“During my childhood I loved to play war games with friends,” Ukrainian author Andriy Kurkov recalled in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. It was Germans against Soviets. The wounds of World War II were still fresh and the children were shaped by the stories of those who lived through it. Kurkov and his friends also dug for war relics: They took a train to the outskirts of Kiev and only had to dig up the black earth to find remnants of the bitter fighting that raged there two decades earlier.
“We had folding shovels with us,” Kurkov describes his youthful travels to the village of Tarasivka, a World War II battlefield. “It was easy to find cartridges from machine guns and rifles, there were also fragments of grenades and uniform buttons.” An acquaintance even found the gun barrel of a German tank with a metal detector that locates relics down to a meter deep . 50 years after his forays with the folding shovel, Kurkow’s homeland is once again at war. And that also leaves its mark on Ukrainian soil.
Source: Krone
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