Written in the Sand

Requiem Out of Sand

Deutsch

Who are we? Contacts Collaboration Site Map
Written in the Sand < Inscriptions of Ukraine < Inscriptions < Areas of Interest < Welcome

In this video by Xenia Simonova (or Xeniya Simonova or Kseniya Simonova, according to the chosen transliteration) there are the below mentioned, translated and commented inscriptions. But let's first of all have a look at the fantastic video!

Author and Title of the Video

Inscription Near the End of the Performance

Comment

Some Hungarian blog contributions say that Xeniya Simonova's Requiem Out of Sand is „love of one's own country, written in the sand“ (homokba írt hazaszeretet). I completely agree with this, but I'd like to add that Xeniya Simonova writes in the sand in a marvelous and extremely impressing manner. The dynamism of her gestures, combined with the so to say self-developping images, the music, and the grave subject of the performance, makes tears run down many faces in the audience as well as in the jury. In some moments Xeniya Simonova might be compared to a great conductor who makes his orchestra achieve symphonic top performances.

The inscription concerning the year 1945, written in the sand near the end of the video, might mean „You are always next door“, word by word. As the young widow and her little child are looking out of the window to a graveyard, this translation is really possible. But it could sound trivial or even cynical, and lack any emotional depth. Other translations proposed in the web are „You are always beside (us)“, „You will always be near (to us)“, „You are always near (to us)“, „You are always nearby“. If you want, replace „always“ by „for ever“.

Ukrainians and Russians are still very conscious of the World War II events mentioned in Xeniya Simonova's Requiem Out of Sand, and both of them still react to the memory with deep emotion. Hitler's war with its horrible racist and megalomaniac excesses tortured, killed, and murdered many millions of their compatriots, and caused inexpressible sufferings to the surviving people. In western countries - and especially in Germany - most people unfortunately prefer to forget that, and for the younger generations all of this mostly is dead knowledge coming from unwillingly endured history lessons.

Even my own generation (I was born in 1944) was already a divided one. The ones inhibited the memory of all those dreadful things that had happened under Hitler, the dead or broken persons among their relatives, and the guilt of their parents' generation. The others battled with all that and often almost (or really) collapsed under the burden of their conflict of conscience concerning their guilty or innocent parents (who could definitely answer this question?). We often ask the older people our oppressive questions, braved our teachers who had learned nothing, just nothing from recent history. We should even have done so much more often and more insistently, but we were first children, then teenagers living in a society that above all was striving to forget the past, to get new prosperity, and to put the guilt on other people's shoulders as far as possible. But the guilt is still there, until now.

My own family was lucky, so to say. Indeed, my father came home from war as a broken man and never recovered from this, and two of my elder cousins and my sister's father-in-law died in the war, but my uncle who was known to be an opponent to Hitler survived to the punitive battalion and to the concentration camp of Buchenwald (though with a psychologic trauma that devastated the last years of his life), and my mother was never interned though for a long time she refused to let my eleven years elder sister become a member of the obligatory Hitlerian youth organization and had taken in charge the two daughters of my uncle who was interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. So we were lucky. Others did not even have the least chance of surviving under the Hitlerian dictatorship, whole families perished, and the victims were, above all, Jews, Poles, Ukranians and Russians. Most of the Germans had cheered Hitler on. The guilt is still there, until now.

Internet

Please be aware of our legal reservation concerning any Internet reference.

Hans-Rudolf Hower, 2009

Frequently-asked questions - Webmaster

Last updated: April 4, 2016