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World War II - A Soviet Perspective on War & Shame – Sasha Vasilyuk
288 Plays6 months ago
Ep 051 – Fiction. In 1941, a Soviet soldier witnesses Hitler's invasion of the USSR and must cope with its devastating consequences. Sasha Vasilyuk discusses her fantastic new novel, "Your Presence Is Mandatory," based on the real-life story of her grandfather’s experiences during and after the war.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
It's
Introduction: Yifim's Secret Past
00:00:00
Speaker
a story of a World War II veteran named Yifim. He is fighting in the Soviet Army during World War II, and then we see him afterward from World War II until the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
00:00:18
Speaker
He has something to hide about what happened to him during World War II, and he kind of proliferates a myth about what he did. And we find out along the way how different that myth is from reality. And he's forced to hide what happened to him because of Soviet politics.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hi,
Host and Guest Introductions
00:00:51
Speaker
everyone. This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am extremely excited to have on the show Sasha Vasilyuk for her new novel, Your Presence is Mandatory.
00:01:11
Speaker
Sasha was born in the Soviet Crimea and spent her childhood between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to San Francisco at age 13. She has an MA in journalism from NYU and her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, the BBC, the Telegraph, and elsewhere because I had to edit it down because there's so many places you've been published. How are you doing today, Sasha?
00:01:33
Speaker
I am great. I'm about to fly out for my book tour and so I'm excited to start my book tour off with this.
00:01:43
Speaker
That is such a dream, as we were talking about before we started recording. I am writing a book, a novel myself, and it is nice to sit back and think about what my future book tour is going to look like.
Crafting WWII Narratives
00:01:59
Speaker
For me, it seems like such a pipe dream, but you're about to embark on it.
00:02:03
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it seemed like a pipe dream for me also two years ago and and now here I am about to fly literally in two hours I go to the airport and Last night I barely slept because I sure like yes, you're excited But I don't know the anxiety is pretty overwhelming honestly What's the first stop? I'm flying to
00:02:31
Speaker
LA Times Book Festival or Festival Books, I guess it's called in LA. And doing, just hanging out for three days there. And then I go to New York for my actual book launch. Oh, very cool. I always forget, I'm on the East coast. I always forget that California is huge and you can't just like, you know, drive 45 minutes to LA or walk to LA. No. And I live in San Francisco. So, yeah. Well, again, like we were,
00:03:00
Speaker
we were talking about before we started recording, so many reasons why I'm excited that you wrote this book. The novel I'm writing is a World War II novel, which takes place on the Eastern Front, which begins in June 1941, which we'll talk about. And I mean, this is just, there could not have been a book written that resonated more with me. And just so, and I feel like a lot of, I don't know how you feel about
00:03:30
Speaker
World War II fiction right now in general, and that a lot of it is, and this isn't a bad thing, a lot of it is maybe World War II romance or stories that are lean more towards that, although there is romance in your story. But it's not often that I feel like there's a good World War II
00:03:58
Speaker
novel that is a little bit different. And I think yours really did a great job there. So yeah.
00:04:06
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a trend and I wanted to avoid being part of the trend. A trend in historical fiction written by women, written for women, and written typically about women, it's what's been selling. And honestly, that world revolves around that, I think, partly.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I think on the one hand, it's great that there's a lot more fiction written both by women and about women, generally, not just World War II. But I feel like we're almost like leaning too far that way. And I had a big chip on my shoulder. I'm a girl writing about a male soldier, right? Like I'm a girl who's never been to war.
00:04:57
Speaker
And yet I think it's very important. I think it shouldn't be about what are the stories we have to tell and how all these women that we have to resurrect.
00:05:16
Speaker
interesting. It doesn't really matter what gender it is and I think, yeah, leaning toward romance because people buy romance is, I don't know, that's just not how I was thinking about it. Like 50% of all books sold I think are romance books. Right, yeah. And like just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I want to write about romance. I'm interested in other things.
00:05:37
Speaker
Sure. This is also based on a real story and my family. Generally, my first question is, and I got ahead of myself because again, I like this topic, but generally, my first question is just for the audience, can you just tell us what your book is about?
00:05:57
Speaker
Absolutely.
Yifim's Story and Its Impact on Family
00:05:58
Speaker
So it's a story of a World War II veteran named Yifim. He is fighting in the Soviet army during World War II. And then we see him afterward from World War II until the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
00:06:17
Speaker
He has something to hide about what happened to him during World War II, and he kind of proliferates a myth about what he did. And we find out along the way how different that myth is from reality. And he's forced to hide what happened to him because of Soviet politics.
00:06:41
Speaker
they sort of during World War II and afterward Soviet regime really made certain types of people during the war.
00:06:55
Speaker
Basically, they treated them like traitors or even collaborators. And the main character, Ephim, kind of fell into that category. And so he was forced to hide it. So as we go along, the book switches timelines between World War II and the decades after the war. And most of World War II parts take place in Germany.
00:07:22
Speaker
And the post-war parts take place mostly in Ukraine, a little bit in Russia as well. And we see kind of what happens to his family while he's keeping this secret for many decades.
00:07:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's start with maybe some history, because I actually have a lot of questions about your background, because it's really fascinating.
Soviet Army's WWII Position and Challenges
00:07:51
Speaker
But to give everybody some context, so your book starts, chronologically, the furthest back, starts in June 1941 in the Baltics on the eve of the German invasion.
00:08:10
Speaker
which is such a fascinating, I really like that you start, like I said, I've got my book where I'm starting there. And I love those moments to think about just like right before everything changed for the world. And that's like one of those moments. Talk about what the Soviet army was doing in the Baltics right before the Germans invaded, and then talk about what your character has to navigate once the Germans do invade.
00:08:39
Speaker
Absolutely. So there's a lot of debate still currently to this day about whether or not how much Stalin knew about Hitler's plans to invade. And the situation as I portrayed in the book is we have an artillery unit there stationed
00:09:00
Speaker
not on the border but, you know, basically an hour walk from the border in the Baltics. Our main character Ephim is a young soldier, he's 18, and he's very eager to show himself because there's kind of this duality where there's an expectation on the one hand that Hitler will attack, on the other hand, sort of no one believes it.
00:09:28
Speaker
And this is interesting because that was a little bit hard for me to understand when I was researching. I kept wanting a very specific answer. Did Stalin know that Hitler is about to attack? And when exactly? And why wasn't his army as prepared for it as it should have been, which is kind of the big question that remains to this day. Because when Hitler did attack, things did not go well for the Soviet army.
00:09:57
Speaker
And many, many people like in the millions were captured within weeks, days actually in weeks. And so yes, they're stationed on the border and there's kind of this expectation that like they basically won't dare, that everybody knows that the Germans are right there an hour away.
00:10:18
Speaker
And yet, no one can believe it. Who in their right mind would attack the great Soviet Union? So there's all this propaganda that was happening for a long time about that we're this unbeatable army, and even if they attack, we'll just crush them and revert them back.
00:10:38
Speaker
which is basically the opposite of what happened for a while. And it's interesting because, as I was saying, that was hard to navigate for me as a writer, but when we had the very exact same situation between Russia and Ukraine two years ago, and there's all these
00:10:58
Speaker
all these soldiers stationed right on the border and no one believed that they would actually attack. Like Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, on the one hand he expected that they would, on the other hand he was like, they couldn't. There's no way. This is just insane. And I think that's actually very much what was happening in 1941 as well.
00:11:19
Speaker
Now, your main character in the book, who I know is based on your grandfather, is he a soldierly type? Is he happy to be on the front? What kind of character is he? He is excited to be on the front. He has four older brothers who all served in the military and he has something to prove, right? He's just like,
00:11:43
Speaker
young guy, all these, his oldest brother Michael came back with all these, you know, very proud of his service and his mother was very proud of him. And so, so he has something to prove.
00:12:00
Speaker
And he is a little bit – he also – he really believes in kind of the Soviet propaganda and in the might of the Soviet army and he just kind of wants to kick ass. He, just like everyone else, completely underestimates the Germans and the Blitzkrieg that's about to happen.
00:12:20
Speaker
And we see that play out very quickly, which is very reflective of real life. So as I was saying this, the main character Euphemium is based on my grandfather. And my grandfather never talked about the war in real life. The only reason I found out what happened to him during the war was because when he passed away, my family found a letter that he'd written, a confession letter that he had addressed to the KGB.
00:12:51
Speaker
It's a short letter, but it describes kind of where he began the war, what unit, where he was stationed, and then what happened to him in the four years afterward.
00:13:02
Speaker
And when I went to research that unit, that artillery unit, I actually found this handwritten document that that unit basically was captured on day two of the war. I know you said it's loosely based on your family, but that is really incredible to me.
00:13:27
Speaker
And have you ever read the book City of Thieves by David Benioff? Absolutely. I love that book, but I was shocked to find out that his grandparents in that book did not exist. They were not real people. He made them up at the beginning, which is fine. I'm fine with that. But it is very fascinating when these stories have a little bit of truth to them.
00:13:56
Speaker
Talk a little bit more about the real grandfather, Yafim. I don't know if his name is Yafim, but talk a little bit about your grandfather and how he might differ a little bit from the character in your book.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, so my grandfather was this jolly guy. You know your grandparents kind of at a very specific age of their life. They're usually not working anymore. They're kind of happy to hang out with you.
00:14:28
Speaker
Anyways, I knew him as this jolly guy. He made really great lackeys. He lived in Ukraine. And there were a couple of things I knew about his time in the war, one of which was that he had his two fingers, his right hand were
00:14:45
Speaker
damage. So they were missing parts basically. And obviously you don't need to talk about it. I can see it, right? So it wasn't like, I never really asked them about it, but it was this visible mark left from the war. And then he told me like a couple of little tidbits. One, something about eating an onion and then something else about finding when he made it to Berlin at the very end that he found all these German
00:15:14
Speaker
marks lying around on the street because they were worthless. Those are literally the three things I knew about his entire existence there. I think it was very common. I think it's common here as well for that generation to not talk about the war, but it's certainly very common in the Soviet Union.
00:15:33
Speaker
Your grandfather believed died in 2007, is that correct? Yes. So you did have a relationship with him or not really at all? I definitely did. Yeah, I visited him. He and my grandma lived in the Donbass, which is the eastern part of Ukraine.
00:15:52
Speaker
And I never lived there, but I visited every summer when I lived over there like in Russia and Ukraine. And also even when I moved to America, I would fly back and see them. So yes, we definitely had a relationship. But it was something like I just always, it was tacitly understood that I was not to ask about the war.
00:16:13
Speaker
And I really wanted to explore that idea in this book as well like why do we keep things silent and and then what is the price of that on the people who aren't told like on my generation and my parents generation who live in with this with this like next to the silence right.
00:16:33
Speaker
Anyway, but I didn't know anything about what happened to him during the war, except for this letter. The letter is two pages long. It
Family Discoveries and Revelations
00:16:44
Speaker
is written to the KGB, right? So like how much he's making up, I have no idea. It's written 40 years after the war. It's written in the 80s. So he's forgetting things as well.
00:16:56
Speaker
And I'm discovering it in another 30 years. Grandpa is dead and there's no one to ask to verify any of it, right? So yes, the book is very much fictionalized, but the way I worked on it, I would take kind of facts from the letter and leave those as is in most cases when I could, and then research around it and then make up the rest basically. Now, how did, that's great.
00:17:26
Speaker
I love that. How did you find out about this letter?
00:17:31
Speaker
So the letter, we discovered it, I actually described it kind of pretty much how it happened in the book. In the first chapter, we open with the scene of Ephim's funeral and then when his daughter and his wife are cleaning his stuff from the room, they come across this letter and they're like, what's that? And then they start reading it and it completely, it's such a huge shock because they realize that they did not know this man at all.
00:18:00
Speaker
And so in real life, when your family read that letter, what were some of the reactions that your family had? What's interesting is that for the first, I would say several months, my grandma and my aunt did not tell me about this letter. They didn't tell any of the grandkids. They were immediately very ashamed. That was like their first reaction was shock and shame.
00:18:27
Speaker
And shame is a big subject that I explore in the book because our Yevim becomes a prisoner of war pretty quickly in the book. And prisoners of war, unlike in America, were treated very differently in the Soviet Union. It was not a good thing to be.
00:18:48
Speaker
Because sort of the logic behind it is that you spent time with the enemy and even if you were in captain camps or like worked as a forced laborer, it doesn't really matter because you were exposed to the enemy for a prolonged period of time. And so you could have been corrupted, A. And even if you weren't corrupted, you basically set out the war. Like that's how it was always talked about. That's the verbiage that was used.
00:19:18
Speaker
And so you were supposed to be ashamed. And a point just about talking about the conditions of camp prisoners, a point you make in your book, not to give too much away for this book, but a scene earlier on is a scene where you've got Soviet prisoners who are very near to the Western prisoners of war.
00:19:44
Speaker
the French prisoners of war. I don't know if it's English. I think it was French. And you draw a contrast between these two because the conditions are much worse for Soviet prisoners of war than they are for other prisoners of war. Talk a little bit about the history. This was such a terrible period of time where so many tragedies were going on.
00:20:15
Speaker
globally and especially in Europe, obviously the Holocaust. We really don't read too much fiction about Soviet prisoners of war during this time, which I'm really glad that you explored here. Talk a little bit about what it was like to be a Soviet prisoner of war.
00:20:32
Speaker
So Soviet prisoners are war. I also knew nothing about them until I came across this letter and started researching the book. And I think that's very reflective of kind of how forgotten they became. I mean, in the West, nobody knows anything about them whatsoever. But even there, it's just not a subject that's ever covered in any way or talked about. But the stats are
00:21:02
Speaker
horrifying. So 5.7 million Soviet soldiers were captured and more than half of them, so 3.2 were killed. They were killed in various ways. They were put in camps. A lot of them were captured very quickly.
00:21:19
Speaker
And so, you know, partly the Germans maybe weren't prepared for it, but there was definitely documents that show that they deliberately wanted to destroy them. And while they were not typically put in gas chambers, which I think was happening later on in the war anyway, they were killed in other ways.
00:21:42
Speaker
they were starved, like purposefully given very, very low rations. And there's documentation about that, that this was done on purpose. There were diseases that were never treated. And the winter or the fall and winter of 41 was extremely cold.
00:22:02
Speaker
even my grandpa in the short letter to the KGB mentions it. It was just really horribly cold in Europe then and people were just dying from a combination of these diseases. And often, as I have in the book, often the Soviet camps were right next to POW camps from people who were not Soviet.
00:22:24
Speaker
And the conditions were very much different and they could see each other. So the Western POWs would get, the Red Cross would visit them and deliver boxes. They had blankets, they had electricity, they had normal rations, they would play soccer. I mean, just incredibly different. And right next to them, there was this fence and people were just dying by the thousands. They would also, at some point,
00:22:53
Speaker
They just, the Germans just started shooting them. They're not right. And to my character also is Jewish, right? So he is doubly in trouble. They would seek out from just general Soviet POWs, they would seek out Jews and political commissars.
00:23:16
Speaker
And often, another thing that was really shocking for me to discover, often it was their comrades that would give them up, usually for some sort of reward, you know, of bread or of playing something.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yes. Then in about November when Hitler's invasion didn't go as quickly as he hoped, they realized that they now have all these of like millions of people being kept in all these camps and they need help on the home front, they need labor. So in November, by which point tons of people had died, they decided to pick out
00:24:01
Speaker
the capable ones that weren't about to die and use them for labor in factories and farms and all kinds of places in occupied territories. So do you know if your actual grandfather, do you know if that's the journey he took to Germany?
00:24:23
Speaker
Yes, so I based it on, you know, like the letters basically like I was here and then I was there and then I ran away and then I was there.
00:24:33
Speaker
And so I would take all the facts that were in there, I basically took and used them. They were just not very many. I'm wondering, and I've never had the experience of writing about anything like this for my own family. I wonder since this actually happened to your grandfather or large parts of it, most likely happened.
00:24:57
Speaker
I wonder how you felt doing the research and how that changed your understanding of your grandfather.
00:25:05
Speaker
Yeah,
Perceptions and Realities of War Experiences
00:25:06
Speaker
I think my understanding of my grandfather kind of changed as soon as I learned about the letter, I would say, dramatically because I always thought he was this war hero. That was kind of the myth that he propagated that he was this war hero because he was in the war from day one until the very last day, which was very rare.
00:25:31
Speaker
given that Soviet Union lost 27 million people in this war. And then he'd say that he had medals, but they were stolen on the train back. That was kind of the family myth. And when I learned that he was definitely not a war hero, he was
00:25:50
Speaker
captured so early, it immediately changed. I felt so much pity. I felt so much empathy. I felt so much guilt for not letting him open up to us about it.
00:26:08
Speaker
And it was hard for me to understand because I was born in Soviet Union, but it fell apart when I was pretty young. It was very hard for me to understand the feelings behind it, that he must have that internalized shame that you keep for your entire life.
00:26:27
Speaker
But the shame isn't fully inborn. It's sort of given to you by your government. The government is telling you to be ashamed, not like you actually feel bad. But also mixed with PTSD, which of course was not even a word back then, anywhere, but definitely not in Soviet Union.
00:26:51
Speaker
Just all of that mix of emotions is something that I wish I could ask him about, but my only way of processing it was to write a long novel, exploring those feelings.
00:27:08
Speaker
And oh, I was going to also tell you a story, so about kind of the veracity of this book versus not. So at some point, he mentions that he's captured and kept in a camp and I'm desperately trying to find this camp.
00:27:24
Speaker
but this camp does not exist. There's others that have remained, but this camp is if you Google map it, it's like a field and the only remnant of thousands and thousands of people who were kept there is this, there's a forest, this is in Lithuania, a current day Lithuania, and there's a forest and there's a small stone monument that says that a bunch of
00:27:55
Speaker
a bunch of Soviet soldiers are buried there, so that's all. That's all you can find on the Internet. In research, I also didn't find very much about this particular camp. I write almost the entire book and all of a sudden, I'm reading something and I see basically like a footnote that mentions what seems like this camp. It refers to another book that I didn't know about.
00:28:23
Speaker
And I'm like, oh my God, I have to find this other book. Like this is it. This is the main source. And what I'm trying to find out is sort of like, what did this camp look like? Because I lived in Germany and in Poland and I visited sort of like the big concentration camps.
00:28:38
Speaker
But the setup was different here often, and this was in the earlier days of the war, so it was just kind of a different situation. I wanted to be true to the facts, right? So I'm like, okay, this book, I'm going to go find this book. It's written by somebody who was there in this camp and apparently wrote a book.
00:28:55
Speaker
The book is published in German. I find the daughter of this guy who is long dead already, and I try to ask the daughter for this book, and then I discover that I live in San Francisco, right? So I discovered that the original manuscript, like handwritten, basically, manuscript of this book is kept at Stanford.
00:29:15
Speaker
a 45-minute drive from my house. I'm like, oh my God. I got so excited. I set an appointment. It's in the archive library. I set an appointment and on the day that I have to go, there's a torrential downpour that's making news around the country.
00:29:37
Speaker
But I don't care. I am going to that library no matter what if I have to risk my life. I'm driving through literally like a river on the highway, but I make it to the library. I'm going to stop because there's too many crazy details. Anyway, I get to the library, they give me these special gloves because it's an old document. I put them on and I open it and I realized that this guy was in this camp for three days.
00:30:06
Speaker
And he literally just has two paragraphs. He writes about it and that's it. Isn't that, you know, I wanted to strangle him, but, and I realized I'm like, I can't, I can't write a whole chapter base. Like given that this is all the information I have. And so I just, I put, I put my main character in a different kind of camp.
00:30:32
Speaker
And I used only a couple of details, but the one detail that I did get out of this crazy trip that I took to Stanford was that there was no structures in this place. This was a field and it was a very windy field, a sandy field, and it was very rainy because it was fall. And so people slept standing up under the rain.
00:31:00
Speaker
or they dug themselves with their hands a hole in the sand and often they would get buried there. They would fall asleep and just die in the sand. Those are the details that I got from this research.
00:31:20
Speaker
Apparently, my grandfather was in this camp, in this camp with nothing, like a field for four months while this guy was there for three days. I cannot fathom it. I cannot imagine how one survives such a thing for four days. Four, sorry, four months, especially when it gets freezing, freezing, freezing and you have nothing on you, no clothes, no food, nothing.
00:31:48
Speaker
And once you understand that about somebody you knew that they survived something like that, even though they were young and you knew them when they were an old man, it's just, I don't know, the strength that takes, both the physical strength, but the mental strength that takes. That really changes how you look at somebody.
00:32:11
Speaker
And you know, I've honestly like and it's, it's a very difficult as I'm sure you learned. It's a very one it's difficult to research because there's, there's not so much material, but the materials I've seen from prisoner camp Soviet POW camps.
00:32:28
Speaker
are they're really actually the Holocaust Museum has a lot of even video, video research of some of these camps. And like you just said, like they're open, open air camps, which is, you know, you're exposed to the elements, as you just said, like people are dying in holes. But it's just so gut wrenching to research what was going on in those prisoner camps. One thing we haven't talked about yet, actually, is your grandmother.
00:32:58
Speaker
who really is pretty prominent in this story, or the character who is based on your grandmother, Nina. Again, I don't know if that's her name in real life. Talk a little bit about your grandmother and the character versus your actual grandmother.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah, I'll start with the character. So Nina is the first person we meet when the book begins because Euphem dies in I think the second page of the book as an old man. And she's also the person that we see at the very end because she is the one who's witnessing the Russia-Ukraine
00:33:44
Speaker
conflict beginning in 2014 in the Donbass.
Nina's WWII and Post-War Experiences
00:33:49
Speaker
And so she's kind of our, I don't know, she frames the book. She also appears throughout kind of in the middle. And the reason I wanted to, I kind of began the book more focused on Ephim's story. But then as I went, it became clear that his wife Nina is also very important because she represents a different part of history. So she is Ukrainian.
00:34:13
Speaker
And Ukraine was occupied by the Nazis from 1941 until 1943. And a lot of people left Ukraine and went east, but a lot of people also remained.
00:34:29
Speaker
She is an orphan. She's like a teenager, high school, college age during the war. And she has to live under German rule for two years. And afterward, basically, everybody who lived under occupation got a little mark put on their documents that remained with them for the rest of their life, or at least for the rest of the Soviet Union's existence.
00:34:58
Speaker
that told anybody who would look at it, such as employers or people who might take you or not take you into a grad school program, that this person lived under German occupation, once again, was exposed to, quote unquote, the enemy, once again, can be possibly not trusted. Maybe they collaborated, maybe they slept with the enemy, you don't know. And so you are going to treat them basically as second class citizens.
00:35:29
Speaker
even though it was not their fault that somebody invaded their country and they were forced to live under them. But the twisted logic of a totalitarian regime is such that its citizens privately have no control of how their story is told and how they're treated.
00:35:50
Speaker
So Nina is Orphan. She works for the Germans because she has to eat. And she thinks about it later on in life as well. She enters university.
00:36:07
Speaker
and becomes later on a paleontologist. And that part is true. And based on my grandmother, she was quite a well-known paleontologist in her day. And she, my actual real grandmother, left a memoir. She lived longer, so I knew her like, you know,
00:36:31
Speaker
Although I began writing this book while she was still alive, but she was not very coherent at that point. Anyway, but she wrote a memoir that was very helpful. Unlike my grandpa who left me this short letter and nothing else, and like a big question, big mystery,
00:36:51
Speaker
She was very talkative, loved to tell stories, and had all these details that I don't think would have been possible to research at all. Because she describes what life was like in the Donbass, which is not a sexy place that anyone writes about, ever, when she moved there in the 50s, and the smells,
00:37:12
Speaker
and how people talked, the domestic environment, which is not something that historians ever care about, living in communal apartments. She had an amazing memory, so there's just all these details, the popular jokes of the day, what things cost, what was hard to get versus easy to get.
00:37:37
Speaker
amazing treasure trove of details. So I plucked some stuff from there. It was also interesting to see what people cared about, right? Because I think often the American perception of Soviet Union is very
00:37:52
Speaker
If we close our eyes, we see this gray background and a long bread line. I feel like that's the image that people have. But that's not actually what life was like at all. It also doesn't necessarily reflect what people cared about day to day.
00:38:10
Speaker
So I have a chapter early on where there's an affair situation. And so there's like kind of the background of Soviet life in the 50s, but there's also this private situation that can happen anytime, anyplace, right? And you're not going to think about the bread lines. You're going to think about the affair if you're the person living through this time, right? So I wanted to kind of bring those domestic details in there.
00:38:37
Speaker
Now, I feel like, of course, we were talking earlier about how your grandfather didn't talk about the war. And I think that's common with not just men in that generation, but probably women too. And I'm curious if you got your grandmother, did she open up at all about her relationship with your grandfather, about how much the war
00:39:03
Speaker
colored their experience about maybe how his silence about the war really impacted her. Was she able to open up to you at all about that? No, what's interesting about my grandma's memoir is that it does not talk about my grandpa as much as you would think, even though the woman was married to him for over 50 years.
00:39:26
Speaker
I'm sorry. I saw this as maybe conversations with your grandmother. This is a written memoir where you got a lot of- No, this is an actual written memoir. I have it. I keep it on my desk. It has her name on it. You were able to ask her like, hey, grandma, tell me about grandpa or anything like that.
00:39:41
Speaker
No, not really. No. And also when the Russia-Ukraine war began, basically in front of my grandparents' apartment, that became the focus and I wasn't writing this book yet. So I was asking her about those things and not my grandpa's as much. Which is kind of liberating because this is a work of fiction and
00:40:04
Speaker
I'm not trying to write the actual story of my grandparents. It gave me liberty to take their relationship in various ways. At some point I read that they, she mentions in the memoir that they went on
00:40:22
Speaker
vacation to Crimea, which I think was like a rare thing. And I don't know, she has like three sentences about it and mostly describing the scenery. And I'm like, oh, I can work with this. This can be a whole chapter when they kind of like reconciliation and touch, you know.
00:40:40
Speaker
Anyway, like a point in a marriage, because in a lot of ways, this is a story of a family and a story of a marriage that's set against kind of a historical complicated background with both of them are keeping secrets about their past and both of them are ashamed of different things in their past. And yes, I wanted to kind of play with that.
00:41:06
Speaker
Well, I want to fast forward a little bit to the modern day, kind of the Russian-Ukraine war conflict. And I want to actually read something that you wrote in a 2022 New York Times essay. And this was right after Russia invaded.
00:41:29
Speaker
As Russia's invasion began early on Thursday under the pretext of rescuing the eastern region of Donbass from Ukraine's military aggression, I knew my family has never asked to be rescued by Russia. For eight years, this conflict has done nothing for my family except tear it apart. This is just the latest ugly chapter. Talk a little bit about that.
00:41:54
Speaker
Absolutely. So the conflict began in the Donbas and specifically in the city of Donetsk, which is where half of my novel is set in 2014. And what resulted from it very quickly, basically everybody who was, I don't know, under 50.
00:42:13
Speaker
left, not everybody, everybody, but the majority of the younger generations left Donetsk. And by the time I visited it in 2016, so it's been, there's been like shelling for two years by the time I got there. What I saw was, this is a city of 1 million people just for context, right? So like a big city by American standards.
00:42:39
Speaker
which was peaceful, had lots of roses. It's like known for its roses, whatever. And it became this completely unrecognizable place where there was martial law. There was only older people, mostly women on the streets. There were bullet halls everywhere, like just everywhere. Every apartment building had a sign that said bomb shelter with an arrow. There were soldiers everywhere.
00:43:08
Speaker
And at night you heard shelling like every night and during the day as well during kind of rougher periods.
00:43:18
Speaker
And seeing that actually I think is what made me able to even start working on this book because right, as I said earlier, I already had my grandfather's story, but I didn't have the confidence that I could write a war novel, especially a World War II novel. It's like almost a cliche. There's so much that's been written about it. It's so researched.
00:43:48
Speaker
who needs another World War II? And yet there were these incredible gaps in history that I discovered as I began writing it, but also experiencing, just getting that very tiny glimpse of what war feels like and the fear you feel when you hear shelling in your city and not on a movie screen.
00:44:10
Speaker
I came back from that experience, changed, and I was like, okay, I think I can write a war book. And by then, my cousins and my little nephews left the city and then became internal refugees. There was, I think, about 1.7 million internal refugees from that earlier conflict.
00:44:30
Speaker
They were often actually not treated well by other Ukrainians. I think as happens when a lot of people, when there's like an influx of people into a place, the people who already live in the place are like, oh, who are these people raising our apartment rents, you know? So that was, they were, they were having a lot of trouble. And interestingly, so my grandmother and my aunt and my uncle were the only people who remained in the Donbas, despite it being basically a war zone.
00:45:00
Speaker
And when I was begging my grandmother, who was 90 at the time, to leave, she would just basically laugh on the phone and be like, I survived the Nazis. Let them come and get me. I don't care. You know, she was just so done with all of it. And she would make up these like dirty poems about Putin and her spirit in her because all she did was just lie around and like listen to Schelling.
00:45:29
Speaker
And yeah, but the family was torn apart because they couldn't see each other. So my aunt and uncle couldn't see their kids for a long time. Travel became possible. It was very hard though. At some point, my uncle, I think, was visiting my cousin, so his son. And you get on this bus and you have to cross this border. And at some point,
00:45:53
Speaker
they were shooting and they had to duck in a ditch. That's how you see your son. I mean, it was just amazing. And then of course this war began.
00:46:04
Speaker
my grandmother has already passed away, but my aunt and uncle finally, just literally less than a year ago, finally left the Donbass and moved to Kiev. And you know what it took? My aunt got cancer. And that's literally what it took for her to finally leave her home. She was so attached to this place where she was born, where she
00:46:29
Speaker
has an apartment and like, you know, a country house. But there's no water in the hospitals. I mean, the hospitals are like, you can't even call them hospitals at this point. So anyway, there's no medicine, of course. So she finally left and is now in key of
00:46:48
Speaker
And meanwhile, my other cousin and the nephews who were internal refugees once now become refugees for the second time in their life. They're not even out of high school yet. So just to survive that twice in your life is incredible and are now in Europe. And I also have family in Russia.
00:47:12
Speaker
who also are now refuging in Europe. So I have just no one left in Russia anymore, but several people left in Ukraine and a bunch of relatives in just various countries in Europe.
Historical Narratives and Current Conflicts
00:47:25
Speaker
Now I wonder in writing a book like this, because of course the Russia-Ukraine war is the biggest conflict Europe has seen since World War II, I wonder how much
00:47:39
Speaker
writing this book, how much of it do you think has influenced how you're viewing the war right now? I think oftentimes we'll hear, especially in historical fiction, often writers will, you're writing about the past because you have something you want to say about the present. Not that that's true for everybody, but I wonder what this period you write about, what do you think that has to tell you or all of us as the public and as your readers, what do you think it has to say about the war right now?
00:48:09
Speaker
Unfortunately, the president of Russia is using history as a weapon to wage this war. So while it may not seem as related to the Western reader, these two wars are actually super in conversation with each other and have very much like a direct relationship.
00:48:31
Speaker
So I feel like my grandfather was not unique in keeping, right? As we discussed, a lot of people from that generation did not talk about what happened to them. When you have an entire generation of people who don't talk about the truth of what happens to them, and you have a regime, a totalitarian regime, and now this new autocratic regime that has an agenda,
00:48:58
Speaker
And what you get as a result is kind of a vacuum of truth. So you get like state written history that tells you what Soviet Union did or did not do and how good we were and skips out all the parts about mistreating its own citizens, for instance, among others. And you don't have private citizens.
00:49:24
Speaker
who tell you the reality of their experience to contradict that narrative, you have a whole future generation, current generation of people who don't understand and don't know their history and who can be easily deluded into thinking
00:49:41
Speaker
what their kind of national story really is. And just to give you a specific example, so Putin has written multiple laws that, for example, make this book unpublishable in Russia and make me unable to go there because I would probably be arrested.
00:50:05
Speaker
There's laws governing how World War II can and cannot be talked about that he wrote recently, like in the last two years of this war. If you go to like Soviet war memorials, you will often see in Russia right now, you will often see
00:50:26
Speaker
things or people actually buried like soldiers who are fighting in Ukraine today. So if you go to like victory day parade, you will see people carrying their grandfather's photos who fought in World War II and you will also see
00:50:44
Speaker
people carrying portraits of soldiers who are dying right now. So they're very much purposefully mixing these two ideas because World War II was a huge national trauma and it's very easy to turn national trauma into a hurrah moment where we
00:51:08
Speaker
suffered, but we kicked the German ass. And if the West, you know, wagging its finger, like if the West tries something like that again, don't you worry, we're going to kick ass again. And that is basically the rhetoric that's like turning, that's turning Russians against Ukrainian. They're kind of Ukrainian brothers. So yeah, that's sadly too relevant to today.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting you say that because your book really is kind of a counterpoint to that narrative because it is the huge trauma that in shame, as you said, that comes from a war and just to think of war in the scale of World War II, which the world has never seen such destruction and such suffering. And today
The Role of Democracy and Personal Histories
00:52:01
Speaker
to see that
00:52:03
Speaker
that trauma trying to be buried, as you say, like it is in Russia right now. That's a very interesting point that you make. Well, I wonder kind of lastly here if, and this is probably pretty related to what you're just talking about, but if there's something you want readers to take away from this story, what would you like readers to take away? I would like readers to know a couple of things. One is that
00:52:34
Speaker
democracy is easier to lose, easier than we think. That's kind of what we've observed happening in Russia. People didn't realize how bad things were until it was too late. So that's just kind of a general beware message. And I don't want this to sound political at all. It's just a general warning. When something looks bad, it probably is.
00:52:59
Speaker
even though we like to think that it isn't. But secondarily, is that private store? If you have grandparents, ask them stuff. America's also an empire. It also has
00:53:17
Speaker
It's not a totalitarian regime by any means, of course, but I think empires generally tend to have a certain narrative that they put out there that they want their citizens to believe. And I think it's important to know the realities of private citizens who were there and who saw it and who aren't a textbook, who aren't written by people two generations later.
00:53:45
Speaker
So, yeah, just value the private stories because they can tell you a lot more. Oh, that's really great. Yeah, I got to go ask my grandma some stuff after this talk. Yeah, I so regret that I didn't. So, yeah, please do.
Future Plans and Social Media Presence
00:54:01
Speaker
Well, Sasha, if people want to stay in touch with what you're working on, are you on social media? How can people stay in touch with the work you're doing? I am, unfortunately, on social media, yes. My name is unique enough. I'm going to spell it Sasha. Last name is V-A-S-I-L-Y-U-K. If you Google that, basically, I'm on everywhere.
00:54:25
Speaker
I have a website. I do get published on things and I hope to continue writing some op-eds and personal essays about all of the war stuff. Really great. I hope you do too.
00:54:39
Speaker
And good luck on your book tour as well. Thanks, Ajay. Well, Sasha Vasilyuk, your presence is mandatory. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. What a fascinating story. And Sasha, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks so much, Ajay. This was great.