The Lost Daughters of Ukraine
Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, while much of Europe was picking itself up and dusting itself down, Ukraine continued to suffer a relentless succession of violent incursions. Both German and Russian invaders exploited the situation, inflicting major atrocities and mass deprivation on the Ukrainian population. While many of us in the West assumed “war” was over, for Ukraine it was not and, of course, still is not.
Based on the history of the writer’s family, this novel focuses on the experiences of three girls, whose ages range from 12 to 17, and those who loved them. We follow the girls and their family members, forced to abandon their homes, ambitions, and livelihoods, in groups or individually as they make an epic trek across the war-ravaged, chaotic countries which border their own.
Always searching for their lost ones, always at the mercy of occupying regimes, militias, and corrupted refugees, often narrowly avoiding death, they persist. Starved, injured, sick and desperate, even through the horrors and rubble of the bombing of Dresden, the journey and the searching continue.
Time passes. “Peace” is declared, and official postwar efforts to reunite refugees begin to bear fruit. Lists are scrutinised. Burials are checked and the lost are painstakingly accounted for. There are astonishing and heartening reunions and some sad “closures”. Eventually, the reunited family members have difficult decisions to make, regarding emigration to distant, safe, welcoming countries.
This is a vivid, heartfelt, and informative piece of work, ably constructed, convincingly researched, and nicely written. If, like me, some of its readers are not as well-informed as they could be regarding Ukraine’s recent history, The Lost Daughters of Ukraine will trigger a greater and well-deserved interest in it.
