It seems to me that the history of a country can be learned from textbooks, but it can only be experienced through the stories of specific people. Especially when you are not yet very mature and you try everything on yourself; you haven’t learned any other way yet. Here are 20 million repressed - everyone knows that a huge number of people were tortured, but this sounds abstract, another formal figure that touches no more than, for example, 1861 or the number Pi. Empathy awakens when you read about one person or a family, and it doesn’t matter what era - from the twentieth century close to us or from ancient tradition. About the girl Alice Freundlich in besieged Leningrad, for example, about ten years in the Kolyma camps of Evgenia Ginzburg or about the children of the Ryazan land who were left orphans after Batu’s raid. Even if the latter are fictional characters, this does not prevent you from feeling the horror that people have experienced at all times.
Diaries, biographies, historical stories - they are precisely about the fact that you need to know history in order not to repeat its mistakes, so that the desire to “repeat” simply never arises.
Memories of childhood in the 30-40s “Sugar Baby” were recorded by Olga Gromova from the words of Stella Nudolskaya. This story is based on real events, but it is not a 100% true autobiography; there is also fiction in the book. At the beginning of the story, Stella was an ordinary five-year-old girl, she lived in Moscow with loving parents and did not know grief. But, alas, life took a sharp turn: a black funnel took dad to an unknown direction, and mother and daughter were declared members of the family of a traitor to the motherland and sent to Kyrgyzstan. There they had to live in an open-air labor camp, then wander around local villages, begging the peasants to give them at least some work, spend the night in haystacks, exchange their last clothes for bread, change several professions, get typhus, and survive hungry winters. But also make friends, organize a literary club, learn a million new skills, and even learn the Kyrgyz epic better than the local population. This story is a vivid illustration of the life principles of stoicism: in any circumstances, maintaining sanity and dignity, remaining yourself helps the inner world, principles, sum of knowledge, mental activity.
The book ends relatively well and during the story there are only a couple of tough moments that the author does not particularly focus on. In general, this is not a story about suffering and overcoming, but rather a recording of events: this is how life can turn out, and we will have to do something with it - well, that means we will live like this. The book, of course, is sad, but it is written for teenagers, and provides information that can be digested at a young age without consequences for the psyche. Parents will also be interested.
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