When I think of my Ukrainian Nana, Halina, my favourite memories feature food. Country-style streaky bacon and bright yoked eggs served with toast, butter and jam. Or salty porridge to soothe harsh winter mornings when the frost had settled stubbornly on the windows and stretched cold fingertips into her kitchen. Lunch was veggie soups, thick and salty, served with boiled varenyky dumplings. In summer, a spread of cold deli-meats with homegrown tomato and cucumber salads dripping in salt and vinegar. I am yet to meet anyone who loved salt as much as Nana.
Or chocolate. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Roses selection and Bulla chocolate ice cream a-plenty! I remember sweltering backyard picnics under the shade of a giant elm tree, swatting flies away from a feast spread out on rickety card tables. While Nana cleaned up, my Pa, Andrei, would tie a swing to the lowest bough and push me higher and higher with never tiring arms. As the afternoon heat seared towards 40 degrees, my brother and I would go running naked and squealing through their garden sprinkler. When we were shivering and done, Nana would wrap us in scented towels and give us Milky Way bars.
It wasn’t until I was older that Halina told me her food horror stories. Of near-death starvation as a nine-year-old during the Stalin orchestrated potato famine of 1933. A genocide that killed fourteen million people and quashed the self-reliant Ukrainian farmers into communist submission. While friends and family died around her, she kept herself and her parents alive by digging for plant roots, eating wildflowers and stealing food from her school. When she tried to explain what starvation felt like, her face distorted, and her hands twisted in front of her stomach.
At seventeen, when she was taken from her home in the Crimea by Nazi soldiers and forced to labour in an Austrian war camp, she learned to accept bread from kinder-hearted Austrians to supplement her meagre rations. Andrei and Halina met in one of the war camps that they were shuffled between and fell in love. Andrei was also removed from his village near the Ukraine and Russian border to ‘work’ for the Germans. Both never saw their families again. My father, Alexander, was born in 1946, nine months after the war ended.
Once, Nana told me about enjoying a banana for the first time, crossing through the Suez Canal on a ship that left Napels, bound for Australia, packed tight with war-displaced souls in 1949. When she gave her son the sweet yellow fruit to try, he screwed up his face and made her laugh.
This family of three belonged to 170,000 post-war displaced immigrants that Australia took in after World War II. Halina and Andrei were in awe of ‘the lucky country’ that adopted them – this democratic land of abundance and choice. When Halina first walked into an Australian supermarket, she stood in stunned delight that such a bountiful concept could exist—immediately followed by a bitter rage that she grew up in a world where it did not.
From that day on, her pantry was always overstocked. The shelves were neatly stacked with twelve tins each of tuna, beans and tomatoes, ten packets of pasta and rice, two huge boxes of cornflakes, ten bars of soap, eight light globes. A freezer in the laundry was kept replenished with fruit strudels, homegrown stewed plums, frozen peas, fish fingers, lamb chops and bacon. Halina may have grown up with inhumane scarcity, but she survived to claim a private utopia of abundance.
I believe it was Nana’s way of sticking it to both Stalin and Hitler, two tyrants that she had outsmarted and outlived. I could see flashes of her enduring contempt for them in her deeply lined eyes and how she held her shoulders proud and defiant when she spoke about her country of birth. Her ferocious stockpiling was her way of saying: Look what I’ve done and how you failed to stop me.
My favourite memory of Halina is how, even at eighty, she would go to her pantry and carefully break some chocolate from one of the many blocks she had stashed in there. She would purposefully pop the bittersweet fragment into her mouth, offer me a piece and wink.