Installation:
archive photo, textile, latex, ventilators. Places exhibition in Jewish
Museum, Moscow. Human condition project, session 4. Curator Viktor
Misiano
The tumbleweed
is a bushy steppe plant that grows into a spherical form which,once uprooted,
can be carried over long distances by the wind.
My stepfather Alexander Davidovich Hilgenberg was a
Russian German. His life, like that of many of his countrymen, was difficult.
He was born in 1912 in the Volga region, in the village of Phillipsfeld, but in
1941 his entire family – his father David Davidovich, brother David and sisters
Irma, Erica and Olga – were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. From there,
Alexander Davidovich was conscripted into the Labour Army, and sent to the Ivdel
work camp in the Northern Urals, where he married a German woman named Emma Mayerle,
who was also serving in the Labour Army. They were later moved to the Vizhai special
settlement, where they had two daughters – Lilya and Vera. In 1968, Alexander
Davidovich went to live in the village of Nizhniye Sergi, in Sverdlovsk Oblast.
He was director of the local forestry enterprise until his retirement. After
the death of his wife, his adult daughters left for other cities and he was
left alone, and so my mother, having by that time lost my father, became his
support. They changed their flats for a single “two-roomer” and moved in
together, my mother looking after him when he suffered a stroke. He died at
home, in the Urals, and is buried beside my parents. His life story is my story
too. And I want to talk about him, but not just about him. The lot of the
Russian Germans has been unfairly tragic. Invited to Russia in the second half
of the 18th century by Catherine the Great, they settled along the
Volga, in the Southern Ukraine and Crimea. In September 1941, right at the beginning of the Great
Patriotic War, all of them without exception were evicted from their native
Volga to Siberia and Kazakhstan. About a million people were expelled from
their homes. Of these, around 300 thousand were then drafted into the Labour Army
and sent to the most remote areas of the USSR, where they worked and lived in
special settlements and camps. Only in 1955 were they allowed to return to the
original places of deportation – to Kazakhstan and Siberia, though the Germans
were forbidden from returning to the Volga region where they had lived up until
1941. The Russian Germans never resettled in their homeland – in the 1990s the
new Russian leadership did everything to prevent the restoration of the Volga
German Republic. Many Germans then left Russia, emigrating to Germany. Russian
Germans are a wandering people, they put down roots in Russia and it became
their real motherland, but the Soviet government cruelly tore up a whole people
from their native land. The Russian Germans have been driven around the world,
just like the wind chases the dried out balls of the tumbleweeds that my
stepfather saw so much of in the steppelands, where he was taken and left to
survive in as best he could, back in the autumn of 1941.
Leonid Tishkov
The author would like to thank the wolgadeutsche.net website and express
his personal gratitude to Alexander Spaсk for providing copies of photographs
from the family albums of the Volga Germans.
