"I couldn't sleep - the sirens were blaring. I had the radio on all the time, not a box, but a real receiver with a tape recorder and everything.
At first, we went to the basement for every signal, but then I got tired of it. I stopped going down there and instead stood by the door where the load-bearing walls were - I figured if something happened, I could run out faster. It was horrible. I was under constant stress. I hardly slept at night. I remember that when I went to see Zhenya or she came to see me, at nine o'clock at night everything went off, it was dark everywhere, you couldn't see anything, nothing more."
"Yes, in 1946, he sent us a special summons - I even have the document somewhere. We all went: my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my sister Ludmila, I, Aunt Marie (mother's sister) and her son - her husband was killed at the front in 1943. Seven people in total... and we had our dog Kazbek with us. We travelled for a month. We travelled in a freight car. Thanks to the dog, we were saved from the 'poachers', as they were called then. At night, my grandfather secured the door with wire, but Kazbek was the main guard: when someone else tried to get in, the dog rushed in, barked, and the thieves retreated. And I also remember how my cousin used to cook porridge: we waited for the petrol or paraffin to drip from the tank, then he took a piece of paper, pointed a magnifying glass at it, and it caught fire. I don't remember."
"Her first husband was Viktor Filatov. He also worked as a machinist and worked well. They even sent him to Moscow for further training, and when he came back, he became an instructor and trained other drivers. He got a cow as a bonus for his hard work, so they got their own.
But then... At that time, two or three signatures were enough - someone gossiped, envied and... Anyway, my sister was born on April 10, 1934, and in 1938 a 'black raven' came in the night and took him away. No trial, no investigation, no right to correspondence. My mother was ordered to vacate the house where they lived within twenty-four hours. She went to her sister's, but her husband worked for the KGB, and later they told him, 'You were hiding the wife of an enemy of the people.' Anyway, Mum had to leave. She went to her parents, to where her grandparents used to live, somewhere near Lake Baikal, in Irkutsk."
Nadezhda Essen (born 1944) is a member of the Soviet and post-Soviet generation of people whose lives reflect the key social transformations of the 20th and 21st centuries. She was born in Siberia into the family of a repressed German engine driver and his “enemy of the people” wife - her mother’s first husband was shot dead in 1938. From 1946, she lived in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, where she worked her way up from a worker in a textile factory to a teacher in a textile school. In the post-Soviet period, Nadezhda Essen was forced to adapt to economic crises in every possible way. In 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, the textile school where she worked was closed. She completed her second degree in philology and joined the University of Chernivtsi, where she taught Russian language and literature. After retiring in 2000, she worked as a nurse in Bergamo, Italy. She spent ten years there caring for the elderly as part of a migrant program. Her family history is also interesting - her sons became “economic migrants” in the 1990s. They went to the Czech Republic, where they opened a tattoo studio. Nadezhda Essen witnessed and participated in the war migration processes. Her escape from Chernivtsi in 2022 (at the age of 78) and her integration into Czech society through language courses represent a valuable case study. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, she feels herself to be Ukrainian despite her German and Russian roots.
