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Original article: Del día en que combatíamos juntos al fascismo al que pasamos a matarnos entre hermanos eslavos

My mother took this photograph on a back road in Ukraine, where the asphalt cracks like memory. It shows no tank, no trench, no flag. Instead, it reveals something more poignant and inspiring for me—and I hope for the war-affected peoples—a frail old man slowly pedaling on a bicycle, wrapped in a red cloak that seems out of another time, ripped from a century long past, like a poppy petal escaped from the fields of the Great Patriotic War. Behind him, the trees form a silent, deep green wall, indifferent to the borders drawn on maps and to the wars declared by men.

Upon seeing him, one cannot help but think of that generation that fought together against the invader. I think of my beloved’s grandmother in Odessa, and her father and brothers who faced fascism under the same leaden sky. Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars, Kazakhs, Georgians, and all the peoples of the vast Soviet Union shared muddy trenches, the hunger gnawing at their bones, and death whistling with every projectile during those one thousand four hundred eighteen days of horror and resistance. Men and women who fell shoulder to shoulder in the frozen hell of Stalingrad, where the earth drank the blood of a hundred different tongues; in the fiery arc of Kursk, where the sky darkened with smoke and steel; in the liberation of Kiev, ravaged and martyred; and in the final assault on Berlin, where red flags embroidered with the hope of an eternal world waved. Men who learned that spilled blood, warm and of the same crimson color, had a common enemy: fascism.

Perhaps this elderly cyclist is one of the last keepers of those stories. Perhaps he grew up lulled by frontline songs, such as Katyusha or Zemlyanka, hearing tales of brothers in arms marching united toward the west, opening the doors of Auschwitz and Majdanek, defeating the Nazi barbarism whose boots aimed to trample forever on the flower of civilization. Perhaps in some wooden box, alongside an icon and a Medal of Valor, he keeps yellowing photographs of young, smiling soldiers who shared black bread and the last scrap of tobacco, never imagining that decades later, the descendants of those trench comrades would once again point rifles at each other from opposite sides of the same wound, speaking dialects of a shared language of pain.

The bicycle moves slowly over the cracked asphalt. It doesn’t seem to flee from distant booms. It doesn’t seem to chase a specific destination. Rather, it seems to carry the silent weight of a question that roams the fields of Eastern Europe like a ghost: At what precise moment did memory, which was an iron bridge forged in common victory, become a wire fence of resentment? At what moment did «no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten» fragment into opposing memories? War poets like Tvardovsky sensed this, and though no one expressed the following textually, we must remember that: War is a wound that festers, and time does not always heal it; sometimes, it exacerbates it.

The trees watch with their centuries-old patience. They were here before the first flag was raised, before the first line was drawn on a map, and they will remain here when these conflicts, like the ones before them, turn to dust upon the pages of books. They have seen empires with double-headed eagles pass by, revolutions promising heaven, Napoleon’s and Hitler’s armies swallowed by mud and winter, columns of exiles with empty eyes. They have heard different languages uttering the same syllables for the lament of a mother losing her child. They know, in their silent, vegetal wisdom, that the land does not distinguish between the blood of a Russian and that of a Ukrainian when both mix under the autumn rain, nurturing the same deep, intertwined roots.

There is an ancient and cyclical tragedy in the history of the Slavic peoples, children of the same steppe and the same song. For centuries they resisted invasions from all directions, shared salt and bread, cultures embroidered in vyshyvankas, polyphonic songs ascending to God, beliefs and sufferings under different yokes. Yet today they find themselves separated by freshly dug trenches, discourses poisoning the air, and new cemeteries where crosses and unbaptized tombstones sprout. As if the common victory over fascism, that titanic feat costing millions of Soviet souls, had been deliberately buried beneath layers of time, replaced by incompatible narratives and a fratricidal war tearing apart families, peoples, and shared memories.

The image of this cyclist wrapped in his scarlet cloak did not go unnoticed by me or by my mother who captured it. His almost ghostly figure, against the green vastness of the Ukrainian forest, reminds us that history does not always gallop to the rhythm of tanks or proclamations. Sometimes it moves slowly, on two fragile wheels, carrying with it the muffled echoes of a world that no longer exists but refuses to die completely. A world where Slavs shared the same trench and the same anthem in the face of death, instead of finding themselves face to face on battlefields watered with the tears of the same grandmothers.

And as the bicycle fades away, a point of color merging into the green twilight of the road, the feeling emerges in the air that the true defeat, the most absolute and irreversible one, is not that of an army or a nation. The real defeat, the one that breaks the spirit of centuries, occurs when peoples forget the struggles that united them in the communion of sacrifice and only remember what separates them. When the children of common heroes become adversaries, the ashes of Stalingrad and Kiev weep, silently—they weep as my soul does, day by day, yearning to return to my beloved Ukraine.

But not all is lost while this cyclist in a scarlet cloak traverses the forests like a torch against forgetfulness. Dear Ukraine will awaken guided by this rider on wheels and will sweep away, without bloodshed, with the sole strength of communication, memory, history, and democracy, the political class that sowed discord among brothers seduced by western «gold.» The day will soon come when Kiev and Moscow together reclaim shared memory and restore peace between brotherly peoples.

Travel far, my words, to every corner of the Dnipro peoples, travel alongside this photograph that has inspired today’s humble exercise of memory.

Bruno Sommer

La entrada From Combatting Fascism Together to Fratricidal Conflicts: The Tragic Tale of Slavic Brothers se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.