Uncle Mytia, a Plus One
Every time I go on a search to clarify one of our many family mysteries, my mom says, “Don’t forget to look for uncle Mytia”. Sometimes I feel that even if I try to find my own childhood medical card, mom would come up, and whisper over my shoulder, “what about uncle Mytia”?
The strangest of our family stories has to do with my grandma’s uncle Mytia. He was a most mysterious figure, and the only thing we know about him for sure is that he went to war and never returned. In 1941 my grandma and great-grandma walked with him to the first platform of Kharkiv Central Station. They hugged, he got on the train with other soldiers… and vanished. He didn’t send a single letter, there were no death certificates, he simply disappeared.
Nobody knew much about him. He didn’t get the time to marry, he worked in “some organs” (nkvd?), as grandma suspected, because, firstly, he had a leather jacket and, secondly, because he usually appeared when great-grandma was in trouble. He helped great-grandma get a job of a cook at a kindergarten when nobody wanted to hire the wife of the ‘people’s enemy’. We don’t even know where he lived.
But every time I’m trying to search for the ancestors, mom says, ‘don’t forget to look for uncle Mytia too.’ Uncle Mytia goes as plus one to every search. She never stops looking, like her mother never stopped looking for this man. And that is the strangest thing.
The motto ‘Never again’ doesn’t resonate with Eastern Europe. It was already ‘again’ in 1946 when another wave of hunger washed over Ukraine. Stalin lived till 1953, continuing to kill jews and other minorities under various pretexts.
But the memory, the ‘Never Forget’ remained in family histories. Such as uncle Mytia, who left nothing on this earth, but a couple of photographs, and a lasting memory of several generations of people who continue to search for him.
