour of Ukraine, run by a ruthless dictator, a buddy of Vladimir Putin. This book is her tribute to the thousands of young girls, some still in school, daughters beloveds, mothers and sisters, who fought the Nazis in the front and at the barricades, many of them dead, many of them survivors and alive, their minds, bodies and souls, scarred, ravaged by the apocalyptic war.

Alexievich grew up surrounded by the tragic bravery of these women. And their memories, stated, unstated, suppressed, crushed.

Many women could never be able to love – thereafter. Many never found love, because male machismo just could not reconcile with such incredible courage in women. Many suspected the purity of their character, once they returned from the battlefield, wounded in body and spirit. Indeed, some men can never change their spots.

The writer spent years creating an original non-fiction genre, documenting painstakingly the invisible stories of these remarkable Soviet women – tank drivers, snipers, pilots, captains, soldiers, nurses, doctors. Many of them just could not speak. Their lips were sealed. Others found the anti-catharsis of an avalanche of angst, after pouring it all out, even relief and optimism. A certain lightness of the soul. Perhaps.

Among these women were amazingly brave young girls and women from all over Soviet Russia, including Ukraine. Their shared memories and nightmares remain etched in their consciousness. War separates, but also unites. This solidarity, amid daily death and dying, and the bestiality of men, could never be forgotten.

Six million Jews were murdered in the Nazi labour and concentration camps in the heart of Europe. More than 20 million Russians died to protect their motherland, and to liberate Berlin. The Nazis were not defeated by the Western allies. They were finally defeated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union, despite the endless siege of Leningrad and Stalingrad – and  how can we forget the infinite resilience and sacrifices of the people of Soviet Russia, which included Ukraine?

Were they not the same people with intense bonds of passion shared for their country? Did they not read Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekov, Nicolai Gogol? Were they not deeply moved by Maxim Gorky’s epic – Mother? Did they not get transfixed by the exquisite movements of the Ballet, its sublime music crafted by great composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky of the Romantic era?

Can anyone ever forget the Swan Lake, after being totally captivated by its intense beauty in the darkness? Or, The Sleeping Beauty? Did they not watch, or aspire to watch, the magical opera at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, steeped in history, with its neo-classical columns? I have seen it in Moscow – it was hypnotic.

Now, will Ukraine ban Tchaikovsky, as angry nationalism and anti-Russia hate overtakes the nation? Will they burn Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Will they disown Mother and Crime and Punishment?

Now, in this endless, meaningless, botched-up war, the children of the great fighters against fascism, have no choice but to kill each other. In tens of thousands – no one knows the count of the dead in Russia and Ukraine. Russia had to hire mercenaries and recruit criminals from prisons, because so many of their young had died in this so-called ‘military operation’, while many others have chosen exile, escaping the brutality of this mindless war machine.

Putin seems unaffected, his face motionless, as if on steroids. Now, first time in the history of the post-war, Cold War world, America has aligned with Russia, even at the UN, something unprecedented. Donald Trump has called Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, a Western ally, a “dictator”. Now he wants the rich mineral resources of Ukraine, in lieu for all the arms pumped in by Joe Biden, in the same manner that he wants to convert a ravaged Gaza into a real estate Riviera, a kind of Trumpesque/Kafkasque La La Land  – after forcibly evacuating 2 million Palestinians from their homeland.

In any case, Ukraine, a big producer of wheat and known as the ‘bread basket’ of Europe, has been integrated into the multinational agribusiness of corporates like Monsanto. Now, Trump might want the wheat too.

Besides, Trump has polarized Europe, again, for the first time. He seems to have dumped Western Europe for the time being to align with Putin, thereby pushing Ukraine and the EU to the brink. European powers, like Germany and France, are already calling for a big rise in defense budgets, knowing the fickle character of Trump.

In any case, Putin went to war because Ukraine was being roped into NATO, hence drastically disturbing the geo-political scenario in the region, and directly endangering the security of Russia. Surely, he could have chosen diplomacy and hard dialogue, instead of manslaughter on both sides of the border. Besides, it remains a mystery as to why Trump is so besotted by Putin, finds no trace of a dictator in him, even while miscellaneous conspiracy theories float in the grapevine.

ALSO READ: Putin Has Blood On His Face

In the end, even as Neo-Nazis and the extreme Right seem to be gaining ground in many parts of Europe, and one of them with his Heil Hitler salute is now the closest advisor to Trump in the US, there is bound to be a paradigm shift in the days to come. While war is always used by the West to boost a sinking economy, how far the arms industry will call the shots in the Trump era, will remain to be discovered.

However, let us not forget the tens of thousands butchered in Gaza, including young women, mothers and kids, in what seems to a deliberate strategy to stop a new generation to take birth in Palestine. Sounds like the Holocaust and Nazi genetics, is it?

Will the drumbeats of war ever end? Will the simmering pain ever become a faint memory? Will the vast ocean of loss and suffering inflicted by war ever be over in this world which claims to be civilised and modern?

I listen to Joan Baez, yet again. Because this song, too, will never die.

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
They are all in uniform
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone with flowers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Theatre Of Horror In Ukraine

By Amit Sengupta

We took prisoners, brought them to the detachment… We didn’t shoot them, that was too easy a death for them; we stuck them with ramrods like pigs, we cut them to pieces. I went to look at it… I waited a long time for the moment when their eyes would begin to burst from pain… The pupils… What do you know about it! They burned my mother and little sisters on a bonfire in the middle of our village…

— Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War

This is her first book. Exiled and hounded in Soviet Russia, this Noble-prize winning journalist has lived most of her life out there and in Belarus, currently ruled by another dictator, Vladimir Putin’s war-mongering buddy. Surrounded by women who fought the bloody battles in the Second World War against the marauding fascists of Adolf Hitler, the journalist documented the lives and times of scores of Soviet women: snipers, nurses, doctors, tank drivers, captains, soldiers, mothers and sisters and daughters who were at the front.

She quotes Osip Mandelstam: Millions of the cheaply killed / Have trod the path in darkness…

She writes, with deep sadness, borne out of the history of her own ravaged land which defeated the fascists: ‘‘During World War II, the world was witness to a women’s phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world: 225,000 in the British army, 450,000 to 500,000 in the American, 500,000 in German… About a million women fought in the Soviet army…

Svetlana writes in the second chapter, A Human Being is Greater than War: “The children of the victors. What is the first thing I remember about the war…? My childhood anguish amid the incomprehensible and frightening words. The war was remembered all the time: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, at celebrations and wakes. Even in children’s conversations. The neighbour’s boy once asked me: ‘What do people do under the ground…? How do they live there…?’ We too, wanted to unravel the mystery of war… It was then that I began to think about death…”

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, painted with the immense intensity of immaculate pain, in the backdrop of bombings and the Holocaust, has been resurrected yet again in our own special distances of angst and anger, as Ukraine fights back, and it is indeed fighting back with its back to the wall, and the Russians know it, especially the detached, dehumanized, dictator in Moscow, who seems to have learnt no lessons from the Nazi barbarism in his own beloved homeland which sacrificed more than 20 million fighting people in the war, as the Red Army conquered Berlin and Hitler committed suicide.

Other memories of immaculate insomnia are creeping back, as real time war stories, as Kiev holds on, children die, run for their lives, and more than 1 million Ukrainians are turned refugees in a senseless war which Russians do not support and which even Putin seems to have no clue about.

Is he thinking of Adolf these days in his hallucinations of becoming Peter the Great, the Tzar of the erstwhile Russian empire, the immortal King of Kremlin? Isolated by the world, his banks and economy squeezed out, his own people hating him, and even China fudging its bets since it has huge stakes in western and global economy, this suicidal shadow he has willfully cast upon himself, seems so historically familiar. Indeed, this could be the last hurrah for Tsar Putin, with his personally stocked up billions in hidden accounts and the many luxury yachts and dachas at stake, seemingly appearing like dust in a desert.

An Indian student walks across and is shot. Others somehow escape to the border, helpless at the various check posts. Ukrainians hugging each other, as if for the last time, lovers and beloveds, mothers and daughters, soldiers, young and old. Women learning how to operate the famous Kalashnikov. A world boxing champion picks up the gun. A tennis player builds up a solidarity network while playing in Mexico. A former beauty queen joins the barricades.

ALSO READ: Will Putin Dismember Ukraine?

And along with their gutsy president, in fatigue, no more a comic artist of great excellence, but a soldier leading from the front, refusing to run, becoming a democratic role model when compared to a totalitarian Putin.

How many Russian soldiers have been killed so far, and how many wounded in this mindless, meaningless war, is a conjecture not even Putin can solve. Now, it is being revealed that they did not even know why they were fighting the war in the first instance: surely, this is no war against fascism! And will Putin be able to eliminate the truth even as he bans all national and international media telling the bitter stories in Ukraine and Russia?

How many Ukrainian civilians, kids and soldiers, have been killed so far in this nasty war, and how many wounded? The death count multiplies, as the brave shed their blood on the barricades and on the streets. Russian soldiers giving tea, sharing love and compassion with the captured Ukrainian soldiers. Talk to your mother, a young Russian woman soldier tells her neighbour. Tell her, you are safe, that you will be back in the warmth of your cosy home in this cruel winter once again. Tell her, mother, dear mother, don’t you worry, I am with old friends, and they speak our language, like we speak theirs, and we share the same history, mother, and we know so well the difficult childhood memories of war!

The Guardian in London reports that Otaci is border town in the poorest country in Europe: Moldova. It is located on the opposite of river Dniester, across the city of Mohyliv-Podlsky in Ukraine, as a friendly town next door. A bridge links the two.  There are other old, cherished, shared bonds too.

So, the people of Otaci, like the people of all border towns, have stood up like a rock to reach out to the people of Ukraine. They are providing them with warm food, warm shelter, internet and free onward travel in cars and taxis across other destinations in Europe. ‘‘Where is your wife,’’ asks a volunteer in Otaci. ‘‘She is across the bridge.’’ “Don’t you worry”, tells the volunteer, “she will make it.”

UN news reports that amid dwindling food supplies in embattled areas in Ukraine, the conflict could have devastating consequences beyond the country.  It has reported that an unpreceded number of traumatized people are desperately leaving the besieged country in ruins, being bombed out from all sides, but still holding ground with millions staying back and refusing to move, fighting it out till death must come, if it must come at all!

Heavy fighting is being reported from the nuclear plant in Ukraine. Radiation levels are normal and the facility’s cooling system has had no impact, a senior political affairs official of the UN told the Security Council in an emergency meeting. Now, this Putin’s war, is turning into a deadly theatre of the absurd.

The concluding chapter of Svetlana Alexievich’s book tells the story of Ukraine as it dies to live. It is called, ‘Suddenly we wanted to desperately to live’. She writes:

It was Stalingrad… The most terrible battles. The most, most terrible. My precious one… There can’t be one heart for hatred and another for love. We have only one, and I always thought about how to save my heart… For a long time after the war I was afraid of the sky, never of raising my head towards the sky. I was afraid of seeing plowed-up earth. But the rooks already walked calmly over it. The birds quickly forgot the war…

The question is, will Europe and the world forget this one-dimensional war in the days to come? Will all the children come back home yet again? Will the dew-soaked birds choose to fly in the dawn, tweeting, across the black sky, ravaged by a mindless war?

Yes, they will.