RED CROSSES
(Červené kríže)
fiction, adults
Text: Sasha Filipenko
Translation: Katarína Strelková
Design: Matúš Hnát
Format: paperback, 200 pages
Dimensions: 120 x 190 mm, 200 g
Retail price: 17,00 EUR
EAN 9788099954183
2022 ©E.J.Publishing, Bratislava
When Alexander, a young widower, moves into the flat next door to Tatiana’s, he’s cornered by the loquacious old lady. Reluctant at first, he’s soon drawn into Tatiana’s life story. A story told urgently, before her memories of the Russian 20th century, and its terrors, are wiped out.
Tatiana Alexeyevna is a 90-year woman who is slowly losing her memory to Alzheimer’s. Her past, though, is still vivid to her, she can’t forget the horrors that people must had gone through during the Stalin's dictatorship, the inhumane treatment, soldiers who were considered traitors by their own country just because they were captured during the war. As a ministry employee, Tatiana found the name of her husband on a list of Soviet PoWs, that she was tasked to transcribe. Should she erase it? If so, will she save her husband, or endanger the whole family?
Sasha Filipenko spent long hours and days in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva to present this story according to the real records he found. There are things that must not be forgotten. This is a story about vanishing history and human lives in which two generations make a pact against forgetting.