She is from Mariupol Author: [Germany] Natasha Wardin Publisher: New Star Press

★Content Introduction

"If you had seen what I've seen." My mother always repeated this sentence over and over again.

“Dear God, please let me feel what she felt, just for a moment,” the daughter said many years later.

One day when Natasha Wodin was ten years old, her mother went out and never came back. Later, she learned that her mother drowned herself in the Regnitz River without leaving a single word; her father was an alcoholic and buried himself in Russian books all day. - After that, the author realized that she knew nothing about her. The only thing she knew was that she was from Mariupol and was driven out of Ukraine to Germany as a forced laborer in 1943. With very few clues, Natasha Wodin pieced the broken pieces together bit by bit. She found that the past of this family was a huge mystery and a historical allegory about the suffering of Eastern Europe... The author used a fascinating way to completely restore a mother's personal history, family history, and turbulent history of the 20th century. Although this is a non-fiction work, it is more magical, more dramatic, and more thrilling than a fictional work.

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★Editor's Recommendation

◎A family history, a microcosm of a century of world disasters

◎A true record of Eastern European disasters in the 20th century, filling the gap in the publication of Eastern labor history during World War II

◎A writer comparable to Winfred Sebald, a book that uses words to save lost lives and memories

◎Rewrite the history of Eastern Europe, piece together the fragments of history, and fully restore the tragic personal history. The 12,000,000 Eastern laborers are by no means a historical footnote outside the Holocaust of the Jews in World War II. They show the panorama of the tragedy of European civilization and reveal the unknown fate of the Ukrainians.

◎Won the second largest literary award in German, the Leipzig Book Prize (non-fiction), the Döblin Prize, and received high praise from German Literature Online, Der Spiegel, Die Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Süddeutsche Zeitung

◎ As soon as it was published, it was translated into French, Lebanese, Italian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, Arabic and other languages, and has long been at the top of the German book list

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Media Comments

A panoramic view of the century presented in the form of family history...a remarkable work.

——"Der Spiegel"

…Only through personal narratives can we understand how historical events have affected a person’s experience and how current events have fundamentally shaped a person’s life. It is no coincidence that this work allows us to see the shadow of the great German memory artist Sebald rescuing lost lives from oblivion.

—Sigrid Löffler, 2015 Döblin Prize acceptance speech

An essential text about forgetting. … This gripping masterpiece goes far beyond the search for one’s own family roots.

——German Literature Online

Human life is so small and yet so rich, and it disappears so quietly in the crusher of history. This is what "She is from Mariupol" tells, and the author wanders and searches between fiction and research, reconstruction and memory. ... The author's language is simple and unadorned, but it is appropriate. ... Very great and influential art.

—Jörg Magenau, German Radio Culture Department

Unpredictable and surprising clues are intertwined, just like a crime suspense film. Every detail adds tension and accidentally leads to a series of incredible things... "She is from Mariupol" is a microcosm of the disaster history of the 20th century, and its influence continues to this day.

—Helmut Böttiger, Die Zeit

There have been several works in recent years about the nightmare of the twentieth century, about violence, as distant as records in archives. Although Natasha Wardin only shows a small part of the story that is happening, her story is so close to the reader that we see ourselves in it.

——Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Natasha Wardin has established a paradigm of writing that is both classical and extraordinary.

—Hans-Peter Kunisch, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Revolution, hunger, world war, civil war, gulag, this is a more dramatic family story. ... Natasha Wardin inherited the mission that historians seemed unable to continue: exposing the history of forced labor and prisoners of war to the public eye.

——Deutsche Welle

This book is fascinating. When I read the first sentence, my heart was in my throat. It was tragic and shocking. It was hard to stop turning the pages. ... It belongs to the lineage of Herta Müller and Imre Kertész.

——"Cologne City News"

...a great book that fights against silence. It is a vivid, lively, questioning, desperate and moving history. Of course, it is also full of pain. This is a tear-jerking book, a personal history written under multiple clues and searches.

——Cultural Channel of Bavarian Radio 2

With limited information, Woodin carefully pieced together the fragments of a mysterious family history, and the result is a much-praised, affectionate masterpiece that rivals WG Sebald. … She Was from Mariupol fills a literary void and serves as a monument to thousands of Eastern Europeans through a loving tracing of their mother’s family.

——New Books in German

This book calls attention to historical issues that are little known and often not in the spotlight, and the history of Eastern labor in Nazi Germany is one of them. Sometimes it is like a detective novel. You can't stop reading this book because you don't know what Natasha Wardin will fill in the gaps. Many things have surfaced in history, but many things have not been said. This is the meaning of writing family history.

——Beyond History

This book once again reveals a scar in German history. Many archival materials were deliberately destroyed, and the memories of the parties involved were lost with their deaths. Even if there are still people who know about it, most of them remain silent. ... I believe that with the spread of this book, this obscured and forgotten history will re-enter the public memory.

——China's Literary Gazette

author

Natasha Wardin is a German writer and German-Russian translator. She is the daughter of a Soviet forced laborer. She was born in a postwar German "exile camp" in 1945. After her mother committed suicide, she was adopted by a Catholic girls' adoption home. After graduating from a language school, she worked as a Russian translator and temporarily lived in Moscow. In 1983, her first novel "City of Glass" was published, followed by "I Have Lived", "Marriage", "Brothers and Sisters in the Night" and "Man in the Shadow". She has won the Hesse Award, the Grimm Brothers Award and the Chamisso Award.

Natasha Wardin was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize and the Döblin Prize for her book She is from Mariupol. She currently lives in Berlin and Mecklenburg.

Translator

Qi Qinwen, a Chinese-German, holds a master's degree in both education and German studies from the University of Kassel, Germany. She was the representative of the University of Göttingen in China and has been engaged in Sino-German university exchanges for nearly ten years. She is currently working at the School of Foreign Languages ​​of Hohai University. Her hobbies include traveling, watching movies and translating books. She has published translations of Heidegger and His Wife's Book (2016) and The Photographer of Auschwitz (2018).