First off, I loved this book; I was surprised, too, how much I loved it, not really expecting, when I started, to get swept along in this amazing narrative. I guess I could just say “What a surprise !! I love this book so much !!” and be done.

But why did I love it?

The author is an adept at drawing out her characters in a few strokes; I felt as if I knew all the people sweeping across the years as her search for answers brought more and more surprises at every turn.

A very moving, heart-wrenching look back from a young girl, no longer young, seeking (as most of us do) some clarity about her family history, the author uncovers an incredible story, filled with a Tolstoyan tapestry of characters, a family, much to her amazement, of wealthy nobles whose lives were turned upside down by, first, the Russian Revolution and later World War II.

This book was a lot of things: a haunting memoir of her search, a page turning detective story, a look back at the atrocities of the early years of Soviet Rule, and a heart-breaking (and infuriating) look at the fate of forced laborers during the Third Reich.

I felt such sadness for the author’s mother, a beautiful young woman whose life was filled with tragedy, as well as for the fates of her aunts and uncles. Once I started, I couldn’t stop; I needed to know what was going to happen.

This book works on multiple levels and I highly recommend it.

I was only twenty-three and in a new city when the lady from across the street came to the door. She came every morning that summer. She brought us cherry dumplings–with cherry pits still intact. She asked me to sew her a dress with a high neckline to hide her creased neck. Nadia told me a few things about her life, but I was too young and ignorant to understand the life behind those few facts.

Nadia was twenty when she volunteered to stand in for her father as a worker on a Nazi farm, a work camp. She believed they sterilized her, because she was never able to have a child. After the war, she met her husband John and they were lucky to be selected to immigrate. They could go to Canada, Brazil, or New Jersey. They came to America.

We only lived in that place for two years and I often wondered about Nadia over the years. Reading She Came From Mariupol, I kept thinking about her. Natasha Wodin’s story of her mother’s life gave me insight into what Nadia, born in the Ukraine, had experienced.

She Came From Mariupol is Natascha Wodin’s journey to understand the mother who killed herself when she was ten years old. Evgenia Yakovlevna, born in 1920 in Mariupol, had been beautiful. And, she was desperately unhappy and unable to cope with life. Wodin hoped to learn about her mother’s life and her family thorough genealogical research online.

I once heard my mother play the piano–something so unspeakably beautiful and sad, like nothing I had ever heard before. On the way home, my mother held my hand and said it was the “Raindrop” prelude by Frederic Chopin…

from She Came From Mariupol by Natascha Wodin
Wodin remembered stories her mother had told her, and she remembered the years after the war, hiding in a shed so the family wasn’t sent to the violence of the displaced persons camp. If they were returned to Russia, they would have been considered traitors and sent to Siberia, or shot. In school, Wodin was shunned as a Russian. She was always hungry. Her father was sullen and angry. Her mother depressed, malnourished, suffering from PTSD.

I only knew that I belonged to a type of human refuse, to some sort of garbage that was left over from the war.

from She Came From Mariupol by Natascha Wodin
The first part of the book relates her personal memories and the stories she recalls and her genealogical research. In the second part, Wodin narrates her aunt’s sister’s story as told in a journal she wrote in late life, her life of privilege in the international city of Mariupol, her time in Germany, and as a displaced person in postwar Germany. Wodin’s mother was born after the family’s financial losses, smack in the middle of turmoil and violence that continued throughout her life. Wodin’s parents were deported to Germany in 1944 as slave labor in Germany’s factories so the German men were freed up for military service.

Wodin was shocked by the atrocities her family endured, wondering how we could have forgotten. The continual violence as the Red, White, and Black armies battled across Russia. The suffering at the forced labor camps, the slaves dispensable and mistreated, starving and ill, working twelve hour days. The millions of displaced persons after the slave workers were freed, hated if they stayed in Germany, hated if they returned home, considered collaborators with the Nazis. Viewed with suspicion by their American and British liberators.

I was riveted by Wodin’s narrative, appalled, and my heart breaking.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A detailed and personal account of the author's search to learn more about her mother, an enigmatic figure whose traumatic experiences during WWII colored the rest of her life and the lives of her children. With only a scant bit of information, Wodin begins her quest online, connecting with other family history researchers, genealogists, survivors, and more. Each foray into the life of her mother's immediate family reveals more heartbreak and suffering, but these are stories worth telling and remembering, including details of the Nazi's forced work camps in which residents of Eastern Europe were sent to Germany to work; the looting and violence that occurred during the chaos of the Russian Revolution; and the coping mechanisms victims found--or couldn't find--in the aftermath. At times the writing is a bit clunky, and sometimes the side-trips aren't well integrated into the primary purpose of the book, but overall it is a testament to the need for historical records and documents and evidence, and to the author's determination to learn about her family.

This magnificent memoir explodes upon the reader, revealing the lives of the author's ancestors from pre-Revolutionary times in the Russian empire when they were wealthy merchants in Mariupol, through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian Revolution, the Holodomor, Stalin terror years, Siberian exile, World War II occupied Ukraine and also the Nazi slave raids where Ukrainians were captured and shipped to the Reich where they were worked and starved to death by the millions. The memoir begins and ends with the author as a beaten and downtrodden refugee in Germany.

This is a vast story to tell and Wodin's method is akin to smashing open one egg at a time in a big nest of them. Any one of the many historical eras had enough experience for an entire book (on a few occasions, a single paragraph could have made a book) and so while a vast history of a family is uncovered, I kept on wanting more detail in each of the eras.

Kudos to Natascha Wodin for writing about her family's experiences during so many times of Soviet and German history that have been propagandized and hidden.
#netgalley #nataschawodin

Searching for the past of her mother, who committed suicide when she was still a child, and of whom she knows practically only the place of origin, Mariupol, in Ukraine, the author discovers, and tells, an incredible story of social transformation, war and emigration, between the Soviet revolution and the Nazi invasion. The number of events, twists and turns, and pain, collected in this book is decidedly impressive, and the writing, simple and not at all emphatic, only increases the impression it makes on the reader a hundredfold.
A book to be read, absolutely.

Eye opening informative,I learned so much about ww2llabor camps.Emotional moving the authors writing brings us right in to heart wrenching moments brings them alive.A truly excellent credal.#netgalley #uofmichigan

She Came from Mariupol by Natasha Wodin

With the Internet’s help in discovering people’s hidden past Wodin set out to discover her mother’s experience during WW2. Her mother died when she was 10 when she and her family were living in a camp for displaced persons.

There so much to say about this book The writing is very comfortable, almost chatty keeping my interest throughout. The translator did a remarkable job keeping Wodin’s writing style while keeping the facts in check. The only time it slowed in pace was during the journal section.

I learned so much while reading this book…biggest for me was I didn’t realize the Nazi’s also
placed Slavic populations (non-German’s) in work camps. After the war they became displaced persons as they had nowhere to go. All had been taken from them. Wodin takes us through her investigation, her successes and failures in her search and finally she puts together what she thinks her mother’s life must have been after collecting all the facts.

Great insight into life during that period, wonderfully created.

I finished this book with the very interesting knowledge of WW2.
I never hear about labor camps around Leipzig,and DP camp near Nuremberg…
What a fascinating and very dramatic story ..
Thanks NetGalley for letting read this book.

Natalja Wdowin at birth, Natascha Wodin tells the story of her mother, father and family in this book. It starts out fairly slow but picks up at the end. The last section kept my attention and I wish she had started with it. The book would have made more sense with this story in the beginning. As I read the first three sections, I struggled to keep track of all the details and felt bad for the author who endured so much trauma in her early years.
Themes in this book include mental illness, poverty, survival, trauma, and addiction. It's a book about resilience, though, too.

She Came From Mariupol by Natascha Wodin is an account of the author's journey to discover her lineage and its history as it lived through the Soviet Union's ever-changing landscape presided over by Stalin and the circumstances of WWII.

There is a lot to be learned from the author's description of her own life experiences that took place directly after the war ended as well as description of the horrific conditions in German work camps (that is rarely discussed due to being overshadowed by the horrific atrocities committed in the Nazi death camps). Additionally, information can be found about the Holodomor (aka terror-famine) that occurred in Ukraine as a means of ethnic cleansing taking place pre-WWII.

These 3 topics alone are painful to learn about and expose the worst of humanity. I was aware of the ethnic cleansing that took place in Ukraine pre-WWII but had never heard of the German work camps (only slightly better than the death camps) or the fate many of its victims suffered after the war. I'm grateful to the author for shedding light on these topics and going through what I can only imagine as the painful process of putting her knowledge and experiences to paper.

That said, I think there is too much subject matter here to contain in one book or maybe it could just use some reformatting because the 4 parts didn't flow well from one to another. The description of her journey into her genealogy, while I'm sure deeply important to her, got very confusing and hard to follow and didn't seem to add much to the book. It felt like a separate story...adjacent but not related directly to the rest.

The most interesting, heart-rending parts were her description of her life with her mom, the labor camps and how the terror-famine caused her family to be far flung, never to see each other again. It would have been nice to have a bit of a bio of how she survived after her mother's death and how her experiences shaped her. It ended somewhat abruptly. I think had these been the topics discussed, minus the deep dive into her attempts to track down her lineage, I would have given this book 5 stars.

Super interesting and very readable. Will be big for sure!

I read this one in a few sittings and was really drawn into it. I really enjoyed how the book was written and learned a lot.

Super enjoyable and a complex and interesting read!