When I was a little girl, I believed that all mothers and grandmothers belonged to a different kind of human.
My grandmother—my babushka—especially seemed to have come into this world exactly as I knew her: sturdy, swift, strong, with curly reddish hair as light as dandelion down, gray eyes framed by a few wrinkles, and hands with skin always cracked from laundry and other housework. I could never imagine her as a little girl, even when she told me stories from her childhood.

Those stories usually came at night, before we fell asleep, lying together in one big bed. I stayed with my grandmother during every school break, and those were the happiest times—even though her stories were always sad or frightening.

She was born in Soviet Ukraine, but her entire family was exiled to Central Asia by the authorities. They had been prosperous peasants of Ukrainian and Polish descent, then labeled as kulaks, who didn't fit into the new collective farming system imposed by the government. It was a time of extreme hardship and hunger. How did they find food after losing everything? How did they keep themselves and their children warm?

Along the thousands of miles they traveled, my grandmother's parents perished—perhaps even killed. She never knew exactly what happened to them, nor did she remember them, being just a one-year-old. She was adopted by her uncle and aunt, who had traveled with them. Her only brother, Ivan, was not taken in; they couldn't feed another mouth, so he was sent to an orphanage. I think they only took my babushka because her own grandmother, who also went with them, insisted. Like many children in that situation, Ivan died soon after.

Every time my grandmother combed her short curly hair, she remembered how her adoptive mother heartlessly punished her. By then, they were in Kazakhstan, in a city now called Semey (formerly Semipalatinsk), and the girl had been sent to kindergarten. Most importantly, they fed children there, so it took away that burden from the parents.

But my grandmother was stubborn, even as a child. Her thick curly hair was impossible to comb, so she ran away whenever her new mother tried to make her look tidy. A few times she was caught, and as revenge for her rebellion, her locks were cut off completely. Embarrassed, she refused to go to kindergarten because children mocked her as a "bald-head," which led to new dramas—screams, tears, and threats. Still, this was the only mother she knew, and my grandmother loved her, though she always believed she was punished more harshly than the other two children—her aunt's own daughter and son.

I can't describe how much they all loved each other, even when surrounded by so much violence. WWII began when my babushka was about nine years old. Kazakhstan was far from the front lines, but the war draft took away many men, and women had to replace them everywhere. My babushka's grandmother found work at a hospital, which allowed them to get a little extra food to survive. They were lucky this time—the war did not take my grandmother's adoptive father, and he returned home.

I remember visiting their house in Semipalatinsk when I was six. The summertime heat was unbearable; the barren steppe offered no shade, and the Irtysh River was too far to give any relief. To keep the house cool, they kept the shutters closed until late afternoon. The land seemed so hopeless and remote that the Soviet authorities chose it for one of their most top-secret projects intended to compete with an American one—they built a nuclear arms testing site not far from the city. Of course, nobody warned the residents about its potential future threats. "After the 1950s, many men died young," my grandmother told me.

But the people who came here in exile—Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, and many others—loved this land, weaving their cultures into the native one of the Kazakhs. My grandmother spent most of her long life in Central Asia—not only in Kazakhstan, but also in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan—always keeping her habit of drinking hot strong tea with milk, pouring it into a small saucer to cool down. he would drink her tea holding it with both hands, strong and soft, despite the skin being red and cracked.

The fight could be loud and pronounced, but it could also be routine and quiet.
Trying to survive, one rebels against death and the injustice that sent them to die. Despite miserable conditions, you can build a new life.