Mysterious Germany

One time when we were living in a building in St. Petersburg that was pretty run-down in a poor neighbourhood, and was meant for families with children — even though it was just me, my husband and my parents — the postman came calling. That was quite rare.

It was after the fall of the Soviet Union, during the presidency of Yeltsin, but near the end of that with another revolution. 1992. The shops were bare and we were always in need. I was pregnant with my first child. We had cards for food, like in WWII — you got rations. It was difficult.

The postman had a large bag. “Are you Tatiana? This is for you.”

I was puzzled — what could this be? It was about as tall as a big backpack and more plump.

When we opened it, we couldn’t believe it. There were all these clothes and all kinds of food: flour, powdered milk, sugar, chocolate, canned goods — things we hadn’t seen in shops in years or sometimes ever. Sometimes we didn’t even know what some of the food was!

We shared out the contents of the delivery among the flats — now people had flour to bake again and sugar…Clothes for their children and elders.

“OK whose size is that? — ok that’s for you…that’s for your 8-year-old son. You’re taking this, you have that.”

A neighbour who was 15 — we found a well-tailored blazer for him in the bag. Because he didn’t have many clothes, he wore it all the time and looked very fancy! This, when everything is grey, dirty, there are no trees and the building is terrible. It looked like he stepped out of a movie. Definitely not from our neighbourhood!

We looked at the package again trying to figure out where it had come from. There was no address, but markings indicated it had come from Germany.

A few weeks later I got another package. It was the same thing. Clothes and food from a mysterious German.

Years earlier, part of a school project was to acquire a penpal and correspond. My penpal was in East Germany. Her name was Berta and she lived in East Berlin. We had lost touch after a year or so of letters back and forth, probably in fractured English because I didn’t know German and she didn’t know Russian.

I dug through my things and found her address from when I had been a little girl and wrote to her. She replied.

Indeed it was her who had sent the package. German TV had shown the images of a destitute Russia — maybe there was guilt from the time the Nazis surrounded our city and drove thousands to starvation.

She had wanted to help. She only had the address from years ago but she would see if it still got to me. She didn’t put her name on it because she wanted it to be a gift and didn’t want to draw attention to how she was helping us out.

Later, we convinced her to visit.

She was stunned at how I was just 20, but married with an infant and attending university.

But we showed her how she had helped all the people in the building and we came together and had a party.

It was a joyous time.