You are born and live, maybe speaking two languages that shape your reality. As a child, you are surrounded by family and familiar faces, existing in a world that feels secure. You might live in the Kyrgyz village of Telman, which the elders call Grünfeld. It is the late 1980s, and the village is predominantly German, with many Mennonite families. The elders speak Plautdietsch (Low German), while the younger generation uses primarily Russian. In their passports, the nationality reads "German."

You are a child, not asking how a German village exists in Kyrgyzstan. Instead, you enjoy simple pleasures while you overhear words spoken by grown-ups that could blossom into stories but do not. No one asks. No one tells.
Only much later do you understand that no one is simply born and lives. Each of us is born into a place, into a time, into a story. Understand that you owe your life to those who outlived too much in the past to dare tell the whole story: "Grandpa was in the Gulag."
In the Soviet Union, keeping silent meant safety for oneself and others. Even a language, particularly German, could be dangerous. Thus, the elders did not try to stop the children from forgetting it. What they do not know cannot betray them. However, some scenes and stories emerge from those who survived, sometimes only at the moment of death or during a meal, when the memories of hunger are most vivid.

Kursiv: "In 1944, starved so much, Grandpa was finally too weak and too ill to work. Therefore, he was released from the Gulag to die at home in one of these winters. But he survived."

Born in Siberia in 1907, he was a teacher in today's Kyrgyzstan by 1937. Due to his critiques and his German heritage, he was considered a danger to the regime.

The elders' secrets exist as questions that children and grandchildren carry with them, even after migrating from Kyrgyzstan to Germany. They piece together places, dates, and origins of trans-generative traumata, discovering that: "They put Opa in the Gulag during the Great Terror of 1937. There, he had to drag the corpses onto the top of the pile of dead, frozen bodies that piled up during the long, harsh winters."

Safety is a fleeting feeling. Before her death, Oma revealed that she was Jewish; her name was Sara. I have so many questions, as my children do. But when is the right time for a 9-year-old boy to hear the most severe answers? Even for him, the past remains unpredictable, much like the future.