| Description |
1 online resource |
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text file rda |
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Digital content provided by hoopla. |
| Summary |
A granddaughter explores the story of her Ukrainian grandmother's survival of Hitler's forced labor camps Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners' household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada. Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina's granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother's story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina's rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of "excessive humanity." This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina's life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us. The relatively unknown story of the Leitz family, the Third Reich's use of Gentile forced labor, and its prisons. It is a life-affirming story of survival, resilience, and the ways World War II continues to influence our present moment. Sasha Colby is a writer, literary historian, performance artist, and director of Simon Fraser University's Graduate Liberal Studies program. She lives in Vancouver, BC. My grandmother's preoccupation with lace has its own history, rooted in a bone-deep belief that lace symbolizes the triumph of civilization over barbarism, beauty over the brutal ugliness of poverty. As one who travelled from the fields of Stalin-starved Ukraine to a forced labour camp in Hitler's Germany, through DP camps to post-war Canada, she would know. Lace is everywhere in my grandmother's house - the curtains, the doilies, the dining room tablecloth. It is meant to be a barrier. As for me - someone who documents 20th century literary history for a living - I spend a lot of time in libraries and archives and similarly quiet, dimly lit places. Coming from a line of women who travelled far, so far, to get where they are, you might ask why I would choose this particular life. I can only speculate that born as I was at the western limit of the western coast, the only place to go was back. I tell you all this because I have become convinced that these movements, like overlapping flight routes in the in-flight magazine of the Boeing 767 that brought my mother and me here, are central to what happened next. All of it: the refugee swell out of the ruins of Europe; the post-war affluence; the restless sense of personal destiny of the sixties and seventies; the more ironic and often less expansive life path forged by my own generation, we strangely acquiescent captives of the millennium, led us to this point: to me among the pickled beets, my mother and grandmother in the kitchen above organizing final details for entertaining the family the following weekend. At the time, I was oblivious to most of this. June, 1942 - Wetzlar, Germany The ground seems to rise and fall in an uncertain rhythm as Irina and the others are ordered out of the train cars and marched to a wire enclosure. In a confined cement area with other young women, Irina is ordered to strip. The girls and women are pushed into a disinfection area, pesticide showers, before before being issued with temporary shift dresses, clogs, and white and blue badges with the letters OST printed in the centre. In a central assembly area, a guard, starched in his tailored uniform, barks sentences in |
| System Details |
Mode of access: World Wide Web. |
| Subject |
Nikifortchuk, Irina.
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Kühn-Leitz, Elsie, 1903-1985.
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Foreign workers, Ukrainian -- Germany -- Biography.
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World War, 1939-1945 -- Women -- Germany -- Biography.
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Ukrainians -- Germany -- Biography.
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Women -- Germany -- Biography.
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World War, 1939-1945 -- Conscript labor -- Germany.
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Electronic books.
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| Added Author |
hoopla digital.
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| ISBN |
9781778522123 (electronic bk.) |
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1778522122 (electronic bk.) |
| Music No. |
MWT15991790 |
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