•
Rating: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20, 29)
"He shared everything he had, indeed he gave away everything that had not yet been taken from him, a mania that usually characterized only saints. He gave me the first, and perhaps the only, gift of all my years of imprisonment: a box of watercolors and colored pencils. That gift, so precious to me, evidently came from the heart, as it remained intact with me through all the years of prison, all the searches and transfers." From those watercolors and colored pencils came very detailed and fascinating drawings that enriched the work of Evfrosinija Antonovna Kersnovskaja, who reconstructs the years of detention in the Soviet gulags... "Memories" No, pages on which are traced simple 'glimpses' of the past. Like faded family photos, precious only to those who, in the blurred images, recognize the faces of people long dead? The narrative opens with the death of her father, a moment in which Evfrosinija must bear the burden of the family and becomes its head. It ends many years later, at the mother's grave, where she allows herself to draw up a sad balance sheet... "All I have left is a dear grave and the memory of what I have lived... Perhaps it would have been better to forget everything? Those who have not lived it, after all, will not believe it, cannot believe it. And how many are the survivors who lived through those years, who walked a way of the cross similar to mine? The last witnesses are disappearing. Perhaps it is better this way? No, it is not better. Everything can repeat itself?.
Evfrosinija Antonovna Kersnovskaja was interned for more than 10 years in a gulag, undergoing continuous hardships and risking death on more than one occasion: both during work and for actions dictated by conscience...
"For me, the law is what my conscience dictates. Your laws are not made for me. I am not accustomed to trembling, and as for help... what help" That of the mastiffs? No, Vera, I can only accept help from those I respect. And God sees they are not many, and even to them, I do not want to cause trouble. No, I only do what I can confess without shame. Before everyone. And without lowering my eyes?. Without the memory of the past, there will never be a prosperous present... A phrase we often hear during "Days of Memory" when we remember the heinous actions committed in the Nazi Germany camps. That crime has stuck more than others because it occurred in the heart of Europe and even in our country. It's easier to forget similar events that, however, happened thousands of kilometers from our homes, beyond the Urals, beyond borders we can't even imagine... "I didn't have time to see the side with the writing "Europe" and the distance from Moscow, but I did watch for a long time as the marker with the writing "Asia" and "8000 kilometers" receded... I couldn't read from where?.
Reading this book involves a brave journey into a shocking reality that has led humans to be ashamed of themselves. Such writings generally have common elements and unique peculiarities. In this case, we find an almost monastic description of events, like a scribe. As if wanting to keep intact certain signs of Life and History... "Everything is forgotten and everyone is forgotten... The problem is not that the names of cities are changed, streets are renamed, monuments demolished, portraits eliminated, slogans, and books already published revised, pages of encyclopedic dictionaries cut and replaced, their sheets pasted over. Taken individually, each of these facts is ridiculous. But when all this, put together, is aimed at depriving man of memory, replacing logic with submission, concealing or distorting the lessons of history, then it becomes monstrous and criminal".
P.S. Except for the initial quote, from which I cited the source, all others are textually taken from the book in question without cuts.
Loading comments slowly
