Here’s a statement I wrote ages ago for story 1 run and story 2 postola. (you might notice there’s beginning thoughts about run-dig and stack in here too.)
In 2001 I learned my father had two audiotapes from a 1983 interview. The tapes describe his childhood during the Second World War in Berezno, Ukraine. I asked him to send them to me. By hiding in the woods for nearly two years he, like others, escaped being killed by the Nazis. He was accompanied by his mother, younger brother, his grandfather and two uncles. Other members of his family, including his father, were killed either while in hiding or because they refused to leave their home and enter work camps. We didn’t talk much about my father’s childhood when I was growing up. As I got older he occasionally mentioned some detail, what the shelters in the woods looked like, for instance, or that a raw potato is edible. I believe he thought I knew the actual story, not my vague and fragmented version. I thought I did too.
When I first heard the tapes I was struck by accounts of literally running for one’s life, not once or twice but many times. What could this be like? I have no desire to recreate the experience of running in the woods, wearing makeshift shoes, while people are firing machine guns at me. But I did feel the need to enter the periphery of that world in order to begin to understand it. I went to my local woods and let my imagination assume a role while I ran with a camera in hand. I scared myself a little, but mostly I realized that I might be one of those “people who just couldn’t keep up (and) remained behind.” Of course, remaining behind meant almost certain death.
I continued thinking about the events recounted. The woods provided safety, while simultaneously harboring danger. The woods provided a chance for survival, but not everyone survived. Basic continuums of life - work, finding food and shelter, death - took on extraordinary proportions. Sisyphean tasks of digging and stacking were demanded at the work camp. Winter in the woods meant creating shelters underground to stay dry and warm, always ready to abandon and run if discovered. Food was begged for, foraged and stolen. When members of the family were killed, they were buried in the woods.
Would it be possible to visit the woods where these events took place over sixty years ago? Would there be any sense of the history that took place in those woods? I have relatives buried in those woods. I might walk where they lay without even knowing it. These and other topics surfaced in story 1, run. To further understand the events that my father recounts, it seemed necessary to transcribe what I was hearing on the tapes. In this way I could read bits and pieces slowly and repeatedly and make sense of them. During the process of transcribing I realized I was participating in a literal passing of story from one generation to the next. My father’s words went in my ears and passed out my hand in the form of text, a story.
The completion of story 1, run led to more questions. Details that my father mentioned in the tapes. Did he really remember how to wrap his foot with rags for lack of socks or shoes? When I asked him, he replied sure, though he may need a little practice. In fact he needed no practice. Clearly he had done this so many times that it was ingrained in his memory – simple as buttoning one’s own shirt. He explained how they wove shoes from strips of birch bark and drew a diagram on a scrap of paper, “The shoes were called postolas. The peasants in the area made them beautifully. We just made crude versions.” Thus story 2, postola began.
There aren’t many birch trees where I live, I thought eucalyptus bark that sheds from the tree might work as a substitute. My father was willing to give it a try. I watched as he stood in my studio and began weaving a postola. The last time he had made a postola was over sixty years ago, while on the run for his life.
Benjamin and Julius statement: (not great, but gives you some thoughts)
There are three family myths that caught my attention as a child. Maybe myth isn’t the right word because these things were based in fact, but they felt mythological, they felt as if they separated me from the ordinary kid. First, my dad had hid in a cornfield with his dad who was caught and shot dead by germans. Second, my mom had cousins in Alcatraz, members of the Purple Gang. Finally, my parents were cousins, their respective grandfathers being brothers. I accepted these myths as fully realized in their brevity.
As a child, to say, in one breath, the words relative and Alcatraz to another kid held some cache. As did having a dad who was Russian, it was the cold war after all. When, at an uncertain grade school age, a teacher explained a bit about concentration camps
I was proud to declare that my great grandfather had escaped from one. She said it was very unlikely, it rarely happened, which was confusing because we often visited my great grandfather at his apartment and I was sure he had been in a camp, evidenced by his red purple shins, clearly a result of torture, most likely his legs frozen in ice (or so I thought).
It would take a few decades before I began asking questions and sorting things out. I had waited, unintentionally, simply for lack of interest, until those who could explain things in their own words had died. So it was my mom who recalled that her dad was caught driving a get away car for the Purple Gang. My uncle, a few years older, never heard about the get away car but knows that his dad took a fall for the Purples because he visited him in jail; in exchange the Purple cousins provided for their family through the depression. Neither my mom nor uncle can describe how these Purple Gang are cousins to their father. Both agree that the cousins were nice guys who always arrived with bags of groceries. Nice guys who happened to be gun and liquor runners, extortionists, racketeers, kidnappers, murderers, and arsonists. They did experience Alcatraz.
My dad has provided me with more details of his war experience then I can recount here. His grandfather did escape a labor camp, as did his father, mother and himself along with many others. They fled to nearby woods where they lived, on the run, until nearly the end of the war. His father was killed during this time, on a day when he and his dad went to a farmhouse to beg for provisions. The farmer had alerted authorities, my dad and his father ran for their lives, my dad heard the shot that killed his own father. My great grandfathers red purple shins were the result of leaping from a slowing train, after liberation. Hot metal on skin.
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