Blood on the tracks

Liliana Corobca is a historian of communism in eastern Europe (she carries out archival work on subjects including censorship, book banning, mass deportations and labour camps), and she moonlights as a novelist. In her latest book, Too Great a Sky, she sets out to prove Stalin wrong. “If only one man dies of hunger”, he apocryphally quipped, “that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Corobca exposes the tragedies beneath the statistics.

Her story begins in Bukovina, which the Soviet Union occupied in the summer of 1940. As part of the occupation, thousands of native Romanians were deported to labour camps in Siberia, many dying of hunger and thirst during the train journey, and even more of disease, exhaustion and starvation at their destination. The author has done extensive research, but here adopts the voice of the fictional Ana Blajinschi, deported at the age of eleven, along with her mother, from her native village to the steppes of Kazakhstan. The innocence of the gaze makes the account all the more harrowing. Ana proves to be a remarkably effective witness.

The train’s cattle cars have no windows or other open spaces; the overriding sensation during the month-long journey is of unbearable heat, oppressive darkness and a lack of oxygen. People get little food and even less water. The sick, the elderly and the very young have the highest rates of mortality. When they die, and they die in droves, the decomposing corpses remain for days amid the living. Occasionally the train slows down and the guards climb in and throw the corpses off, leaving them to rot where they fall.

The train makes its final stop at the end of the tracks (the book’s Romanian title is Capătul drumului: “the end of the road”). The deportees are then left to fend for themselves in the middle of the steppe, under an oppressively bright Kazakh sky. The local population regard them with hostility – they have been told to expect dangerous “enemies”. Worse is to come with the arrival of the Siberian winter. The deportees “had neither winter clothes, nor shoes, nor enough food, and that’s why they dropped like flies”, Ana reports. The description of the settlement’s near-collapse, at a time when even the locals fall prey to starvation, is haunting. “The smaller children went around begging and they’d find old people who were frozen, almost dead. Mayors, teachers, village leaders would also beg for a crust of bread.”

One of the novel’s remarkable accomplishments is the complex fictional universe that Corobca creates though the lens of Ana: a peasant woman reflecting on a life caught up in the wheels of twentieth- century history. As a grown woman she is intensely religious, intelligent, expressive, even worldly, if poorly educated. She remains a staunch Christian in a world where Christianity has been outlawed. She has undergone horrendous trials, yet has survived to tell the story, her humanity intact. She can be preachy and occasionally repetitive, but never boring. Her world-view is steeped in Bukovinian folk culture and she often falls back on folk poetry, which would have made the translation a daunting task. Monica Cure does an excellent job of rendering the narrator’s multilayered, idiosyncratic Romanian into English.

There is a strong element of grim farce prevalent throughout, from the beginning, with people randomly arrested and deported “more to fill up the railcars … than anything else”, to the end, when the elderly Ana receives a document from the Soviet authorities admitting that she had not been at “fault”. She reflects on how she carried out “hard labor and built up socialism … Then socialism disappeared, like a puff of smoke. We had suffered for nothing”. The Ana Blajinschis of the world always suffer for nothing. Even more grimly farcical is the reparations money that accompanies her rehabilitation papers:

For our goods which were destroyed, for all our property that had been taken, for the tortures and privations suffered in desolate foreign places, for years, I received forty-one rubles as compensation. If you added twenty rubles to this sum, you could buy yourself a headscarf.

Most farcical of all, perhaps, is history’s repetition. Once again Russia is occupying lands to its west, and once again the citizens of those lands, including children, are being forcibly deported.

Costica Bradatan’s latest book, In Praise of Failure, 2023, is now available in paperback. He is working on a new book, The Herd in Our Head

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