World War II

World War II is a remembered and argued-over past that repeatedly enters the lives of people living through a later war. It is present in Sergey Sergeyich’s family photographs, in a village memorial, in a Crimean family’s account of a grandfather’s fate, and in neighbors’ debate about Hitler. Rather than forming a single historical digression, it surfaces through personal objects and ordinary conversations, linking private memory to the competing political narratives of the present.

Family Photographs and Inherited Memory

Sergeyich turns to old photographs while drinking tea, treating the albums as a way to recover a life that stretches from his parents’ postwar years to the period before the current war. Their pages hold not only family history but also a record of work and fear. His mother worked in the district hospital, handling bed linen that passed repeatedly between patients, laundry, and beds. His father loved light machinery but earned a living operating heavy equipment, including Kamaz lorries that frightened him because he feared running someone over.

The father’s memory gives the postwar past an intimate scale. He was happiest with a scooter and sidecar, sometimes using it to collect his wife from work. He died of a heart attack; the narration notes that he did not realize what was happening and therefore had no time to be afraid. His parents did not live to see the current war. They lie side by side behind a bombed-out church, while the conflict unfolds above them beyond their knowledge. In this juxtaposition, the albums preserve a peaceful family past even as the place where the family rests has been marked by renewed violence.

A Village Memorial and a Family Account

A wooden star beside a yard gate connects an individual household to wartime commemoration. Sergeyich is directed to the second house on the right and told that the grandfather of the children there died fighting the fascists. The star, once red, has faded to grey like the fence. Its change is concrete and quiet: the memorial remains, but its former color has worn away.

In Crimea, the past takes a more unsettled form. As a mountain comes into view, Akhtem’s wife identifies Mangup and says that her grandfather hid there under the Germans. Soviet soldiers caught and shot him after the war, near the site of a clinic. Her account carries the history across successive regimes: hiding during the German occupation did not secure his safety after the fighting ended. The brief exchange places this family memory in the landscape, where a place associated with refuge is also tied to his death.

War Stories Recalled Beside the Present

Sergeyich’s memory of a village funeral for a man brought home from the war in Afghanistan offers a comparison across wars. The entire village attended; people spoke at the cemetery, but they remained standing. Only the dead man’s mother tried to fall onto the fresh grave, and relatives and friends held her upright and led her away. Soldiers fired into the sky and covered the grave with wreaths. The memory returns as Sergeyich considers the roadside kneeling at a later soldier’s funeral. The two dead men merge in his thoughts, making the older war a measure against which he tries to understand the newer ritual of mourning.

World War II also enters everyday conversation as an unresolved subject. In a dreamlike passage, Sergeyich hears neighbors discussing whether Hitler escaped to Argentina, prompted by photographs in the newspaper Top Secret that they believe show an aged Hitler on a beach with a young blonde. Their debate fades into the sound of dishes being cleared; then explosions draw nearer and interrupt the remembered argument. The shift from speculation about the old war to the sounds of the current one makes historical talk feel neither settled nor safely distant.

Competing Accounts of the Past

The novel places personal recollection beside mediated political speech. On television, commentators blame America and Europe for supporting Ukrainians and predict that their own citizens will eventually launch Maidans. A channel change brings a green-dyed politician into view, protesting that she is entitled to her opinion; Sergeyich recognizes her as Bondarenko, a local figure. These broadcasts frame current events through accusation and spectacle, in contrast to the particular memories preserved in family albums and spoken around a table.

The pressure to control the words used for the present becomes explicit during Sergeyich’s border interview. Asked why he came from Donbas, he explains that he is from the grey zone and that people are shooting, with Ukrainians on one side and Russians on the other. A young crew member stops him and instructs him to repeat the answer without saying Russians, prompting Sergeyich to substitute separatists. When asked about his damaged car, he says that one shell-shocked man attacked him after getting drunk at a wake for a soldier killed by Russians. The interviewer halts the live exchange and shifts the crew toward filming the bees and the axe mark. The scene shows how accounts of war are edited in the moment: a lived description is corrected, while visible damage is retained as footage.

Across these scenes, World War II is neither a distant backdrop nor a simple explanation for later conflict. It survives as a family’s lost generation, a weathered star, a grandfather’s fate, and an argument repeated among neighbors. The novel’s fragments of memory also show how historical language can be contested: intimate testimony preserves particular lives, while television and interview settings press people to frame responsibility in approved terms. The old war remains present, but never in one stable or complete account.