Recently we were in Georgia for the introductory film and the VR film for our museum. A look behind the scenes. Part 3: Daddy, don’t leave!
“Ne oechadi!”, the little boy Dmitri shots anxiously at a six-eyed camera. He raises his hands to the sky, as the horse and carriage drive away from him. His father waves to him, as he slowly but surely disappears on the horizon. It is the last image Dmitri has of his father, who has to fight against Nazi Germany, never to return.
How many children, like the little boy Dmitri, must have run after their father in an attempt to prevent him from going to the front? How many women and children were left behind in 1941 without a husband or a father? Balancing between hope and despair, without support and in great uncertainty about what the future would bring?
In Leusden alone, 865 personal tragedies are hidden behind just as many gravestones. A war cemetery full of lives that ended too early, with men who never saw their wives again, with fathers who did not see their children grow up. Ordinary people with a name, a face and a life story, which at the time went to the grave with them, because no one succeeded – or made the effort – to identify them.
In 2000, little Dmitri Botenko, now an elderly man of 61, was the first surviving relative to hear that his father was no longer missing. His moving story is the focus of our museum, which will open its doors in March.
Unfortunately, we cannot film in Crimea, where Vladimir Botenko lived with his family. But the hills here in Georgia are reminiscent of the village where Vladimir built a house with his own hands in the year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The camera is set up at a farm with corrugated iron roofs and a garden full of apple trees. In the small living room, the finishing touches are being put on the recordings. A tap is covered, because the inhabitants of Vladimir’s village used to get their water from a well. A small prop, a portrait of Stalin, disappears into a drawer. Because mother Botenko didn’t like the Soviet leader very much since he had sent her family members to the Gulag as kulaks.
Her beloved Vladimir was spared that fate, but now he too must go: to the front. Film director Erris van Ginkel waves his arm from top to bottom, a sign that the next take is being filmed. “Papa, ne oechadi”, the little boy shouts again. “Papa, don’t go!”
