After much pre-planning, chnaging my work/childcare days and the dentist, to achieve an important appointment this week...After over a week of gruelling tummy bug for the baby, night and day washing, cleaning, bathing, my older son became sick with terrible cold and cough on Wednesday. High temperature, the lot. Up 1am to 4am this morning, me sponging him with a cool cloth. I thought I'd got used to the lack of sleep but waves of nausea kept flowing over me whilst laying listening to his racking cough.
So all the plans are kyboshed too, I can't keep the appointment (my only hope, my mother has the sickness bug now, too, and with her not being too robust please to keep her safe), and still have to pay for the childcare I planned so carefully, and now can't see the dentist for ages.
Of course I'm not moaning about the boys being ill, I would cut off my right arm for them and it doesn't matter how little sleep I get. Even when all my letters and numbers get mixed up when I write.
Especially when I read a piece my Mum had cut out for me in the paper, about the book just written called Gulag Voices. 'Gulag' is an acronym for what was broadly the Soviet slave labour camp system. It was terrible but at it's worst under Stalin.Torture, astonishing cruelty, gang rape, and starvation were the norm. So humbling, makes you feel so outraged, angry, hopeless and devastatingly sad.
I will describe the worst one for me, because the lady in question, Hava Volovich described her baby daughter reminding me of my youngest son, and what happened to her was unspeakable, and of course not at all an isolated case.
Hava was a newspaper sub-editor, (always a dangerous job in countries with unscrupulous governments)imprisoned for being publicly critical of the treatment of Ukranian peasants. She was 21, and was one of the tens of thousands of young prisoners to become pregnant and give birth in the camp.
Prison nurseries existed but because of punishing regimes, starvation and cruelty, the children often died. She worked in the forest felling trees in the day and at night, shared a tiny room with 2 other mothers. She brushed the bedbugs off her baby by night, and by day had to leave the babies with women who they knew would take the food out of the children's mouths.
'Every night for a year, I stood at my child's cot, picking off the bed bugs and praying, begging God to prolong my torment by 100 years if it meant I wouldn't be parted from my daughter.'
Eleanor had just started walking and talking when they were transferred to the 'mother's camp' in a freezing cold freight car. She saw her baby turn from a chubby little angel with golden curls to a pale ghost with blue shadows under her eyes and sores on her lips. Through wretched illness, she had to bribe the guards with firewood to see her daughter outside normal hours.
But the things she saw..Nurses shoving and kicking children out of bed before washing them with ice cold water. She saw a nurse grab the nearest baby, tie back the arms and cram hot porridge down the throat.
'My little Eleanor began to fade faster. 'Mama, want home', she cried one evening, her little body covered with mysterious bruises'. On the last day of her life, she could not even stand being breast fed, the description of pain is heart rending.
'In the evening, when I came back to my little bundle of firewood her cot was empty. I found her... in the morgue among the corpses of adult prisoners...she had spent one year and four months in the camp and died on March 3rd 1944'. I've had to mop my eyes so many times writing this, because I can't see the keyboard. It makes me hold my children fiercely close and defend them like a lioness, even more.
I hope I'm not breaching any copyright laws. My Dad was in a Russian POW camp and spoke very little about it. His friend, Roman Rodziewicz, a noted war hero, (and involved in the film Major Hubal, 1973, because of his real-life involvement) told my mother that he'd tried to drive a nail in his own head, due to the brutal treatment by the Gestapo and in Auswitch, Germany.
You can not even call some people animals, animals can't be this evil. People who endured these camps, slavery, war crimes in the past and present must have surely already been in hell or purgatory now and go to paradise no question. It must be the case of, Happy are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, a huge understatement in some cases.
So all the plans are kyboshed too, I can't keep the appointment (my only hope, my mother has the sickness bug now, too, and with her not being too robust please to keep her safe), and still have to pay for the childcare I planned so carefully, and now can't see the dentist for ages.
Of course I'm not moaning about the boys being ill, I would cut off my right arm for them and it doesn't matter how little sleep I get. Even when all my letters and numbers get mixed up when I write.
Especially when I read a piece my Mum had cut out for me in the paper, about the book just written called Gulag Voices. 'Gulag' is an acronym for what was broadly the Soviet slave labour camp system. It was terrible but at it's worst under Stalin.Torture, astonishing cruelty, gang rape, and starvation were the norm. So humbling, makes you feel so outraged, angry, hopeless and devastatingly sad.
I will describe the worst one for me, because the lady in question, Hava Volovich described her baby daughter reminding me of my youngest son, and what happened to her was unspeakable, and of course not at all an isolated case.
Hava was a newspaper sub-editor, (always a dangerous job in countries with unscrupulous governments)imprisoned for being publicly critical of the treatment of Ukranian peasants. She was 21, and was one of the tens of thousands of young prisoners to become pregnant and give birth in the camp.
Prison nurseries existed but because of punishing regimes, starvation and cruelty, the children often died. She worked in the forest felling trees in the day and at night, shared a tiny room with 2 other mothers. She brushed the bedbugs off her baby by night, and by day had to leave the babies with women who they knew would take the food out of the children's mouths.
'Every night for a year, I stood at my child's cot, picking off the bed bugs and praying, begging God to prolong my torment by 100 years if it meant I wouldn't be parted from my daughter.'
Eleanor had just started walking and talking when they were transferred to the 'mother's camp' in a freezing cold freight car. She saw her baby turn from a chubby little angel with golden curls to a pale ghost with blue shadows under her eyes and sores on her lips. Through wretched illness, she had to bribe the guards with firewood to see her daughter outside normal hours.
But the things she saw..Nurses shoving and kicking children out of bed before washing them with ice cold water. She saw a nurse grab the nearest baby, tie back the arms and cram hot porridge down the throat.
'My little Eleanor began to fade faster. 'Mama, want home', she cried one evening, her little body covered with mysterious bruises'. On the last day of her life, she could not even stand being breast fed, the description of pain is heart rending.
'In the evening, when I came back to my little bundle of firewood her cot was empty. I found her... in the morgue among the corpses of adult prisoners...she had spent one year and four months in the camp and died on March 3rd 1944'. I've had to mop my eyes so many times writing this, because I can't see the keyboard. It makes me hold my children fiercely close and defend them like a lioness, even more.
I hope I'm not breaching any copyright laws. My Dad was in a Russian POW camp and spoke very little about it. His friend, Roman Rodziewicz, a noted war hero, (and involved in the film Major Hubal, 1973, because of his real-life involvement) told my mother that he'd tried to drive a nail in his own head, due to the brutal treatment by the Gestapo and in Auswitch, Germany.
You can not even call some people animals, animals can't be this evil. People who endured these camps, slavery, war crimes in the past and present must have surely already been in hell or purgatory now and go to paradise no question. It must be the case of, Happy are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, a huge understatement in some cases.
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