Poems for Resisters: Wendell Berry takes us to Safe Places

An Indivisible Toledo friend, Cherie Spino, a dedicated and indefatiguable resister, posted a poem by Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things, on facebook. She needed a break, she said. There's so much sad news out there, so much to do to bring change and to save a democracy under siege.  "Take a deep breath, and read."

"When despair for the world grows in me...I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water...I come into the peace of wild things..." Oh, how that resonates! It's a place where my favorite contemporary poet Mary Oliver takes us, too. Yes, we do need to come into that place from time to time. We do need breaks from the politics of the day. It becomes unbearable to see how our democracy is being undermined, how kids are being killed with AR-15s and weapons of war, how our social safety nets are under attack, how oligarchy and tyranny, from the White House and Congress on down, have taken over our lives.   

I had not thought about Wendell Berry, the award-winning poet from Kentucky, in a long time. The last I recalled, with Cherie's prompting, is that he won a National Humanities Medal and gave the annual Jefferson Lecture a few years ago, both august public humanities events I have followed since I worked for the DC and Florida state programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The poem Cherie posted refreshed my memory and took me online to do a little research.  Wendell Berry was born in 1934 and lives on the farm in Henry County, Kentucky, that has been in his family for five generations. His writings evoke a strong sense of place, full of images of the Kentucky River and the hill farms of central Kentucky. He is an advocate for sustainable agriculture and small farming, locality and agrarian values, in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau.

I took myself away from the news du jour, away from writing, and spent an afternoon reading Berry's poetry.  I ordered a few books. Berry's poems will be there when I need a break from resisting, marching, making phone calls, protesting. Not that what I do compares to Cherie, who is on the front lines with Indivisible and other resisters, like Molly Reed, 24/7.  I swear, these two women keep me going.

I met Cherie at a workshop she was conducting to get signatures on a petition to put an anti-gerrymandering issue on the Ohio ballot in November.  She said we were just starting and needed 300,000 signatures. That was daunting! Her optimism moved me. I did what I could, which wasn't much, but Cherie has been at it for months and months. These devoted activists have almost reached their goal. Imagine the work. And it's only one of the many political action strategies that resisters like Cherie and Molly are involved in every single day.

Whatever helps these resisters carry on is a good thing.  If it's a poetry break, even better! "Take a breath, and read," Cherie says. It is wonderful advice. "Though I am dark, there is vision around me./Though I am heavy there is flight around me."

Two more poems by Wendell Berry
Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

Do Not be Ashamed 

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
"I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

This poem took me to Mary Oliver's Wild Geese, and in a poetry frame of mind, I can't resist putting it here. 

The Ostarbeiters: "Making Bombs for Hitler"

My 10-year-old great-grandson Philip, son of my first-born grandchild Julia and grandson of my daughter Elissa, handed me a book he had just read. "I think you'll like this, Nana," he said.

The book is Making Bombs for Hitler (Scholastic Inc., 2017), by popular Ukrainian-Canadian author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch (pronounced Skrip-ich). The title captured me right away.

"You read this book about such a serious subject?" I ask. He nods, smiles. I give him a hug. He is so proud of himself, and I of him!

Philip is right. I liked this book. I'm a historian. I taught American history to students at various colleges over the years. I directed NEH state programs in DC and Florida to bring history to the public. I lived in the town of Starobilsk in eastern Ukraine for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer. While living there (2009-11) I picked up bits and pieces of a World War II history that I never knew before, a shocking history uncovered only since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The badge worn by child slaves
 in German labor camps.

Making Bombs for Hitler encompasses this history.  The novel, written for kids Philip's age, but really for people of all ages, tells the sad and little-known story of the Ostarbeiters (literally "eastern workers").  The Ostarbeiters were mostly Ukrainian children, ages 7-14 on average, whom the Nazis kidnapped and forced into slavery in German labor camps to keep the Nazi war machine going.  It's estimated that more than 2.5 million children were sent to these camps. Many thousands died from starvation and overwork.

Skrypuch draws on real-life stories of survivors to tell the harrowing tale of Lida and her sister Larissa. She dedicates the book "to Anelia V, whose detailed recall of day-to-day life as a Nazi slave helped me create an accurate world for Lida."

The accuracy of Lida's world horrifies.

The story begins in the brutal reality that Yale historian Timothy Snyder documents in his best-selling book The Bloodlands: Eastern Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2012). The sisters' father is killed by the Russians and their mother is shot by the Nazis for harboring Jewish neighbors.  Lida, Larissa and her family, archetypal of their time and place, are literally viciously trapped between Hitler and Stalin.

Philip and Chase reading books at Costco while
GranElissa  shops. Love to see my grands reading.

Lida and Larissa, living with their grandmother after their parents' murders, scared, hoping they might be safe because they aren't Jewish, are kidnapped by the Nazis. Clinging to each other for dear life, a Nazi nurse separates them despite, or because of, their protests. Lida's pain and confusion are heart-wrenching. What's happening? Where are we going? What will happen to my sister? What will happen to me?

Lida, just ten years old but advised to pretend to be older, is herded onto an overcrowded cattle car and left floundering in shock with hundreds of other children, without food, air or water, a hole in the corner for a toilet, like the death trains that took Jewish prisoners to concentration camps and other Eastern European victims to Russian gulags. Fear and "the smell of misery" envelops her.

It never goes away. The labor camps are vicious. Underfed, hardly clothed, indiscriminately "disciplined" by sadistic guards, exposed to the arbitrary outbursts of the Gestapo or industrial plant guards, witnesses to and victims of inhuman brutality, many of the Ostarbeiters did not live to tell their story.

Can one's sense of humanity and decency survive under such conditions?  Lida's struggle to survive and find her sister Larissa brings more horror than hope. But somehow, Lida never gives up. She draws strength from deep within that she didn't know she had. She remembers her mother telling her "you can find beauty anywhere." She tries.  At a low point in the camp, she pleads with a despairing friend, both worked beyond endurance, to fight to stay alive. "If you don't live, who will tell your story after the war ends?"  

The rest of the story highlights how these brave young workers sabotage the bombs they are forced to make under the hateful eyes and constant death threats of their supervisors. They are also victims of increased Allied bombings that targeted Nazi munition factories near war's end. 

As the Nazis began fleeing the camps and destroying evidence of their existence, Lida learns from her friend Juli, who worked in the camp's hospital, a gruesome assignment, that Officer Schmidt, the sadistic head of the labor camp, had ordered the cook to poison the workers' soup. "All the Eastern workers who were in camp today died."

Lida's fury rises up. "The Nazis will pay for these murders," she whispers to her horrified friend, as they continue sabotaging bombs one after another. "They should think twice before asking slaves to make bombs."  Who knows how many bombs failed to explode because of the efforts of these children, but their courage is breathtaking.

Making Bombs for Hitler ends in the same Bloodlands reality as it began.  After the Nazi labor camps came the Russian Gulags. The Red Army, every bit as cruel as the Nazis, hunted and captured the terrorized survivors and sent them to their deaths in Siberia. "They called us traitors," the young boy Luka, who barely survives this fate, tells Lida.  "But you were a prisoner of the Nazis," she says. "It doesn't matter," he replies, clearly traumatized beyond measure by his near-death experiences. "We can never go home again."  So they wandered, these lost young souls, in post-traumatic shock, into and around displaced persons camps, wondering where they would end up, what would happen to them. A lucky few found new homes in western Europe or the U.S., or were adopted in Canada and other countries. Skrypuch, a Ukrainian-Canadian, suggests this ending for Lida and Larissa. 

I asked Philip what he thought of the book. "I think Lida was a very brave girl."  How would you have survived?  "I would do what Lida did, and for sure sabotage those bombs like she did." He did wonder if he could survive on the camp diet of  watery turnip soup. "Maybe I would have gotten very weak," he admitted, "too weak to work, maybe too weak to live."  He pondered that. So did I.

* * *

On the complicated history of Chernivtsi oblast in western Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernivtsi_Oblast

On the Ostarbeiters. Ukrainian references from my friend Natalia Dohadailo in Starobelsk. They can be translated.  Thanks also to Olga Koulich-mirochnychenko for sharing information.
*  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostarbeiter
*  http://argumentua.com/stati/vyvozu-ostarbaiterov-iz-ukrainy-75-let-zhutkie-tsifry-i-vospominaniya-ochevidtsev
*  http://www.stena.ee/blog/ostarbajtery-foto-vospominaniya-video
*  http://argumentua.com/stati/ukraintsy-na-prinuditelnykh-rabotakh-v-tretem-reikhe-skolko-ikh-bylo-0

About the author: http://www.scholastic.ca/books/authors&illustrators/marsha-forchuk-skrypuch

For World War II historical context: Timothy Snyder, BLOODLANDS: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010).   The "Bloodlands" is the region that includes modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states.  Snyder's thesis is that this is where "the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than any seen in western history." Snyder painstakingly documents how Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass killings of more than 14 million unarmed non-combatants and civilians outside the death camps of the Holocaust during World War II and afterwards. These were Intentional policies of mass murder, including Stalin's Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish army officers and POWs, the Nazi's deliberate starvation of 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and outright executions and death camps on both sides of the Nazi/Soviet line.
      The citizens of these countries were literally caught between two bloody regimes, with no exit.   I've been learning more about eastern Europe ever since I lived in Ukraine, a traumatized society to this day. After the Nazi atrocities came the Stalin atrocities, when Red Army soldiers hunted the scarred and scared survivors and treated them like traitors. They captured thousands upon thousands of Ostarbeiters as they wandered the countryside or ended up in Displaced Persons Camps and sent them to Russian gulags. From Nazi labor camps to Soviet Gulags. Imagine it.