Time sleeps in the papers' rustling. While reading the forces letters, we wake them, their stories and concerns fall into our hands, heavily weighing on them for a while. They won't let go of us. Letter for letter, sign for sign we grope our way through this rough terrain of worries and hardships. We recover treasures, we testify to what the addresses were never able to read, being dead perhaps or otherwise unreachable for the senders at home, in the trenches. For hours we drown in those leaves of time, rustling and listening for history's whisper. A quiet, deeply imprinted miracle.

“Oh, let those cranes move on in their sorrow...” Eva Maria Hagen sings in Biermann's translation of a Jessenin poem; lightly, yet infinitely plaintive. But in the last room of Kiev's Museum of the Great Patriotic War there are cranes that don't move on. They stay in an endless funeral procession flight over the ready-laid wooden table, built on bullet casings; they stay over these 27 metres of table – one metre for each million of dead. Tied from military canvas on the one, and colourful women's headscarves on the other side they soar, reminding of the dead and surviving, in a long procession over the table. Before the dead's eyes, 6000 faces, the fallen and surviving are called to table. It is laid with battered dishes of fallen soldiers and a row of glasses for the remembering. Thus, one sits in front of official notifications of death, many “ruschnik” - the traditional embroidered Ukrainian bridal and funeral cloths.

And the sorrow does not move on. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Oleksandra speaks slowly and thoughtfully, she sometimes weighs her words. She speaks in Chmelnyzkyj's Museum of Resistance about the graduates of 1941, about the night the war started, when they wanted to celebrate graduation and became partisans: 17-year-olds, like Maria Trembowezka, active and persecuted, tortured and shot, in the end, for her revolt against occupation, war, and wrong. They freed starving prisoners of war at “Stalag 355”, where 60.000 lost their lives, blew up railway tracks, and sabotaged. They wanted to be free, be allowed to go to the cinema or fishing. Both was forbidden by threat of being shot.

Oleksandra speaks slowly, she also speaks about her parents.

ihr wart meine schüler

nicht hier im freien

weiten steppenraum

östlich des vergessens

wir zogen gemeinsam

die loren der erinnerung

durch stollen und über ebenen

dem gespräche zu

(16.11.2012, Chmelyzkyj; Rainer F. Kokenbrink)