Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319968339
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Narratives of Expulsion

The first spoken line of the documentary, though enigmatic, reveals a lot about the film’s perspective: ‘I’m losing you. I’m losing the woman who was once my mother,’ says Sophia beginning the poignant narrative of parallel stories. One story, which appears to be the focus of the film, is about discovering Helen’s past, recuperating the memory of her war experiences and journeys, and understanding the impact of the past on her decisions such as placing her daughter in an orphanage. The other one, which provides the framework of the whole complex narrative, is about the fissure in the mother-daughter relationship, about loss, anger, and resentment. There is also a third thread of the narrative. Sophia explains that through her personal story she also tried to ‘tell a big historical, political story of what happened to the Poles who were transported to Siberia during World War II’ (qtd. in Nicholson).

The storylines are connected through the themes of expulsion, displacement, and journey experienced at different levels. The opening lines introduce immediately the feeling of loss and separation: referring to her dementia-stricken mother, Sophia announces a fear of forever losing her and the connection to the past. Also at the very beginning it becomes clear, through Helen’s doubts about her daughter’s identity (‘You are not Sophia, darling, my daughter is different’; [screenplay]), that the distance between mother and daughter is great and hopes for reconciliation frail. Both Helen and Sophia are facing a looming danger of permanent isolation and exclusion. In the case of Helen it means a growing isolation caused by dementia, by a gradual withdrawal from daily life, once again becoming unable to understand, communicate, and participate in social life, as if continuing the painful journey that she has already taken arriving as an illiterate and non-English-speaking refugee in Australia in 1950. For Sophia it means to lose the chance to learn about the past, her mother, and herself.

While the threat of these anticipated ‘expulsions’ is the major impulse behind the movie, the documentary focuses on the experience of actual expulsion from one’s home in war-torn Europe, and two epic journeys that followed. It is a story of a miraculous survival which provides a broader perspective on war experiences of Eastern Europeans. Helen was born in the 1920s in Oleszów, in Eastern Poland (now Oleshiv in Ukraine). Orphaned at a very young age, she grew up on the streets. When she was 16, together with 2 million other Poles, she was deported to a gulag in Siberia where she worked felling trees. In 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the captive Poles were released from Soviet forced-labour camps. Tens of thousands of Poles started their journey south, on trains, carts, or walking, to join Anders’ Army2 and continue with them their odyssey out of the USSR, through Central Asia to the Caspian Sea, Iran, and North Africa to eventually find home somewhere in the world. Sophia comments on the miracle of her mother’s survival: ‘With no money, no

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