The Matryoshka Memoirs:

A Story of Forced Labour, The Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance

The Matryoshka Memoirs (2023) Sasha ColbySasha Colby

Nonfiction

ECW Press, 2023

248 pages

ISBN: 9781770417359

$24.95

 

Reviewed by Gabrielle E. Josefsson

 

Sasha Colby’s The Matryoshka Memoirs is a vivid, unflinching, and intimate testament to the resilience and courage of women who triumphed over the unspeakable horrors of WWII.

The memoir is divided into three different perspectives. The first focuses on Colby’s grandmother Irina’s life between 1942 and 1946, while living under occupation by both Nazi and Soviet forces. Colby portrays her experiences with a care and honesty that honours the bleak realities of forced labour camps, the precarious nature of being a refugee attempting to escape, and the constant fear of hard-won security being ripped away.

These are inter-cut with Colby’s own stories about a summer visit to her grandmother’s home in Niagara Falls in 2011, which tells of the life Irina built after immigrating to Canada. These chapters investigate her grandmother’s history during the war and grapple with its lingering effects on her and the rest of her family.

Colby balances the darkness of the wartime chapters with her grandmother’s sardonic, headstrong personality and banter, allowing the reader to witness the vibrant woman Irina has become and the loving family she has gained. For example, Colby recalls giving her grandmother a scarf:

“My grandmother presses the scarf against the plastic, examining the outfit critically for a moment.

‘Yes, perfect. See, I know.’

‘Are you going to a wedding?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she says, pleased. ‘This outfit I buried in. Scarf look nice in coffin. Matches material I pick out for lining.”

Irina shares traditional Ukrainian recipes, her beloved family home, and a fondness for lace. These breathe life into her later years and colour the environment that Colby and her mother grew up in.

The third and final perspective are chapters focused on Elise Kuhn-Leitz, the woman who rescued Irina from a German forced labour camp by employing her as a domestic worker at her family estate. Elise is the daughter of Ernst Leitz II and her chapters focus on the invaluable bond she formed with a young Irina.

They detail her efforts to help not only Irina, but to better the conditions for all the forced labourers working in Leica factories and help Jewish workers flee the country. Kuhn-Leitz was later arrested by Gestapo agents for her efforts to better the conditions at her father’s optical equipment factory. Her kindness and determination are a light in the memoir’s darkest moments.

Colby has collaborated with several organizations, both in Canada and abroad, to bring her grandmother’s stories to life. She corresponded with Dr. Oliver Nass, Elise Kühn-Leitz’s grandson, and she credits him with helping her make the memoir as accurate as possible.

Colby also includes a variety of historical photographs, courtesy of Dr. Nass and the Ernst Leitz Foundation, as well as family photos, which complement Colby’s powerful writing.

Colby has created a deeply personal memoir about life-long connections, unlikely heroes, and the indomitable human spirit. These stories of a Ukrainian forced labourer and a German heiress and ally to the oppressed are a triumph of compassion over hate. The scars of war may never fully disappear, but perhaps they can be healed by honouring those who sacrificed everything for the chance of a better future, and cherishing the people we hold dear.

Sasha Colby has written three biographical dramas about 20th-century poets Hilda Doolittle, Mina Loy, and Nancy Cunard called Staging Modernist Lives. She performed her 25-character one-woman Hilda Doolittle play, The Tree, in North America, Europe, and Asia. Her first book, Stratified Modernism, was on the effect of 19th- and 20th- Century archaeology on English and French literature. 

She is an Associate Professor and director of SFU’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, a hybrid MA for mature working students. She teaches writing, literary modernism, and graduate field schools in Oxford and Rome.