Transcript: Howard Mansfield & Sasha Vasilyuk
Howard Mansfield
Howard Mansfield, welcome back to Writer's Voice.


Thank you.


It's great to be here.


This book, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II.


First of all, when you say “our fathers,” yeah, you do talk about some other fathers. 
But the focus is really on your father. 
He was so young when he went to war, 18 years old.


Is that right?


18 when he volunteered, 19 when he was in the air over England and Germany, France.


A teenager, in other words.


Yeah, most of the crew was.


Tell us about him.


Well, I say our fathers because that generation, almost uniformly, came home and did not talk about the war.


And any time I meet somebody, I say, yeah, my father, or my mother was in the WACs, or my grandfather, or my uncle.


They all say, yeah, they never talked about it.


It's rare when someone does talk about it.


So why was that?


And that's what I was trying to get at the book.


My father grew up in the Bronx, in New York City.


He had what's just like a classic New York childhood, playing stickball in the street and roller skating.


That kind of sepia image that's been seized by like the nostalgia industry, I mean, it's incredible.


His parents both came from the same shuttle in Lithuania, same Jewish shuttle.


Found each other married.


Spoke a lot of Yiddish around the house.


He had an older sister.


And he had a lot of good friends.


But what he also had was something that was invisible to me growing up.


He had a really bad left hand.


It was like he had a birth defect.


His hand was almost like a club.


And yet he went to volunteer for the Army Air Forces, as it was called then.


He was therefore 4F. About one third of all men they called up were 4F. But it's 1943.


He goes back.


He goes back.


He goes back.


And they take him.


And the Air Force boasted that they took only the finest men, greatest physical specimens, et cetera, et cetera.


So why would they take him?


Well, in 1943, over the skies of Europe, the Air Force was losing 75% of its men.


Huge loss rate.


So not only did they have to replace those crews on what they called the heavy bombers, the B-24s, the B-17s, but they were looking to increase in size.


I think it was like double or triple in size the following year.


So they took him.


And he went off and he became a gunner and was put in a crew and ended up fighting over there.


You know, as you said, this book is also really about why he never talked about it.


I remember growing up in the 50s and the 60s.


And as you write, the war was everywhere on TV.


I mean, all I can remember are those images of those bombers that you're talking about, droning on the little tiny screen of the TV, droning over Europe, and the skies over Europe.


But you write that the war was everywhere when I grew up, but most of it was unspoken.


It was omnipresent.


It was invisible.


Why was it invisible?


Why did they never talk about the war?


Well, that's the central question.


And there's several things about it that need to be understood.


One was how it was like 16 million US servicemen and women, 16 million.


So everybody had gone there.


Everybody saw a little different piece of the war.


No one sees the whole war the way we see it like in a documentary, you know, with the bombers in the air and the maps and all that and Churchill and Hitler.


Everyone saw a little part of the war.


But the other thing about it was it was really terrifying and violent, and the destruction was incredible.


And that's very hard to come back and explain to anybody what you actually went through.


And the final reason, I think we can come back to this, is that this not talking or this not telling was a part of their service.


They did this.


They won the peace.


So we, kids growing up in the 50s and 60s, wouldn't have to think about it.


They were not going to burden us.


It's very different than the model today, the therapeutic culture we have where everybody talks about everything nonstop.


It's a different, it's a coat of honor.


It's a very serious thing.


So to understand that, you have to understand, well, what did it mean to fly then?


So this airplane they were in, this B-24, was open to the weather.


They would go up at 20,000, 25,000 feet.


This thing is open to the weather.


Frostbite was the leading injury, wounds in the Air Force.


And that was one of my father's two purple hearts.


They had these insulated electric uniforms and gloves.


They didn't work very well.


I mean, it could get to be 60 below by those windows.


It could get to be 20 below.


And the other thing was, these missions were really grinding.


They would be in the air four, six, eight hours sometimes.


Hazardous from the moment they took off.


They flew in these formations and had to gather them over the skies of England, actually East Anglia.


And it's soupy and cloudy often.


The Air Force lost 5% of its bombers just getting into these formations.


And then flying over to bomb Germany, not only was there the lift-off of fighters coming in at you, but from the ground there was very heavy anti-aircraft guns and cannons shooting up, tearing these planes apart.


So it just ripped the planes up.


His plane, all the planes, they would come back with holes in the plane, with flying back on three of the four engines, sometimes threatening to have two engines, with guys wounded, with planes smashed up.


It's incredible that you see the pictures of what they were able to fly back to England.


And the way it hit people was just random.


You could be the most qualified pilot, the best crew.


You could just still get hit by all this steel flying up into the air.


And eventually, that's what he got hit on his 19th mission over Kassel, Germany, and was carried off the plane and was in hospitals for 164 days, which is when I finally found his medical record.


That's the other thing.


When I first learned about this, we were cleaning up the house.


It was about a year before he died.


My brother and I were starting to clean up.


He was actually now in a nursing home.


Turned out to be a veteran's home, although he's not a gung-ho veterans guy.


Everybody else had these caps that said veterans on.


He was wearing a Yankees cap, which was his first posting.


And then I couldn't believe it.


I found in a drawer this folded diary.


Because first off, airmen, I knew this, were not supposed to do that.


That was foreboding.


Because anything that the enemy could get to figure out what the other side was doing was serious.


And it was.


They had a hard time on both sides figuring out what was working, what wasn't working, what was the other side going to do.


So I just stood there reading this really fast, as if it was just suddenly going to disappear in my hand.


And I just couldn't believe it.


And I got to the last page, and there was a note from the military center.


And that military language saying, we are seizing this diary, the base center.


Sign here.


We will return it to 1639 Monroe Avenue in the Bronx after the war.


And they did.


So I was like, wow.


So I was just curious, what was it like to have been 19 to be 20 and flying in this unprecedented way of war?


So I figured, oh, all right.


I'll get his military records.


I'll get his Air Force records.


So it turns out that the Central Archives in St.


Louis in 1973 had a massive fire.


And it consumed about 90% of all the Army and Air Force records going back to World War I up to the early 1960s.


Just gone.


So I had to put it together other ways.


I had his diary.


I remembered the name of his pilot, because his pilot lived actually out on the east end of Long Island.


They have a car dealership out there.


And I contacted his son, who had the same name.


He had his father's logbook.


He sent that to me.


I got records from the Air Force Historical Research Agency.


They have miles of microfilm about each mission.


And they send it to you as PDFs.


I was able to read about his bomb group.


They have a couple of histories written.


Bit by bit, I put it together.


I knew there was a couple of things that had been floating around the house, including, oddly enough, a yearbook from the gunnery school that they sent him to in Florida.


I don't know why, it's just kind of this odd thing they did, I guess, to build esprit de corps or something.


And also, towards the end of his life, he was making these tapes.


He used to write these kind of Hollywood movies, circa 1940s, you know, boy meets girl, but there's another guy, but they work it out.


Not for money.


He did this for himself.


No, no, just to send to me.


And I don't know, I would type them up.


He'd share with my brother.


But in among that, he did talk about growing up in the Bronx.


And then, he never talked about the war, but he did, on a tape or two, talk about training.


And that was kind of amazing.


And a couple of other things, that surprised me.


A couple of those tapes I didn't find.


And then, at the very last, like three years after he had died, we were down to just a couple of boxes.


My brother had one of those storage units.


And there was like these two small microcassettes.


I never knew he was using those.


His sight had really deteriorated.


So I got home, I listened to them.


They were really short, but they're the most poignant, remorseful recollections about, really, what had bothered him about this his entire life.


Remorseful.


Tell us about that.


So remorse is something we don't think about.


It doesn't come up on Memorial Day, really.


Doesn't come up on Veterans Day.


But it's what he felt about it.


When his grandchildren would ask him about it, if they got anything out of him, it was that he didn't want to go kill people.


He wanted to fly.


All those kids wanted to fly back then.


Flying was the celebrity technology of the era.


Everyone wanted to fly.


Everyone wanted to be Lindy.


Lucky Lindy, Lindbergh.


But he would say, like, one of my nephews went off to live in Germany.


And he said, it was parting words, don't tell them what I did to their beautiful country.


And then there was this tape I found.


Should I read this to you?


Yeah.


Let me just find it here.


And I don't have this bookmarked.


And I found this right.


The book was mostly written at this point, just about.


So these tapes are very short.


His voice is serious.


He speaks carefully, as if he were testifying in court.


He begins, October 1944, I was a staff sergeant, United States Army, part of the Eighth Air Force.


I was an aerial gunner, part of a bomb, a Carina B-24.


End quote.


In a handful of sentences, he talks about watching on different missions a B-17 blow up in midair, a B-24 ditch in the water with its fate unknown, and another B-24 on fire as the men jumped.


He counted the parachutes.


He had told the war story.


But he quickly sets it aside, saying again, and that's all the war story I'm going to tell you.


But he pauses and continues.


But now I'm going to tell you another war story.


The war was over.


It was probably 1957 or 58.


We were home sitting there.


And mom came in and said to me and David, a little guy, about five or six years old.


Mom said, you two boys sit there and watch television.


I'm going to prepare supper.


So I put on the TV.


And little David and I are sitting there watching it.


And they put on this newsreel.


And on the newsreel, they showed pictures of bombers flying over cities, dropping bombs, and destroying homes.


And they showed the people below.


Mom came in and said to little David, she said, you see that airplane there?


That's the airplane your father flew in the war.


And they were watching these airplanes dropping bombs in the cities, destroying everything.


And David said to me, were there little boys there like me?


I didn't know how to answer that question.


What do you say?


Was it them or me?


I was part of the war order.


I was only following orders.


How do you answer a question like that to a five-year-old boy, five, six years old?


I never knew how to answer that.


And to this day, I don't know.


It's just something I was never able to forget.


Wow, that is so, so powerful.


And that's what I think I always wanted to know.


What did he really feel about it?


And it's really what often gets left out of a lot of the histories.


We went back, we were talking about the wars everywhere.


And yet, it remains kind of untold.


Part of what's untold is not only the physical destruction, but also the emotional toll it took on everyone, either side, whether you're in the airplane or on the ground being bombed.


To think about the war and to think about these men who were brave, who had kids, who served, who did fighting a terrible evil, you have to keep many different thoughts in your mind at the same time.


And I think that's what's hard for people.


Yeah, that kind of the nuance of everyday life, the complexity of everyday life, the contradictions that we all live with, it seems that that is what's left out of all kinds of conversations, even more so today than maybe before.


Yeah, I agree with you.


And we shouldn't put it on the veterans to bring it up.


They've served.


They've done their part.


However it is they want to come home and deal or not deal with it, we have to respect that.


I really do think that.


I didn't know anything other than he'd been in the Air Force.


There was an old uniform in the basement.


There was a couple of other little things around the house.


He never really talked.


He never talked about it at all.


I didn't know what that had really entailed and what it would have been like to have been a kid knocking around the Bronx out of high school.


He graduated early for some reason, working in the father's luncheonette.


And then, boom, you're on this great adventure.


And then at a certain point, when you're in the sky, you think, oh, I could get killed.


And it's just.


And there's a point, there's a story he tells in there about coming back after having seen an airplane blown out of the sky near them.


Daddy was like really shaken up.


It's like, whoa.


Could you imagine?


Just picture yourself, you're in an airplane, and you look out the window.


And a plane that's just a couple, maybe 100 yards from you, blows up and disappears.


And you keep flying, because that's what you have to do.


And then you got to land and do it again tomorrow, or two days, or three days.


And that's the other strange thing about the air war, is that for several hours, you're like right in the heat of this crazy, violent action.


Or maybe nothing happens.


And then you come back, and you're in the pub.


Or you're around the base.


You're waiting.


Or you've got to leave, and they send you to London for that knock around.


Then you're back in the war.


And you're back.


And that was really odd.


And that's something, when you read the Air Force records, they were trying to reconcile.


They were very concerned about morale.


They didn't really know quite what to do with it.


They would organize things like ping pong tournaments and lectures.


It sounded like almost like a summer camp with a very high mortality rate.


I mean, it's just, it's a little crazy.


Yeah, that mortality rate, this is one of the things that surprised me.


It was actually more than 100% average fatality rate.


You said 75, but. 75, yeah.


I'm sorry, 75 and 43.


By the time he got there, it had dropped down to 35%, because they changed the way they were fighting.


But still, every time you went out, on average, one third chance, you're not coming back.


So why were the losses so high?


I mean, what struck me was how unprepared the Air Force actually was to fight this kind of war.


It's a complicated history.


You can almost go back to the trenches of World War I. I'll do that really quickly.


World War I happened.


It was a tremendous stalemate.


Years and years, everybody's stuck and dug in.


And then in the interwar years, as they call them in England, there arose in England and Italy and America a group of military planners who were devoted to the airplane, to the bomber.


They're going to say, this is not going to happen again.


Here's what's going to happen.


We're going to build these big bombers, these flying fortress kind of things.


They're going to fly in.


They're going to hit the capital.


Everyone's going to panic.


The enemy is going to surrender.


And there'll be no ground war.


The troops can just walk in and take over.


The war is going to be over really fast.


They all promised that.


It didn't happen.


They thought they could fight.


And it's a pretty complicated history here, the Americans, without the fighter support you always see in the movies, because they didn't have the fighters at the time.


So the bombers were unescorted.


That was one of the reasons early on.


The other early reason is that they were very inexperienced.


And the Luftwaffe had been fighting for years.


They'd been gunning down people in Spain and Poland and all over the place.


They were a very experienced air force at that time.


And the Americans weren't.


So it took a long time to get this sorted out at a very heavy casualty rate.


The same thing for the Brits, too.


This kind of industrial destruction, 100% PTSD, 75% to 35% fatality rate, did it do any good?


That's the all-time question.


It did eventually knock the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, out of the sky so they could be the D-Day landing.


It did eventually choke off the oil and the synthetic oil that the Nazis were making.


It did help bring the end of the war.


To what effect?


How much?


And at the beginning of the war, it was the only way the Allies could fight on the continent.


You've got to remember, they were completely run out of continental Europe.


There is England, and they're fighting in North Africa.


So it was the only way they could fight back.


So it did good, not in the way that was promised.


It was over-promised.


And then on top of that, they did this big survey after the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, the USSB.


It was led by John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist.


He hated the Air Force.


He hated bombing.


So as you read it, the survey wasn't, to my eyes and other people upset, it wasn't really done right.


It was really too dismissive.


So and again, I'm not a military historian, but over-promised at the beginning, and then too dismissively assessed at the end.


And then because the RAF bombed completely differently, or very differently than the Americans, they were about obliterating cities, city-busting.


De-housing was the official policy.


It's very hard to get a hand on what that was.


But it did.


Well, that was the wholesale destruction of civilian populations.


I mean, the firestorms of Hamburg, of Tokyo.


I think more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than even died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


Yes, brutal, brutal, brutal.


And when you go to Japan, one of the things that the Allies thought, well, that should be it.


It's, I think, March when they firebombed Tokyo.


At that point, they thought, one of the times they thought, well, maybe the Japanese will capitulate, will surrender, sue for peace.


And they didn't, so they just firebombed every other city, bombed every other city, Curtis LeMay with the B-29.


In fact, it was getting down to it that there wasn't going to be nothing left to bomb for the atomic bomb.


It's really a grisly history.


And then if you look at if they had to land on the island, the case can be made that would have been millions more killed fighting up the island, fighting up Japan.


It's a very, very hard history.


And the questions that were asked after the war that we walked away from asking are two really important questions.


How did this happen?


How did this war break out?


And the other one is, how can we keep this from ever happening again?


And it's that second question I think we're losing track of.


Because the destruction in Japan, in Europe, was just massive.


I think they think maybe all told from direct conflict, from starvation, from persecution, maybe 55 million people.


I mean, it's madness.


And you can't picture how many people it was.


I mean, I can picture a stadium full of people.


And after that, you just can't.


So it's a hard thing to write about.


It's a hard thing to face.


And I think that's one of the reasons why in the tellings of the war in the 1950s and 60s, it becomes sanitized or a commemoration becomes kind of a ritualized forgetting.


You want to focus on the individual doing heroic things.


But if you really look at war and what happens to people, all those guys running up the beach, it's a denial of individuality.


It's like, you're running up there, you're being as brave as you can be.


You're here, you get shot, but if you're a step away, you're okay.


It's a very hard history to face, truthfully.


It comes out only recently, occasionally in the movies, that recent movie about Dunkirk, the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.


There's a German film, excuse me, a Russian film called Come and See.


I watched it, and my nephew happened to watch it, which takes place on the Russian front, which is brutal.


But we can't really face that.


That's kind of a rambling answer to a complicated question.


Well, and an important question, because right now we are seeing the relentless, brutal bombing of a civilian population in Gaza.


Yes, in Gaza and in Ukraine.


And in Ukraine.


This is happening right now, it's so depressing.


And your book, Howard Mansfield, I think this book is so important because it tells that story in a way that we can grasp it.


It tells a story from the point of view of your father, one of those individuals who was involved in it.


It goes into the kind of detail we so rarely see on what war really means.


And I want to thank you so much for writing this book and for talking with us here.


Oh, thank you, thank you very much.


Sasha Vasilyuk
Sasha Vasilyuk, welcome to Writer's Voice.


Thank you so much for having me, Francesca.


Sasha, you were born in Soviet Crimea, which then became part of Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and then was invaded and annexed by Putin's Russia in 2014.


You came to the U.S. when you were 13.


Tell us a bit about your family history and how it informed this wonderful novel.


Sure, so I was born and lived in Crimea until I was six, and then my family moved to Moscow.


And then we moved to San Francisco when I was 13.


So I spent half of my childhood in Ukraine, half of my childhood in Russia.


And I spoke Russian, that's my native language, and I speak it still.


But my father's family lived in Ukraine, an Eastern region called the Donbas, which became a war zone in 2014 after Crimea was annexed.


My grandma was there who was 90, but my beloved Jewish Ukrainian grandfather had passed away by then.


And he was a World War II veteran about whom we knew, not that we didn't, we thought we knew a lot about him, but he never talked about the war, which I guess is pretty common for veterans of that war.


However, when he passed away, my grandma discovered a letter that he'd written addressed to the KGB from the 80s.


So the letter was quite old by the time we found it.


And it explained what really happened to him during World War II, which was very much the opposite of what we believed.


So the sort of the myth he propagated kind of was that he fought the whole war from day one until the last day, which was very rare because so many people died.


And that kind of made him basically a war hero, but he never expanded on that beyond that.


And we just lived with this myth of this like veteran grandpa who was a war hero.


What we discovered in the letter was basically the opposite.


I think a good analogy would be that you thought you were watching like in Glorious Bastards, the movie about Jews hunting Nazis, but what you were really watching was more like The Pianist with Adrian Brody being my grandfather.


He was forced to hide this.


He was a prisoner of war in World War II.


And as a Jew in Nazi Germany, he had somehow magically survived for four years.


And while the letter was very short, I was very much intrigued by both his story, like what actually happened to him in the war and how he managed this incredible feat of surviving, but also, and maybe even more so, the fact that he kept it a secret for the rest of his life.


At first from the government, and then even after the government found out from us, the family that loved him.


I was very much interested in exploring this, the fear and shame and silence that played a role, not only in his life, but in the life of many Soviet people.


So explain that, because I think for most Americans, we would think that there is no shame in being a prisoner of war.


And it also sounds like your novel, in many ways, falls quite closely to this real story.


Although as a novel, you do get to really get into the mind of the main character, who's called Yefim, and his thought process.


But explain, why would he want to hide that he was a prisoner of war?


Yes, so there were several categories of people in Soviet Union who were considered, if not directly traitors, then very much close to that.


One category was prisoners of war.


Another category was forced laborers that were deported to work in Germany.


And third big category was people in Ukraine, for instance, who were occupied by the Nazis and lived under the Germans, basically, for two years.


So all of these people, though it was obviously not their fault for meeting this fate, they were, in Stalin's eyes, considered not trustworthy.


And for me, as a writer, this was one of the biggest challenges to explain that, because it is such a foreign concept.


Because obviously, none of that would apply to people here in the West.


And in terms of, I wanted to add also, in terms of fiction versus nonfiction.


So all I had to go on was this very short letter that my grandpa wrote to an agency called the KGB.


So obviously, it did not really have a lot of feelings.


I don't know if the facts were true at all, or if he was fudging things.


It was written 40 years after the events, so he's not probably remembering things or choosing to edit things out.


And that's kind of all I had.


Grandpa was dead, I couldn't ask him anything else, which is why, even though I'm a journalist, I decided that this was gonna be a work of fiction.


And I kind of think that I would say, like 90% of this is fictionalized, and 10% is based on facts.


But I was trying to be very diligent in staying very true and very realistic, and used a lot of research and kind of firsthand sources.


Because those people who survived this terrible fate, both being treated horribly by the Nazis, and then being often treated horribly by the Soviet Union when they came back home, it was important for me to preserve the reality of their experience.


I think you did that brilliantly in this book.


I'm still trying to understand, well, actually, I think I do understand because I read your book, but how to explain to our audience why they were seen as traitors.


In other words, the book is really set in the context of two totalitarian regimes, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.


And what you're really talking about here is how regimes of this kind, and let's say, in this case, let's focus on the Soviet Union and Stalin's Russia, how they ignore actual reality in order to create a myth, in order to create a lie, in order to be part of propaganda.


And I wonder if you could talk more about not only how they did it or why they did it or how that worked that way.


I mean, why would it be seen as being traitorous?


What are they supposed to do, kill themselves instead of being deported to be slave laborers or to be prisoners of war?


It's really bizarre.


But also how the victims of this kind of state propaganda, like your grandfather, except, or like Yefim in this novel, in your presence as mandatory, except the shame that is put on them.


So I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic.


So the thinking behind sort of why they're perceived as untrustworthy is because they were close to the enemy for an extended period of time.


There was, like in any war, certainly real collaborators.


And the Soviet government kind of used that idea that anybody who was exposed to the enemy could have been really a collaborator.


And how do we know?


We really need to check and we need to question them and put them in filtration camps.


And if we don't believe them still that they didn't collaborate with the enemy, we could always send them to the Gulag, to the camps in Siberia.


So it is a very bizarre type of thinking, but I think in any war, paranoia kind of rises up and becomes a weapon of the state.


What's interesting about the Soviet case is kind of exactly what you point out, which is that it was that propaganda and that kind of societal state sanction shaming was so strong that it really did get absorbed into the consciousness of individuals.


And it's interesting to study that, to look at this now, because all of those people who survived all of those horrible things, and not just World War II, there was also like a famine in Ukraine or being sent to the Gulag, all of those examples of a totalitarian regime kind of going extra crazy, they often never talked about it.


So, you know, just like in trauma, often victims of trauma, kind of rape, for instance, are too ashamed to talk about it, even though it's not their fault.


I think this dynamic multiplied by millions of people was kind of what was happening in Soviet Union.


And now we see a war between Russia and Ukraine, and we see World War II in Russia being used kind of as a weapon to partly excuse this war, something that isn't very much covered in the Western media, but if you read Russian media, it's very obvious.


There's several laws, new laws that Putin made up that dictate how you can talk about World War II and how you cannot.


So for instance, I don't think this book, this book would be banned if it wasn't Russian, because it disobeys those laws.


And it is used in propaganda to kind of link this national trauma of World War II with the current war, you know, the language of Nazis is coming back, all of that.


Russian soldiers are often buried, Russian soldiers of this war are often buried in the same places as World War II heroes.


It's just these two narratives are being mixed into kind of one thing that says, the message of which is Russia is defending itself against the enemy again, and just like last time, we will prevail.


That's kind of the messaging behind what Putin is doing.


And I believe that one of the reasons that you could have a message like that now and for it to actually work is that most of the people who see in World War II are now dead.


And most of them never talked about what happened to them and never left a record.


And so these personal stories that did not get passed on kind of created a vacuum of history that is very easily replaced by a state that wants to tell its own version of history.


Yeah, and your family, did you grow up, I don't actually know how old you are.


So do you remember the transition from, do you remember the collapse of the Soviet Union?


I do, I remember it.


And what's funny is that I kind of, the first thing, the first like, if you call it serious thing I wrote was when I was a kid.


I was maybe 11 or so.


And we got this assignment.


I was living in Moscow at the time still.


And we got this assignment in school to write a fairytale version of real historical events, which is, you know, sounds like a kind of complex exercise for somebody who's in fourth grade or fifth grade.


But the story I wrote was the Putsch.


So the change of, or the attempt to change of government when Soviet Union, that kind of preceded Soviet Union falling apart.


But I cast a story with animals, like Gorbachev was a lion, I think, and Yeltsin was a tiger or something like that.


I don't fully remember it.


But my teacher, what I remember about this is that my teacher was very impressed that I took this very dramatic recent historical event and turned it into a fairytale that worked, which is funny because now I'm, of course, writing a novel also about historical events.


So yes, the answer is I do remember it pretty well, even though I was like in elementary school.


Well, let's go back to your novel, Your Presence is Mandatory.


You mentioned that there were other, other than being forced labor or a POW, the other cause of shame was to be a Ukrainian, you know, an occupied Ukraine when it was occupied by the Nazis.


And Yefim's wife, Nina, comes under that kind of inconvenient truth for the Soviet regime.


I found that interesting because I think for many American Jews, including myself, the only thing we really knew about Ukraine before Putin's latest assault was that the Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis in murdering Jews.


And that's actually referred to in the book when we learn about a Jewish person who was shot by a Ukrainian policeman during the occupation.


Now, I have to say, in France, in Holland, in all the occupied countries, there was collaboration by the police with the Nazis.


But there is this kind of special place of hatred and resentment, I think, in American Jews about Ukrainians.


You know, “the Ukrainians were worse than the Nazis.”


I even heard that when Putin invaded Ukraine.


I just wonder, how true was this?


Was this a common thing or was it like it was in every occupied country?


There were collaborators and there were people who just, who were not collaborators.


Yes, I think that narrative got away from itself.


And I don't know the stats and the numbers exactly, but I can tell you that my grandmother, for instance, who was Ukrainian, she's not Jewish, she became an orphan during the war.


She was like 17 or 18, something like that.


Her parents had passed away and she was left alone.


But she hid a Jewish girl that she knew from the Nazis in her apartment.


And she was very much not the only person in Ukraine to do that.


So I think that narrative is skewed.


I do think it's also used, unfortunately, in the current war.


And I don't think that you can say Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis at all.


I think there was a subsection and there were a lot of people who certainly did not, who were suffering from the Nazis, just as anyone else.


And some of them, given the chance, even helped Jews.


This was a country where they really lived side by side.


So my grandma wrote a memoir.


She talked about her city where you could hear, before the war, you could hear four languages being spoken all the time.


Yiddish, German, Russian, and Ukrainian.


So imagine a place like that, right?


That's so mixed and everyone's interacting with each other.


Obviously, there's gonna be some people who are anti-Semitic and then there's gonna be people who are absolutely fine with their neighbors being Jews.


I do want to add one thing.


This is slightly different because this is not related to Ukraine particularly, but one of the things that struck me as I was researching this book was the fate of Jewish POWs.


So this applies directly to my grandpa and the main character of the novel, that POWs, Soviet POWs, were treated really atrociously and basically exterminated by the Nazis.


There were almost six million of them that were captured and more than half of them were killed, which is very much not known.


But within that group, there were also Jewish Soviet POWs, which is a smaller group, and they were exterminated much more so, right?


So at any point, if the Nazis would discover that this is a Jewish person who is also a soldier, then they would immediately shoot him.


But one of the ways they discovered it, and this is kind of so sad and so hard, it was very hard for me to find this out, was that they were often given up by other Soviet captives.


One thing that I think this says, and then I've seen this kind of in research, is that Soviet Union was a pretty new country at the time.


And it was a country that combined people that really had nothing to do with each other.


Like if you take, I don't know, Lithuania up north, and then Kazakhstan, like, you know, half the planet away, those people have never met, and all of a sudden, they're forced to give up any religion that they've had, and they're forced to speak Russian, a language that they probably did not speak before.


So all of these, and all of these things have been only happening for 20 years by World War II.


And then all of a sudden, they now are forced to fight the same enemy, to fight together in an army against the same enemy.


But by then, they're still not really one nation.


You know what I mean?


They're not like America, where it's just like, well, you're fighting for America.


No, do they really care about fighting for the Soviet Union?


A lot of them don't.


Do they care that somebody sitting next to them in a prisoner's camp is from some other country, some other republic they've never heard of?


No, so in atrocious conditions that they were put under, a lot of them snitched on each other.


And I mean, it's heartbreaking to even say this out loud, because I kind of don't want to believe that about humans.


But that was the truth.


Well, yeah, it is a horrible thing.


But the conditions were also in extremis.


I mean, people were being starved.


So I know there was one incident in your novel, in your presence as mandatory, Sasha Vasilyuk, that somebody gives up, one forced laborer gives up a Jewish forced laborer and is later seen drinking some milk, if I have that incident correct.


You know, somebody who was starving, who was given some food as a result.


These are the kind of reality, the nuanced reality, that people actually live in their lives, which makes it hard to judge.


And you really circle in this novel very much around the notion of how keeping such secrets impacts an entire life.


So I wonder if you could talk about that.


What is the cost?


There's clearly a cost of revealing the truth, but there's also an equal cost, perhaps, of hiding it.


Yes, I think this is a central question for me with this book, is that what does it mean when we keep a secret to supposedly protect our loved ones?


Are we really doing it to protect them or are we doing it to protect ourselves?


Because we're ashamed of something that we're keeping a secret about.


It's something that I think I'm generally fascinated about.


And so I was exploring here what the cost is.


In this environment, the Soviet environment, on kind of whole generations.


And the cost, I believe, is that when you don't pass down the truth of your personal experience, your children and your grandchildren and so on, kind of the society at large, starts to view history in much more of a black and white way.


We start to believe whatever kind of the narrative is versus knowing that things were much more complex and nuanced.


And so I really think that these personal stories are so vital to keep and to tell.


And I actually think that Svetlana Alexeevich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago for doing this exact work, these oral histories of people from Soviet Union at different eras.


She did some work on World War II, but also in the 90s and the Soviet Union falling apart.


I think there's a reason why that work got so much attention because it really uses these personal narratives to construct history that wouldn't otherwise exist and that often opposes kind of the official textbook history that's proposed by the state.


The Soviet Union fell, the promise of Glasnost, the promise of democracy.


You know, Alexei Navalny, before he was murdered, he expressed bitterness at the squandered opportunity for democracy.


Do you see a link between this kind of hiding, this myth-making, and the reason why Russia was not able to take advantage of the opportunity for democracy, or am I being too simplistic in making that connection?


I think that Germany had to do a lot of work on their own consciousness, while Soviet society did not do that work.


And I think that does create a certain result.


It creates a certain society.


If we are not talking openly about misdeeds that we did to each other in the past, and in Soviet Union, it was very much a place where horrible things were done to each other because of fear.


People were arrested because their neighbors told on them all the time.


And if we're not kind of delving into that and wrestling with it and are just moving on, which is, I think, what most people wanted to do.


They didn't want to think about the Soviet Union, or study it, or really, they just wanted to forget that it ever happened and move the heck on.


It's going to be hard to build a society that's free and that has a sense of community and togetherness, but without being like crazy nationalists and being against everyone else in the world.


You really need to deal with your past and your kind of family history and your societal history to free yourself from it and to be better.


So there's so many factors that obviously contribute it.


Capitalism being, I would say, probably the more major one than dealing with history that contributed to where we are today in Eastern Europe.


Greed is, I think, a major engine of Putin's government.


Violence is another one.


Getting rid of a lot of intellectuals and sending them away is another one.


And just like a general apathy and skepticism that has pervaded the society in Russia.


All of those play a role.


Navalny's death is very sad and hit a lot of people very hard.


I met him in 2012 when he was kind of rising to prominence.


And I was asked by CNN to write kind of an essay about it when he passed away.


And I've been a journalist for quite a long time, and this was the first time that I was bawling while writing.


It was a very strange experience.


I was on deadline.


I only had like two hours to file this story.


And I was hysterical, even though he wasn't my friend or anything.


But just it's so rare, I think, in our 21st century to have people who sacrifice themselves for a cause that I was just struck by this man who was willing to do that, even though he had a family that he loved.


So anyway, I digress.


But yes, lots of reasons, I think, for what is happening today.


I think a lot of people are rethinking their kind of mistakes.


And history in Russia is being constantly brought up now.


So people there are starting to wrestle with these ideas of past and how the past played a role in the present consciousness.


Navalny, it always seemed to me that his death was so pointless.


I mean, why did he go back?


I've been thinking that for years, because I knew he would not survive this.


But you have a note of hope.


Do you think effectively his martyrdom may, in fact, lead to some change in Russia?


That's something that I talk about in that CNN essay.


I called a few people to ask them what they thought.


I called my aunt in Ukraine, a friend in Moscow, my brother, who is a refugee in Warsaw, and some Soviet immigrants here in San Francisco, where I live.


And I would say, overall, the tapestry of their responses showed very much the opposite, very much that sort of what you were saying, not that it was pointless, but that it's not going to change anything, and things are only going to get worse.


I also went to a presentation by Elena Kostyuchenko.


She's this great journalist who's now running away from Russia, because she is being hunted, basically, for her reporting.


And she was talking, and I've heard other people from Russia talk about this idea that we keep having too much hope, and that we shouldn't, and saying that if we stop hoping, that we will be much more realistic, and it will be empowering in a way, that we won't be just waiting for things to magically get better, but to really face the reality and the horror that's happening.


And had we noticed it earlier, we possibly could have done more to stop it.


So I don't want to end on a pessimistic note.


Oh, I don't think that's pessimistic, actually.


What you're really saying is that if we see things clearly not colored by our hope, but by realism and expectations, that, in fact, then we are more able to take advantage of opportunities should they arise.


Yes, yes.


She was warning her kind of American audience in her talk about if you see something that feels like it's dangerous, it's because it is.


And I generally think Americans tend to be kind of more optimistic.


But she was saying that Russia is a lesson for everybody else to be able to stop things before they get to the point where they are unstoppable, and to really fight for what, you know, in this country, what we have, the rights we have still, and the democracy that still does mostly function here.


A cautionary tale, indeed.


Well, Sasha Vasilyuk, this is a beautifully written novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory. 
Thank you so much for talking with us here.


Thank you, Francesca.