Wind Doth Blow

Wind Doth Blow

There was a poem I read once, or an essay, or a novel.
It said something like “Siberia is in my bones. Its wind blows coldly through my soul”. For a long time, I imagined those words on my skin. My grandmother, my Babcia, was taken, taken by Siberia. Siberia robbed her of a father, of a mother, of a brother. It came to Lwów, which is Lviv now and a park of the Ukraine, but was then Poland.

I have not been able to find the poem, and the source of those words is lost to me, but some nights I feel the cold winds of Siberia blow through my ancestry, and wake up in a terror of betrayal, and powerlessness, of brutal unflinching cold, and the hatred of men.

Now, perhaps, some day soon, the cold winds of Siberia will blow again to Lviv, and another young girl will lose a father, a mother, a brother. Will grow up broken. Will grow up not knowing how to love and how to be loved, will struggle through, will bear the scars of loss for a lifetime and have no one to turn to.

Will there be trains?

Is it madness to think that it could come to that again?

Tightly packed bodies and breath misting in freezing air. Puddles of urine and the smell of death heavy on the air.

Will there be camps.

Surely not that. But surely not this.

Not tanks, artillery, hard men with hard faces and hard hearts. Agreements broken and lines crossed. Shelled buildings and photographs. Barefaced lies and flags and mineral resources.

Not the teetering madness of structured decimation. Yet 'surely not' holds no more power, and we are witness.

How did it come to this?