From top Babushka’s Journey and its author Marcel Kreuger
You may know him from the telly.
He can write too.
Dundalk-based author Marcel Krueger’s book ‘Babushka’s Journey – The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps‘ will be published on November 30
The book follows the tracks of Marcel’s grandmother Caecilie, Cilly for short, into her vanished homeland of East Prussia and to the labour camps of the Soviet Union.
Cologne-born Marcel has interwoven contemporary landscape and family history into an evocative travel memoir. To wit:
Babushka’s Journey is the record of Marcel’s grandmother’s journey from the snow-covered battlefields of East Prussia in January 1945 to the Soviet labour camps in the Urals, where she spent five years before returning to Germany. Chasing the sights, sounds and voices of past and present along this route, the author has created both fictionalised historical narrative and contemporary travelogue, covering two different journeys that follow the same path.
As he stumbles through the bars of present-day Poland and dreams on the bunk beds of the Trans-Siberian railway, Krueger forges an authentic retelling of Cilly’s tragic yet hopeful story, discovering that her journey reflects tens of thousands of similar personal histories, which continue to haunt Germany, Poland and Russia today.
Marcel is promoting the Babushka’s Journey with an event tonight with Berlin-based author Paul Scraton, 6 pm at No Alibis, Belfast. The book’s official Ireland launch will take place tomorrow at 7pm at Roe River Books, Dundalk.
In fairness
‘Babushka’s Journey – The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps‘
Fair play Marcel, good luck with your book launch(s) :)
Good luck Marcel! Sounds like a fascinating read. Fair play to you
Should be compulsory reading for Dr Rory Aherne.
This’ll be a bit more upbeat than The Gulag Archipelago I think :)
Sounds fantastic. Very best of luck Marcel.
Nice one, Marcel.
I always enjoy Marcel on the show. He is well prepared, respectful to the other members of the panel, and provides an interesting European perspective. I particularly enjoyed his objective analysis of the craziness that is Taste of Dublin, where middle class people who can’t afford to pay exorbitant money to be in a grassy enclave away from working class people every day instead pay exorbitant money to be in a grassy enclave away from them one day a year.
LOL – the hatred of self is very strong in this one
Yoda-isms were fun in the early days of the internet but are now only interesting if they make sense.
The assumption that because someone criticises people from their own social demographic they don’t like themselves is (i) logically fallacious (ii) smacks of that good ole social program (“don’t diss your own” and (iii) is completely irrelevant in circumstances where you couldn’t possibly know my social demographic which is very far from grassy enclaves indeed.