In the first issue of our yearbook “Time to remember” we published memories by Yelena Kucherova (Clavsut’) who died in Germany seven years ago (kniga-book.com/елена-крикунова-начало-пути/). The author dedicated them to her friend Kira Tiverovsky who kept them for almost thirty years before handing to us. Lyalya’s (Yelena’s) experience was in a way unique – she married a young musician from a German military orchestra and moved to Berlin. In the USSR after the World War II it was considered not only “connection with foreigners” but а sort of treasury and thus in 1947 her personal tragedy began.
She wrote about those whom she met during nine years of her wanderings – first in East Germany prisons and then in twenty soviet concentration camps. Charges were cooked easily and no one of them knew exactly (if at all) the reason for the arrest. But resistance was absolutely useless: it led to dark insulator with water on the floor. “Two German women, Ursula and Elizabeth, and Irena from Czechia are our companions in distress” (by the way, Irena turned out to be “a plant”). Ida, a German woman from Russia, left a two-year-old daughter with her neighbors while Lyala’s small son stayed with her husband in Germany…
Children in prison are also a subject of these notes. “What we first saw in Khal’ch was the children’s cemetery…”. Lyalya managed to get her son to the camp orphanage where kids were constantly dyeing of starvation and illnesses. But for her mother who took the boy away he was doomed to share their destiny. The women were not even let out of the zone to bury their children.
Yelena Kucherova left us one more remarkable testimony of soviet totalitarian state victim. Her keen attention to people combined with mean but accurate style, the property of thoughtful writing, help the readers’ imagination complete the images and make her story unforgettable.
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