Sasha Colby
Simon Fraser University
The complexity and diversity of WW II liberation has revealed itself to me through two of my bookprojects in ways I believe can be productively compared. The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story ofUkrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ECW Press, 2023),recounts the Ostarbeiter experience of my grandmother, Irina Kylynych, as it coincided with theresistance work of Leica Camera heiress, Elsie Kühn-Leitz. For Irina, the story of Wetzlar’sliberation the spring of 1945 was particularly difficult to tell: while she eventually escaped to Canada,“liberation” was a complex moment of hiding in DP camps, posing as Polish, Soviet capture, escape, and life as a fugitive.
By contrast, French photographer and filmmaker Henri Cartier-Bresson illustrated his take on the return of French POWs to Paris in a very different, very public and highly celebrated fashion:through his U.S. Office of War Information-funded short film, Le Retour (1946) . It is worth watchingthis film in detail not for the way it glosses liberation – on the contrary, Cartier- Bresson is attentive to itsmyriad difficulties for returnees – but for the ways in which this is, in the end, a film that celebrates anOdyssean journey and a homecoming, elements I am struck by in my in-progress biographical novelabout Cartier-Bresson, particularly as these dimensions are so completely absent in Irina’s account of the same period.
In reading a short section from The Matryoshka Memoirs beside a clip from Le Retour, I propose tohighlight the diversity of experience through the liberation juncture with particular attention to thedivergent ways these stories have subsequently been told: notably, the domestic, muted, and fragmented modalities of women’s transmission, often in spaces like the kitchen, as opposed tothe public, documentary, and story-driven rendering in a film like Le Retour, a truth of the telling that hasmade the latter infinitely more visible and iconic in the historical imagination.
Sasha Colby is Director of Graduate Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of three books including The Matryoshka Memoirs, which won the2024 Gold Medal for Europe Non-Fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards