In her literary debut Vielleicht Esther (2014) Katya Petrowskaya describes, among other things, the history of her Jewish family during the Stalin terror and the Second World War in Ukraine. I still think it’s a wonderful book that makes you feel how unreal war and terror can be when you’re right in the middle of it.
Since the success of that book, Petrowskaja (Kiev, 1970) has had a column in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung, in which she analyzes photos. According to her, photographs testify, tell a history and raise questions. Those columns are now bundled under the title Das Photo schaute mich an† Petrowskaja has a few fixed themes. One of these is the war in Ukraine. Not only those against today’s Russia, but also those against Nazi Germany.
The most penetrating column in her book is ‘Majdan 1943’. Petrowskaja analyzes a photo of the German-occupied Kiev. That photo was taken from the Instituutstraat, which is located on a hill. A few people stand on the ruins of the Ginsburg House, the Soviet Union’s first skyscraper dating from 1912. From that point you can see the entire ruined area of Duma Square, named after the likewise destroyed parliament building that stands there. Later it will become known worldwide as ‘the Majdan’.
In the foreground of that photo is a child of about eight years old. Petrovskaya recalls that her mother was the same age when she returned to Kiev with her mother and sister in 1944, after being on the run for three and a half years. The three already know that in September 1941 grandmother and aunt were murdered by the Nazis in the ravine of Babi Jar, along with more than 33,000 other Kiev Jews. But they don’t know if their house is still standing. And that house is more important to them at that time. Through the rubble they walk to their street, 300 meters from the destroyed Ginsburg skyscraper. And then they suddenly see their old house rising between the ruins. It stands completely undamaged in its familiar place.
Petrovskaya’s mother also saw twelve German soldiers hanged among the same ruins. Everyone was cheering, especially the children. She would be ashamed of it later and be ashamed of that shame again later.
The column ‘Das Foto gibt es nicht’ stole my heart. Subject is a photo taken by the KGB of a placard that reads ‘Za vasjoe i nasjoe svobodoe’ (For you and our freedom). It was held up in Moscow by the dissident poet Natalia Gorbanevskaya, one of eight Russians who demonstrated in Red Square in August 1968 against the crushing of the Prague Spring by a Warsaw Pact army. That ‘For you and our freedom’ was an important leitmotif for the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and dates back to 1831, when the Tsar suppressed the Polish uprising.
Of those eight protesters — seven intellectuals and one construction worker — after an absurdist trial, two were imprisoned in a mental institution, two in a penal camp, three were exiled to Siberia and one, a student, was acquitted. After this, no one dared to demonstrate against the communist regime. Compared to Putin’s current Russia, little has changed.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 27, 2022